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?
Just a few of the many findings from this report are:
The academic library web staff itself provides a mean of 65.86% of the total man hours required to run the college library web site
Half of colleges in the sample with more than 14,000 students launched a major library website redesign within the past year.
For 41.67% of the libraries in the sample the college website budget was considered to be a part of the college information technology budget.
Only 12.5% said that their library websites had personalization features.
Academic library websites for the research universities in the sample had a mean of more than 16 individuals who entered content into the academic library website in the past semester.