Law Library Benchmarks 2014 Edition

The 155-page study gives extensive data and commentary on law library spending plans and management practices including current and future expected budgets, spending on salaries, and materials such as online databases, print reporters, online and print directories, books, e-books, journals and other information resources. The report also looks at use of particular types and brands of information resources, at cost recovery efforts and at law library effort to reduce costs and improve productivity through better negotiation and other tactics. The study also presents detailed data on library measures to enhance mobile device access and to use social media, blogs and other internet resources in the law library service effort.

. Data in the report is based on a survey of 55 North American law libraries drawn from law firm, private company, university, courthouse and government agency law libraries. Data is broken out by size and type of library for ease in benchmarking. The 120+ page report covers developments in staffing, salaries, budgets, materials spending, use of blogs & wikis, use of legal directories, the library role in knowledge management, records management and content management systems. Patron and librarian training, reimbursement for library-related education and other issues are also covered in this latest edition.

The 200-page study looks closely at the information literacy efforts of North American colleges and universities, presenting findings from a survey of more than 50 colleges and universities. The report gives highly detailed data on library use of personnel for instructional purposes, trends in the number of in-class presentations, number of instructors used, students served and classes given. It pinpoints librarian opinion on the information literacy skills of their students in catalog, e-book and database use, facility with QR codes, search engine use, and use of special collections, among other areas. It serves as a guide to how students and information literacy instructors are assessed and what is the role of information literacy in college orientation. The report also gives detailed data on information literacy training requirements for graduation and on information literacy efforts for special populations, such as distance learning students. The report helps library planners to answer questions such as: what are norms for information literacy graduation requirements? What is the perception of the overall level of student skills in use of e-book collections? What percentage of libraries access faculty satisfaction with the information literacy effort? How high a priority is information literacy for college management? What is the role of instructional video in information literacy?

The study presents data and commentary from 47 law libraries including law firm, university, government and other law libraries. The 129-oage report presents a broad range of data on salaries, budgets and materials expenditures, including specific data on recent and planned spending for books, eBooks, reporters, online databases, journals and other information vehicles. The study also looks closely at trends in the use of law librarians' staff time, querying them about use of staff time for information literacy, legal research, collection development, records management, marketing, metadata and other end used, In addition, the study looks at law library use of technologies such as QR codes and social media. Other topics covered include outsourcing library tasks, billing of library services to end users, use of webinars, use of blogs and Google Scholar and other gratis information sources, the impact of video on library searches, and much more. Just a few of the report's many findings are that: The law firm libraries in the sample recovered a mean of 50.61% of the cost of their online database services through billing to clients.Planned spending on print reporters for the libraries in the sample is expected to drop by 4.67% in 2017.Spending by the sampled libraries on eBooks rose by 2.53% in 2016.19.15% of the libraries sampled use QR codes while 12.77% were unsure that they were and about 66% did not use them. Almost all use was by university law libraries of which 63.64% used QR codes. Respondents reported seeing an average of 6.6 webinars each year that were relevant to their work.Law library budgets for the organizations sampled fell in the aggregate in 2016.