The study looks closely at how 42 academic libraries, mostly from research universities or other research-oriented institutions, seek out and purchase data sets for the general library collection and for use by particular academic departments. The 80-page study helps its readers to answer questions such as: how much do libraries spend on data acquisitions? How much do they plan to spend in the future? How do they decide which data acquisition requests to fund and which not? Do they have a data librarian? Which academic fields use the most data and make the most requests of the library? What percentage of requests are funded? When libraries and academic departments share costs of data acquisitions what is the split in costs? To what extent can data requests be met by existing collections of open access data sources that academic researchers may not be initially aware of? How do negotiations to purchase or license data differ from negotiations for other forms of content?
The data in the report is broken out by many variables including size and type of college, tuition levels, enrollment levels and other variables. Data is broken out separately for R1 and R2 universities, for graduate professional schools, as well as for other types of institutions. The study includes data for 14 RI and 7 R2 institutions, as well as for many graduate professional schools. Some participants include Auburn, MIT, Claremont Colleges, Princeton, the University of Toronto, Georgetown, USC and the University of Calgary, among others.
Just a few of the report’s main findings are that:
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52% of libraries sampled paid for data acquisitions with library funds.
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42.86% of respondents indicated they experienced or expected to experience significant or strong demand for data set acquisitions in social sciences.
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Libraries serving private colleges granted and fully funded more than 40% of the data acquisition requests received by the library.