Newcastle Libraries Online Resource Usage: Monthly Metrics

Newcastle City Council has tracked monthly usage of over a dozen digital library resources, including family history archives and citizenship test platforms, from January 2005 to the present. The dataset documents a significant service disruption, noting all library buildings closed from March 19, 2020, due to the coronavirus outbreak. It captures evolving metrics, such as Ancestry's shift from counting sessions to content pages viewed in June 2015.

Use Cases

• Evaluating digital resource subscription value based on monthly session and page-view counts.
• Analyzing the impact of external events, like the COVID-19 lockdown, on online library usage.
• Tracking longitudinal trends in public interest for genealogy resources like Ancestry and Find My Past.
• Assessing the reach of services for migrants and asylum seekers via the British Way of Life resource.

Strengths

• Provides a long-term time series with coverage from January 2005 to present.
• Includes detailed annotations explaining metric changes and subscription dates for each resource.
• Documents a major real-world event affecting the data (COVID-19 closures from March 2020).

Limitations

• Critical metadata is missing: specific column names, row counts, file formats, and license are unknown.
• Data meaning for the 'EISODOS' resource is explicitly noted as lost.
• Platforms show conflicting 'last updated' dates (2024-09 24 vs. 2026-04-30), creating uncertainty about freshness.

Provenance

Source

Newcastle City Council

Collection Method

Likely collected automatically from resource platforms or via manual library reporting.

Time Range

January 2005 to present

Freshness

Last updated dates conflict: one source states 2024-09-24, another states 2026-04-30.

Geography

Newcastle, United Kingdom