International Survey of Research University Leadership: Evaluation of the Academic Library, ISBN 978-157440-453-1
Primary Research Group Inc. has published the International Survey of Research University Leadership: Evaluation of the Academic Library, ISBN 978-157440-453-1
The 125-page study presents the findings from a survey of 314 deans, department chairmen, provosts, registrars, trustees, chancellors, vice presidents, administrative department directors and other upper level administration and management from more than 50 research universities in the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia. Data is broken out by title and also by department or work role, such as for fundraising and marketing, technology transfer, student services, educational administration and other categories. Data is also broken out by country, for public and private universities and by other variables such as level of compensation and gender, among others.
We asked these higher education leaders what they thought of the overall performance of their library, of the performance of the library in meeting the needs of their particular departments, and of library performance in a range of areas: cost control, information literacy, collection breadth, supplier of bibliometrics, and other areas. Those sampled also give their opinion on which items the library should be spending more, or less, or about the same, with specific data on books, eBooks, journals, workstations and other content, practices and items.
Just a few of the study’s many findings are that:
· Younger administrators were more pro-library than older administrators; nearly 69% of those aged 31-39 awarded an “A” grade to their library while only 47.25% of administrators 60 or older did the same.
· The best paid administrators, those earning more than US $250,000 per year, were also less enthusiastic than others at lower pay grades about increasing the library budget: only 20.83% of them wanted to increase library spending.
· Support for increased spending on library workstations was strongest from those in
positions in university business and finance, where 41.18% wanted to spend more and 5.88%, much more, and in student services, where 47.06% wanted to spend more, and 2.94% much more.
· Overall, more than 54% of those sampled considered library performance in serving university administration good or excellent. Canadian administrators were far unhappier than others in this respect and only a little more than 35% considered library performance in meeting the needs of university administrative departments to be good or excellent. Administrators at private universities were much happier on this issue than were those at public universities.
· Virtually all frequent visitors to the library, those making more than 50 visits per year, were 50 years of age or over. The highest-level officials – deans, provosts and chancellors – were the most likely visitors, averaging 17.84 visits per year.
· In terms of providing a leading edge scholarly collection libraries enjoyed favourable ratings. Nearly 67% of those surveyed rated performance as good or excellent while only about 22.3% considered it poor or acceptable. Survey participants in the UK/Ireland and in universities ranked in the world’s top 41 were particularly enthusiastic.
· Administrators in North America were particularly disillusioned about their library’s performance in information literacy and positive performance assessment fell off considerably from the highest to the lowest ranked universities.
Some of the affiliated institutions of the administrators participating in the survey were:
Australian National University
Baylor College of Medicine