Republic file photo The interior of the Bartholomew County Library in downtown Columbus.
A survey on the Bartholomew County Public Library’s teen department has resulted in almost 500 responses in one week.
The library had 489 responses to the online and paper survey as of Monday, Library Director Jason Hatton told library board members.
“Which is the largest, by far, of any survey we have ever put out,” he said. “So I think that’s great, right? Again, it shows that people are interested. People want to have their voice heard.”
The survey, which opened on Jan. 9, can be accessed at forms.gle/aC6bww7W12XH3Ptr9. A link is also available on the library’s website and Facebook page. Hard copies are available at the library’s service desks. The survey will run through Jan. 27.
Hatton said he expects to have data from the survey at the board’s next meeting, which is 4 p.m. Feb. 13.
Library staff are also working on a diversity audit of all items within the teen collection. Hatton said in a previous interview that staff members will eventually compile findings from the survey and audit, along with a recent study of best practices at other libraries, and use this information to determine what the teen department is doing well and where it needs to improve.
Over the past year, there have been a number of library board meetings where some individuals have advocated certain teen section books be moved to another area of the library or be banned from the facility, while others decried those sentiments as censorship. Many of the books in question dealt with LGBTQ issues.
However, there were only about 10 people in the audience at Monday’s board meeting, and none chose to offer public comment. Additionally, no new material reconsideration forms have been submitted to the library, Hatton said.
The meeting agenda largely consisted of financial items. In discussing a recent claims docket, Hatton mentioned that the library is having a collectionHQ, a company that provides libraries with data analytics, do a diversity audit of the library’s entire collection.
“We (library staff) are doing a title by title audit for the teen collection,” he said. “And so what this provides is not title by title level — I mean, they will do that, it won’t come back to us this way. But it will give us a sense of the categories, different pieces comprising our entire collection and also breaking those down by populations as well. So I’m excited to see what this says.”
