The study presents detailed benchmarking data from 55 academic libraries detailing their recovery from the pandemic, its continuing impact, and their spending plans for content/materials, staff and salaries, and much more. The report also looks closely at how the new inflationary environment is impacting libraries and how it is affecting their spending on salaries and materials.
The report has a great deal of highly specific benchmark data enabling its end users to find and deploy detailed metrics. Some of the data points included are: number of visitors to the library pre and post the intensive phase of the pandemic; use of various communications programs such as Zoom, WebEx. Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts and many others; current policies on masking and social distancing compared to policies in the most intense phase of the pandemic; percentage of librarian time spent working remotely; trends in personnel budgets and salaries, including recent and expected changes in librarian salaries; hiring plans; budgets and nature of changes in budget allocations; economic outlook for the parent organization; economic outlook for the library; recent and expected spending on content and then specific data for particular content forms: print books, eBooks, print journals, ejournals, databases, audio visual spending, magazines and newspapers; recent and expected spending on interlibrary loan operations – and more.
To foster benchmarking, data is broken out by library staff size, school enrollment, college type, tuition level, and for public and private colleges. Open ended questions explore issues such as:
Just a few of this 106-page report’s many findings are that:
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Spending by public colleges for online information is expected to increase by 4.21% in nominal terms in the 2022-23 academic and fiscal year.
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Nearly 42% of academic libraries sampled used Microsoft Teams with usage higher among research-oriented institutions.
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More than 69% of libraries sampled plan to spend more on eBooks in 2022-23 than they did in the 2021-22 academic year. The median nominal increase in academic library salaries in the 2021-22 academic year was 2%. Outliers drove the mean considerably higher.
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14.55% of libraries sampled plan to spend approximately the same on inter-library loan this year as last year.