Research Library International Benchmarks

Of main findings -- List of tables -- Participants -- 1. Intro -- 2. Staff -- 3. Capital budget -- 4. Materials spending -- 5. Grants -- 6. Collection digitization -- 7. Personnel changes -- 8. Technology investment -- 9. Intra-library employee communications -- 10. Relations with consortiums -- 11. Workstations and information literacy -- 12. Relations with college or institutional subsidiaries in foreign countries -- 13. Open access and digital repositories -- 14. Books and journals.

The study closely compares the policies of 23 research libraries predominantly from the USA, but also from Canada, Germany and the UK. The intensive 230+ page report gives detailed comparisons and data about how these libraries are handling an array of issues and developments, including but not limited to: trends in staffing and use of personnel, operating budget, capital budgets, digitization strategies, use of open access, 3D printing, grants management, technology investment, employee productivity growth, database licensing and much more. Data is broken out separately by library staff size, region of the world and for corporate/legal libraries, university libraries and for other non-profit/government libraries.

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?

Corporate Library Benchmarks, 2009 Edition presents extensive data from 52 corporate and other business-oriented libraries; data is broken out by company size, type of industry and other criteria. The mean number of employees for the organizations in the sample is 16,000; the median, 1700. Some of the many issues covered in the report are: spending on electronic and print forms of books, directories, journals and other information resources; library staffing trends, number of library locations maintained and the allocation of office space to the library, disputes with publishers, allocation of library staff time, level of awareness of database contract terms of peer institutions, reference workload, and the overall level of influence of the library in corporate decision making.