Here are a Few of the Stats that are Included in the Review:
This is an update of a report that was first published last year, when the 2006–7 figures were analysed. It is heavily weighted towards academic libraries, and quite US-centric: 77.03% of the respondents were college or university librarians (as opposed to 22.97% public or special librarians); and78.38% of them worked in the US (as opposed to 21.62%‘non-US’ librarians).
One of the most interesting findings of the report is that librarians with the biggest budgets (of $4m or more) increased their expenditure on e-books much more in 2006–7 (when the average increase was 35%) than in 2007–8 (when the average increase was 14.2%). Even more markedly, librarians with budgets of between $1.5m and $4m increased their expenditure on e-books by an average of 53.3% between 2006 and 2007, but by an average of just 7.43% between 2007 and 2008.
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Of the sample featured in the report, half had a NetLibrary contract, 34% used Gale Reference Library, 27% used Ebrary, and17.6% used Safari. Institutions with budgets of over $4m were seven times more likely to subscribe to Safari than others(which is not surprising, given that Safari has a specialist appeal, and libraries with smaller budgets tend to buy only very generalist e-book collections).
The libraries in the sample were relatively loyal to their e-book platform providers. On average, 77% expected to renew current contracts (with83% of academic librarians expecting to do so, and 61% of special/public librarians). 70% of the total spending on e-books in the sample was with aggregators; 24.6% was with individual publishers (the remaining 5.4% is not accounted for).
Much More After the Click
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A surprising and disheartening statistic, given the effort that has been put into both producing and standardizing them, is that 80% of the respondents said that they did not use vendor-supplied usage statistics extensively.
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The libraries in the sample spent a mean figure of $3,760 on e-books in the last year a significant but not astronomical sum when compared to print expenditure. (As a comparison, median ARL library expenditure on print monographs in 2007 was a little over $2m.)
See Also: Primary Research has More Statistics From the Report In This Media Release:
+ Well over 81% of the sample cataloged their e-book collection and listed it in their online library catalog.
+ For the most part, librarians in the sample felt that their patrons were less skilled in using e-book collections than they were in using databases of magazine, newspaper and journal articles.
+ The libraries in the sample had MARC records for a mean of approximately 74% of the e-books in their collections.
+ Many libraries reported significant use of electronic directories. 12.5% reported extensive use and 30% said that use was significant. The larger libraries reported the heaviest use.
+ Use of e-books in the hard sciences was particularly high. More than 30% of participants said that use of e-books in the hard sciences defined as chemistry, physics and biology)was quite extensive and another 26% noted significant use.
+ Libraries in the sample maintained a print version for a mean of 24% of the e-books in their e-book collections.
+ Nearly 21% of the libraries in our sample have digitized out-of-copyright books in their collections in order to make their contents more available to their patrons.
+ E-books account for only about 3.9% of the books on course reserve, with a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 30%.
+ Nearly 70% of the sample’s total spending on e-books was with aggregators, while just over 24.6% of the total spending was spent with individual publishers.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
