How well are we doing ?

Edinburgh City Libraries serves a population of 471,650 with 26 buildings and 5 mobile libraries. Our annual budget is just over £9,500,000 and we have 244 staff and 150,000 members.

2.75 million people visited the library in Edinburgh last year – that’s more than visited Edinburgh’s top four tourist attractions (Edinburgh Castle, the Zoo, Edinburgh Bus Tours and the Scottish Parliament).

During those visits you borrowed 2.9 million items – that’s 6.2 issues for every man, woman & child in Edinburgh. [based on 08/09 popn of 463,510] and you chose them from the 1.2 million items we have in stock.  If you laid our items out end to end, they would stretch from Edinburgh to the outskirts of Inverness ! You also reserved over 130 000 items and made 250 000 enquiries.

There are lots of things going on in our libraries. Last year we held 1500 adult events and over 3800 events for children and young people. We also had over 1000 computer classes and events. We have 22 reading groups around the city, and this number is rising all the time.

You use the library service a lot from home as well – we had 250 000 visits to the library website and over 300 000 people used our online resources.

See the performance spreadsheet (excel, 16kb) and the links below for more detailed information about how we're performing.

The Service    

Service points, Budget, Staff, Members

Performance and Feedback

Stock, Issues and Visits
Reservations, Enquiries and Complaints                    
You said, we did

Community Activities

Events for adults and young people, Displays, Reading groups

Information Technology

Computers for public use, Computer events held