Newmarket Public Library’s Report to the Community 2024 is seriously misleading. 

It claims a “significant increase” in membership between 2023 and 2024 when, in reality, there was a decrease of 7.9%

In her presentation on Monday 7 April, the Library Chief Executive, Tracy Munusami, told councillors the Library had 22,234 “active library cardholders” in 2024.

Ms Munusami told the Province it had 24,136 active library cardholders the year before, in 2023. (See table bottom right)

The Province requires all libraries to file a wide-ranging set of statistics annually showing membership, usage and so on.

How does the Chief Executive explain the claim there were 9,476 new library members in 2024? The question was never put to her by councillors.

Business decisions

At Monday’s meeting Ms Munusami was quizzed by Ward 4 councillor Trevor Morrison on the reasons for membership numbers fluctuating over the years.

She told him:

“In 2022 we were looking at ways to evaluate the people who are using the library card numbers as well as to clean up our databases.…  In 2022 we've removed accounts from the system that were no longer active library users. The definition of an “active library user” is someone who's used the library in the last 24 months. And in order to make better business decisions we had to have the most accurate data. So that's why we made the change in 2023."

Cllr Morrison: 

“And as a follow up…  the 24 months… is that just something that… the Board (has) come up with or as a library policy?”

Tracy Munusami: 

“So that is the definition through the… We do a survey every year to the Ministry. It's called the annual Public Library survey and that's the definition that they use.”

"Active Library Cardholders"

The statistics submitted to the Province show “active library cardholders” in December each year. Newmarket library card holders have to renew their membership every two years so there is a constant churn with people joining the Library, leaving or renewing their memberships.

Fortunately, the Ontario Public Library statistics allow us to compare apples with apples. The figures do not back up the claim by Library Board Chair, Darryl Gray, that the past year had been marked by a significant growth in membership.  

The Chief Executive’s presentation drew attention to 1,543 new card memberships in 2024 resulting from the Library’s outreach work. That is impressive but this wasn’t enough to lift the total number of active library users in 2024 above the 2023 level.

Outreach

Outreach work is important. The Board and the Council have made it clear there are no plans – nor any ambition – for a new library or even another branch in the foreseeable future. 

Instead, there has been renewed emphasis on outreach work – getting to parts of the Town that are underserved by the Library. The downtown area has a much higher level of Library membership than neighbourhoods further afield.

There was a big breakthrough last October when the Board was shown library membership statistics by ward for, I believe, the first time. Councillors had been pressing for this information. And now that we have the number of active library members by Ward and the Town-wide total we can easily track the number of non-resident Library members who, last year, made up more than a quarter of Library members.

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Note: Some data held by the Province (years 2022, 2020 and 2019) is temporarily unavailable on-line but we can access figures going back to 2014 – and earlier. The Library Chief Executive reported the 22,234 membership in her presentation to councillors on Monday 7 April 2025.