This 200+page study presents detailed data from a survey of academic libraries about their new construction and renovation plans. The report helps its readers to answer questions about how academic libraries have recently used their space and resources and how they plan to use them in the future. The study gives detailed data on trends in capital spending by academic libraries; it includes data for plans for group work rooms, library cafes, the information commons, soundproofing, exterior landscaping, classrooms, workstations, viewing and listening rooms, special collection space, office space, patron seating space, storage space, space for book collections and much more.
The study also looks at how academic libraries raise funds for renovations, how the library fares vs. the capital funds needs of other academic entities and departments, the impact of mobile computing on library renovation spending decisions and more. Data is broken out by size and type of library, by level of institutional tuition and other variables.
Just a few of the study’s many findings are that:
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More than 26% of private colleges in the sample have increased the size of their information commons over the past three years.
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A mean of 48.67% of library patrons use their own computing devices in the library. Nonetheless, the number of fixed workstation computers continued to climb in our sample with the mean number deployed rising from 44 in 2012-13 to 47.83 in 2013-14 and 51.27 in 2014-15.
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Half of the libraries sampled said that they would hold constant space dedicated to classrooms but only 5% intended to reduce such space while 42.5% planned increases. Colleges offering advanced degrees of any kind were more likely than others to want to increase classroom space in the library.
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13% of funds raised for recent or plan renovations were derived from grants
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Only 7.5% have made investments designed to reduce the overall number of workstations in favor of mobile device use in the library. All were public colleges and all had tuition of less than $10,000 annually.