Phenomenal increase in Anatolia library users during the Covid – 19 lockdown
Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, the Anatolia College Libraries have remained active and open online for the institution’s faculty and students who could access remotely the libraries’ collections. To support our faculty and teachers across the institution the Anatolia College Libraries built and made available curated content on online teaching and learning, a comprehensive guide that was popular and well used according to the website statistics during this period. Also, in order to help families entertain themselves a “stay@home” guide was put together with plenty of ideas for reading, online activities, and cultural happenings.
This activity recorded a 270% increase in visits to the Libraries website during the period of March and April 2020.
Within a two month span
- The Elementary School Library website visits increased by an astounding 551%;
- Eleftheriades Library website visits increased by 258%;
- Bissell Library had a 33% increase in website views.
Furthermore, during April and May 2020:
- The Teaching and Learning guide created for teachers and faculty was much appreciated as we had 1,367 visits
- The “stay@home” guide was clearly very popular as people visited 6,120 times
- Ebook reading at the Elementary Library resulted in 2,164 downloads of books
- We created 12 new guides during this time which had collectively 10,737 visits!
- We offered 10 recorded fairy tales prepared by the library staff, accompanied by music which had 619 visits
Looking forward, our aim is to further expand our online provision and to inform our community that we are here to support teaching and learning online. We have experienced one of our busiest periods ever and we invite and encourage everyone to continue using our libraries online while we commit ourselves to continue our long tradition of offering excellent resources and services to our community.
