Faculty Needs and Librarians Perspectives: Findings from Two Nationwide Surveys
Presented by Meredith Quinn, Services Project Manager, Ithaka
Ithaka – is an organization that does incubation projects for JSTOR, like Aluka.
“In the summer and fall of 2006, Ithaka (http://www.Ithaka.org) commissioned an outside research firm, Odyssey, to conduct surveys of the attitudes and perceptions of academic collection development librarians and faculty toward the transition to an increasingly electronic environment. These studies received 4,100 and 350 responses, respectively, and were cosponsored by JSTOR and Portico and in part by Aluka and NITLE. The studies build on similar faculty studies conducted in 2000 and 2003; by examining the librarians’ perspective as well, we can gain a fairly balanced perspective of the dynamic environment. Considered together, the findings suggest the need for libraries to take leadership in helping academia’s transition to the new environment (Roger C. Schonfeldan, Kevin Muthrie, Educause Review, July/august 2007).”
JSTOR will be emailing the complete data analysis to us after the forum.
Survey consisted of responses from 1400 4 year intuitions, consisting of all the JSTOR Classes, from very small to very large.
44K faculty surveys were sent out, 9% came back
Market research firm they used, Odyssey , does a lot of work on immerging technologies.
Survey was also sent to collection development librarians, one per institutions was accepted. 350 surveys came back from this group
This survey has been done every 3 yrs. But this was first to include librarians
Transitioning to Elec. Only journals environment – Librarians
1. 20%, 1 in 5 librarians said hard copy will always be needed
2. 40% happy to see backfile hard copy replaced by elec. (backfiles)
3. 60%, 2/3 are ready to cancel current print journals subscriptions (current issues)
4. 20% said in the near future libraries will not have to maintain hard copy anymore
Librarians at research institutions are more likely to say we will not need hard copy in near future.
Faculty are more conservative
1. 40%, 1 in 5 librarians said hard copy will always be needed
2. 20% happy to see backfile hard copy replaced by elec. (backfiles)
3. 60%, 2 out of 3 are ready to cancel current print journals subscriptions (current issues)
Now by Discipline
Fine with canceling print in favor of e-only access
Bio 70%
Engineering 78%
Law 55%
Economics 70%
Sociology 62%
Classics 35%
History 40%
Philosophy 48%
Interesting findings
Economist and Biologist have near the same high comfort level with the transition to e-only journals. Why? Maybe due to workflow of economist, which is very online now, a change from older studies.
1 out of 3 in Classics field is comfortable with the transition. This is relative high.
Faculty on the issue of preservation and archiving of e-resources
Long-term preservation of electronic journals—how important? This is consistent across all disciplines, rating as very important.
How happy are they with the state of archiving for long term?
High satisfaction as a whole, but they don’t really want to get into the nitty gritty details of how to do it.
Librarians on the preservation and archiving issue?
How important now and in five years?
Very high priority, similar to the faculty. But place a much heavier importance on the the future (in five years).
Preservation of Hard Copies?
Faculty? — Higher if you ask them if important for some libraries but not mine. In other words it is important for someone to do it but not necessarily my library.
Ithaka is doing a research study to find out how many copies are important to keep in hard copy.
Librarians?
How important to preserving hard copy of reference material, journals, etc.?
Very important now but not as much in 5 years
It shows how important it is that the ARL libraries actually do take the lead with preservation. We really do need to think about this problem.
Value of Library Functions 2003 vs 2006
Survey looked at three functions:
1. Library as a starting point or gateway for locating information for my research (GATEWAY)
2. The library pays for resources I need (BUYER)
3. Library as a repository of resources–archives, preserves and keeps track of resources (ARCHIVE)
Buyer – even across both years
Gateway – down in 2006, decrease is mostly from the science disciplines. Are scholars googling more from their desk instead of using library resources, and is this bad? What does this mean for libraries?
Archive – even across both years.
Digital Repositories
Librarians – Does your institution have a digital repository for any kind of scholarly material? As would be expected the digital repositories are most widely available at the largest institutions. But even for the smaller institutions, digital repositories are seen as a very important function of the library.
For Librarians the top goal for a digital repository is the archiving and preserving institutional intellectual assets — 87%.
Contributing to a new framework for scholarly communication is also important, 47%.
For Faculty – Changing scholarly communication is low for faculty. Probable because they have a larger stake in the present system.
Faculty also do not know if there institution even has a digital repository.
