How to count Active Patrons is one of those deceptively simple questions. Are you looking at just the patron main status, whether any activity was done on or by the record, or only those patrons that received a book? Does it matter what they received, or from where? Do you count everyone active right now, or everyone who has active at some point during the period? The exact definition of any given 'Active Patron' count will generally explain why these types of counts often differ.

As an example, and to help you understand NLS' upcoming data on patron growth, here's how their numbers were reached.

NLS Circ Status Summary

In the NLS Circ Stats Summary file we ran for everyone in October, the top portion includes a readership summary along these lines:

This leads with the total count of patrons at each library who "were served" according to their Last Served Dates (9256 patrons at FL1A).

The next columns are counting the number of unique patrons who received something from that library in that format (so 6618 audio books or magazines, 74 hard copy braille, 51 e-braille, 4567 from non NLS materials at FL1A). You can't add those numbers up because some patrons can be active in multiple formats, receiving both hard copy and e-braille, or both e-braille and audio books, etc.

The last column is "%NNNN," which is the percent of patrons who are active ("were served"), but did not receive something from that library in any format (15% at FL1A). For the total Active Reader count for your library, NLS will consider your Total active patrons count minus this percent. At FL1A, 9256 minus %15 leaves 8618: the total number of patrons who received something from FL1A specifically.

So why are some of your patrons getting their Last Served Date in at least one medium set, but not receiving anything from your library?

The biggest reason would be BARD. NLS did not want us to include the BARD transactions in the circulation data extract on the theory that they already had that information. So, if you have patrons who solely serve themselves through BARD, the loading of the BARD transactions updates their Last Served Dates--but NLS is only counting them on the BARD side, not in the count for your library.

Another possibility would be those patrons who signed up for a non-TBT subscription that was directly mailed. Since you started sending out MoC serials by Duplication, they shouldn't be a factor for the audio magazines portion. However, the braille magazines are still sent directly from NLS, and are not included in this report either.

Readership & Circulation

For further illustration of how much all of these little differences in definition affect the final numbers, consider the Readership & Circulation Report. 

On the R&C Report, the top section (Active Individual Readers and Active Institutional Accounts) is looking at patrons who are marked Active, or who have had their status changed at some point during the reporting period. The theory here is that you've had to work with those patrons in some way, so they should be counting toward your working total.

However, this is not "readership," which is what those Circulation numbers are looking at. The Readership section of the report is a little further down from the top. Here you'll see the patrons in each Medium, broken out by individual versus institution. So, you'd need to add those together to get the numbers for each medium. But once again, you can't just total each column to get the number of active patrons. What you'll get is the total number of active Media Profiles, and as you know, each patron can and often does have multiple Profiles on their record.

So what does all of this mean? 

• The Active Individual Readers count from the R&C Report is an accurate count of how many patrons at your library are in Active status or who you worked with in some way. (As long as it is run as closely as possible to the end date of the report. Running it any other time opens up a very large can of worms!)
• The initial Total from the NLS Circ Stats Summary is an accurate count of how many patrons at your library were served reading material of some kind.
• The initial Total minus the %NNNN is an accurate count of how many patrons were served reading material of some kind by your library specifically.

Each is a count of Active Readers--but because each is defined and figured differently, you can expect each number to be different. None of them are wrong, it's just a matter of figuring out which count best measures exactly what you want to measure.