It was New Year’s Eve when James Keenan (the Library Applications Supervisor for CWMARS) ran a report and realized that, as a consortium, we were 925 circulations shy of having circulated 1 million items in Overdrive. It wasn’t a record we were really cognizant of until that point, but we immediately made it a goal to break that record. And we did! The final checkout talley for 2018 is in at 1,001,975 digital loans. 5,849 of those were borrowed right here in Douglas.
CWMARS started circulating ebooks and other e-material in Overdrive in July 2005. We hadn’t circulated a million items until the middle of 2014, so we circulated more items in 2018 than we did in the first 9 years of providing the service. The biggest jump in digital circulation came with the advent of the Kindle and other e-readers. In 2010, annual circulation was 52,277. In 2011, more than doubled to 108,645. Since then, the numbers do this:
2011 108,645
2012 238,537
2013 366,592
2014 544,860
2015 700,856
2016 781,281
2017 834,355
2018 1,001,975
Happy New Year!