The report compares five of the largest public libraries in Finland: Espoo, Helsinki, Tampere, Turku and Vantaa, using data from 2014 to 2023. The report includes information on the number of visitors, loans, staff and costs.
The first page shows the development of opening hours and number of library staff in the ten year period. There is also a breakdown of expenses, including staff costs, library material acquisitions, rent and other expenses. The page can be filtered by library.
The second page shows opening hours, costs and visits relative to the population of the area. Because the numbers are relative, they can also be compared to the overall statistics of the whole country. The city of Espoo has the most expenditure into library per capita as well as the most visits per capita. The big cities are able to offer less opening hours per capita than the average for the whole country. This report can be filtered by year.
The third page examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on library operations. 2019 was a record year, particularly in Helsinki, where the opening of the new central library Oodi increased the number of visits significantly. The pandemic caused a sharp decline in visits and loans in 2020 and 2021, but the numbers have been recovering since then. The graph on visits shows that while physical visits decreased, the number of visits to the libraries' online services increased during the pandemic.
The data was collected from the Finnish Public Library Statistics database. The data was cleaned and transformed using Power Query in Power BI. The report was built using Power BI Desktop and published to the Power BI service.