While I was at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute I was very active in the Outing Club. We ran all sorts of trips out each weekend. Examples include hiking, white water rafting, white kayaking, caving, cross country skiing, ice climbing, and rock climbing. As you might expect college students don't really have the money to own gear for all of these trips, so one of the perks of having a very active outing club was that we had gear for all of these activities.

Now the combination of being a club that needs to keep track of a bunch of gear and being at a technology school, means of course we had a website with a database keeping track of it all. I helped with the recent migration and reconstruction of this site so a year later I was curious to see how it was working. So I sent a message to the current webmaster and got a dump of our rentals table. Turns out in the last school year we had 893 rentals! Now this intrigued me. With this sample could I pull some meaning out of what gear was being borrowed? We shall see.

Preliminary Stats

First step was to figure out which types of gear were being signed out. Fortunately the system we use for id-ing our gear helps with that. We use a XX-YY-00 type format where XX is a 2 letter code for the activity, YY is a 2 letter code for the type of equipment, and 00 is the 2 digit number for the individual item. For example WM-TN-01 is Winter Mountaineering, Tent, 01. Below is the split of rentals by activity.

This in some respects isn't surprising. Winter Mountaineering as an activity includes tents, sleeping bags, flashlights and most general camping equipment. This means it should have the most rentals for 2 reasons, you need these items to do a lot of other activities and we have a fall outing club wide camping trip every fall that is our single most attended event.

Now Looking deeper beyond the activity level I wanted to look at what types of items are being signed out. The following bar chart shows the number of rentals by item.

Looking at this graph we can see that winter mountaineering items are all near the top, particularly Sleeping Bags (SB), Tents (TN), and Backpacks (BP). But there seems to be some outliers here too, PFDs (CN-PF), Booties (KA-BT), and Helmets (KA-HT). The reason these show up are because of one day trips. When we go on a trip white water rafting we will sign out gear like this in bulk but just for a couple hours. This leads to looking into length of rentals.

Time Signed Out

Next we look at the average time out by item. This is shown in the graph below.

Now what does this tell us. Rather than what I hoped which was proving that sleeping bags, tents and backpacks are the hottest items, it actually showed me that there are other items closely guarded. So Bivy Sacks (BV), water pumps (WP), and bike bags (BG) or the most popular items...or more likely the items that everyone forgets to sign back in. Welp the system doesn't always work the way you want it to, but something for the Pit Chair (gear manager of sorts) to keep in mind is people who sign out things like rock climbing ropes (RC-DR) should be pestered to bring them back otherwise it may sit in their dorm room all year.

Specific Items

Something else I wanted to look at was specific items within a item type like sleeping bag. For instance is sleeping bag 01 signed out much more frequently than 02 or 03? This could mean that we should get more of the brand, temperature or style of the first bag. First I looked at sleeping bags.

From this table we see that there really isn't any special sleeping bag. In fact this just tells us that it's good that we have a variety of bags because it seems that all different types and temperatures are signed out regularly. The next item I wanted to look at was tents.

Again nothing really interesting about tents, except that maybe better descriptions would be a good thing, but I digress (also totally a joke for all I know it could have been me who entered it). Finally I looked at backpacks.

Finally we can pull some significance out of this data. Osprey backpacks seem to be a big deal for the club and being a very biased observer (I own 2 osprey packs) I say we get more!

Conclusions

So I posted some pretty pictures and some tables, but what does it mean. There were a couple key things I got out of this analysis. First of all the number of rentals per activity table could be used to help allocate the budget. I already know that Winter Mountaineering is the largest budget of the club so we got that one right, but we could look into other activities that have smaller budgets but maybe a lot of rentals. Another key point would be that there are some items that people aren't returning. From the Average Time Out graph we can see that some items are out for months without being returned. Finally although not as convincing as I might have hoped we do have some items that more popular than others in terms of sleeping bags, tents and backpacks therefore it might be worth considering getting more of those types when purchasing new gear. All the code used for this project is on GitHub at rocStats.