The Pioneer Library System is growing our digital collection. To accurately expand the e-collection to the interests of our continuously flourishing digital readership, library selectors needed additional data regarding interests and habits of digitarians. Selectors had no quantifiable data as to whether or not digitarians mirrored the makeup and interests of traditional readers. To gain these insights, selectors instituted a plan to create and post regular curated lists to the digital content catalog which reflected the broad range of the physical library offerings. Key to this effort was measuring e-reader’s response to the posted lists.

Assessing patron interest in a digital curated list requires an investment of staff time to manually count patron activity as there are no vendor reports designed to accomplish this task. Increasing patron activity at the curated lists is indicative of our thriving digitarian audience and their interest in accessing material in a subject specific browsing format. We will use this patron-list relationship to create curated lists which supplement branch programs, thus showing a stronger relationship between program offerings and content available for reading from anywhere within our three county region.

During the past year we measured the curated lists’ e-reader activity in order to provide library selectors a more refined understanding of digitarian interests and thus develop an evolving guide with which to create an e-collection tailored to digitarian needs. We will use this digitarian profile to create and post curated lists with the aim of maintaining our current e-readers while also attracting new transitionals to our e-collection. In addition, we will use the relationship we have established between digitarians and the curated lists to expand the connection between branch programming and collection use to include our growing digital collection.