The study presents data and commentary from 47 law libraries including law firm, university, government and other law libraries. The 129-page 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.