Just a few of the study’s thousands of findings are:
• Mean spending by corporate and legal libraries in the sample on
Ebook licenses was $48,000.
• The mean number of independent licenses for electronic content
held by the libraries in the sample tripled from 2000 to 2007.
• 19.42% of the licenses held by the libraries in the sample
restricted the number of simultaneous users.
• Consortium purchases accounted for a mean of 30% of the database
licenses by the libraries in the sample.
• College/university libraries’ single largest consortium partner
accounted for a mean of just over 41% of contracts, twice as much as for
public or government and non-profit libraries.
• Participants reported spending an average of $7,300 on dues and
fees to consortiums.
• Libraries reported mean price increases for full text and
newspaper and magazine databases of 9.43% in the past year.
• The mean reported annual increase in the price of medical and
biochemical information was 8.13.
• Participants estimated spending an average of 290.49 hours of
library staff time reviewing contract terms from vendors of all kinds of
licenses for content in the past year.
• A shade more than 7% of the libraries in the sample had ever been
threatened by a publisher or information vendor with any form of legal
action for contract abrogation.
• Nineteen percent of libraries with expenditures below $35,000
believed they had “a good idea of what others were paying” fo rtheir
licenses, nearly four times the rate of libraries with database
expenditures exceeding $500,000.
• Twenty-three percent of the libraries in the sample currently had
institutional digital repositories.
• Just over 14% of all libraries surveyed indicated that they
extensively used free access to back issues of some journals that have
an “embargo” period before articles become available without charge.
• A mean of just over 24% of the electronic or electronic/print
journal subscriptions maintained by survey participants guaranteed
perpetual access to archives.
• Just 15% of libraries used an internal charge back system for end
users to help pay for the library’s database licenses. Libraries in the
U.S. were slightly more likely than non-U.S libraries to do this.
• Over a third of all respondents indicated that their course
materials on reserve were roughly equal degree paper and electronic.
• A mean of 4.35 librarians in the libraries sampled spent at least
10% of their work time reviewing and choosing new electronic resources.
• Librarians in the sample estimated that just over a third of the
sets of access and usage statistics they received from vendors of
electronic information could be considered “highly reliable.”
• Just under 10% of all libraries surveyed reported that they had
ever canceled a content license because of the provider’s inability to
effectively deal with service interruption issues.
More than half of the participating libraries are from the USA, and the
rest are from Canada, Australia, the UK, and other countries. Four hundred
tables of data are broken out by type and size of library, we well as for
overall level of database expenditure.
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