Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Each year the Library collects a wide range of statistics to enable it to keep track of its activities and monitor its performance. These figures are then used to produce a number of performance indicators which can be compared with activity in previous years, and against benchmark indicators from other University libraries.

In common with many measures in Higher Education, many of our key performance indicators are expressed in the form of a ratio per full-time equivalent (FTE) student, as this enables us to take account of changes in the size of the University as reflected in student numbers.

Here are the Library’s main KPIs for the year 2010-11, with comparisons from the previous two years:

  2008-9 2009-10 2010-11
Number of visits to the Library per FTE student 68.95 71.03 72.95
Items loaned per FTE student 51.02 51.52 48.68
Use of ebooks per FTE student 7.21 9.78 14.97
Downloads from electronic journals per FTE student 105.52 113.21 119.31
Total Library expenditure per FTE student £485.37 £453.69 £491.83
Expenditure on information resources (books, journals, etc) as % of total library expenditure 49.56% 52.09% 48.66%
Expenditure on electronic resources (e-journals, databases, etc) as % of total library expenditure 29.51% 36.75% 34.06%