Academic Library Website Benchmarks

Academic Library Website Benchmarks is based on data from more than 80 academic libraries in the USA and Canada. The 125+ page study presents detailed data on the composition of the academic library web staff, relations with the college and library information technology departments, use of consultants and freelancers, budgets, future plans, website marketing methods, website revision plans, usage statistics, use of software, development of federated search and online forms and much more. Data is broken out by enrollment size, public and private status, Carnegie Class, as well as for libraries with or without their own web staff.

This report looks closely at how academic libraries are re-shaping their websites. The study is based on a survey of 56 academic library web staffs with data broken out by size and type of academic institution and other criteria. The 160 page study gives exhaustive data about academic library preferences in areas such as use of mashups, library social media sites, website staff and budgets, role of the college and library IT staffs, governance of the website, content entry policies, relations with the college IT and web staff, branding issues, college web conformity issues, preferences in content management systems, programming and scripting, division of web staff time among various priorities, use of blogs, listservs, email newsletters, rss feeds and other communication vehicles, use of and plans for federated search, search box presentation strategy, and use of cascading style sheets. The study also covers ease of use issues for library staff focusing on how easy it is to perform certain website-related tasks such as entry of the same content to multiple site locations, ease of inserting and positioning videos, and ease of inserting tabular materials, among other tasks. Other issues covered include but are not limited to: use of freelancers and consultants, sources of advice, use of social bookmarking tools and much more.

The 116-page study presents data from 50 colleges and universities about their academic library development and management policies. The study helps its readers answer questions such as: What percentage of academic libraries recently undertook, or plan in the near future, a major website redesign? What are the goals of the website redesigns? How is the academic library website staffed? What is the role of the central college IT department? How have website usability studies been conducted and by whom? Have outside consultants played a role? How many libraries have ancillary sites or presences on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and other cyber sites? How many libraries have committees to oversee their websites? What do librarians consider the best single products and ideas that have helped their websites over the past few years?

The 186-page study presents results of an exhaustive questionnaire about virtual reference services answered by more than 50 academic, public and special libraries covering issues such as budgets, software and services use, consortia membership, partnerships, library staff time consumed, number of reference questions answered, time taken to provide responses, and the tracking of reference answers and the development of a reference database. The study also looks at reference question & answer delivery vehicles such as web forms, instant messaging, email, phone, Facebook, Twitter, Skype and more. The report also looks at the various costs of virtual reference – telecommunications, manpower, technology and equipment and at how libraries are using and safeguarding their reference response databases.

The study presents data from 30 college and university libraries in the USA, the UK, Canada, Germany, Ireland and other countries, about their use of bibliometrics. Participants include: the University of Cambridge, Cornell University, University College Dublin, the Rockefeller University, the University of Seville, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Newcastle, SUNY Buffalo, Technische Universität München and many others. The study helps its readers to answer questions such as: How well used are indicia such as the Web of Science, Scimago or Scopus? How are Google Scholar and JSTOR used in bibliometrics? What has been the impact of google Scholar or of digital repositories? How strong is demand for bibliometrics services? What are the centers of demand? How fast is demand growing? Is funding keeping up with demand? How are bibliometrics services promoted within the college or university? What has been the impact of altmetrics? What are favored altmetrics techniques? What role are bibliometrics playing in tenure decisions? In hiring decisions? How much library staff time is spent on bibliometrics?

This 254 page report presents data from a survey of the cataloging practices of approximately 80 North American academic libraries. In more than 630 tables of data and related commentary from participating librarians and our analysts, the report gives a broad overview of academic library cataloging practices related to outsourcing, selection and deployment of personnel, salaries, the state of continuing education in cataloging, and much more. Survey participants also discuss how they define the catalogers¿ range of responsibilities, how they train their catalogers, how they assess cataloging quality, whether they use cataloging quotas or other measures to spur productivity, what software and other cataloging technology they use and why, and how they make outsourcing decisions and more. Data is broken out by size and type of college and for public and private colleges. Just a few of the reports many findings are presented below: ¿More than 70% of the libraries in the sample say that their catalogers have salary levels that are comparable to those of public service librarians at their institutions. ¿About 27.3% of the survey participants routinely use paraprofessional staff for original cataloging. Public colleges were more than three times more likely than private colleges to use paraprofessionals for original cataloging, and larger colleges were more than twice as likely as smaller ones to do so. ¿41.56% of the libraries in the sample outsource authority control, obtaining new and updated authority records. ¿About 15.6% of the libraries in the sample outsource the cataloging of e-journals; close to 28% of research universities do so. ¿20.78% of libraries in the sample use MarcEdit or other MARC editor to preview records and globally edit to local standards prior to loading. ¿29.7% of the libraries in the sample have technical services areas that track turnaround time from Acquisitions receipt to Cataloging to shelf-ready distribution. ¿About 24.7% of the libraries in the sample use paraprofessional support staff for master bibliographic record enrichment in OCLC. Most of those doing so were public colleges and offered beyond the B.A. degree. ¿Authority control experience was considered a very important criterion for hiring by only 8.11% of survey participants, while a bit more than 35% considered it important. 21.62% considered authority control experience not so important as a hiring criterion.