Primary Research Group has Published Research Library International Benchmarks (ISBN 1-57440-101-3)

The 200-page study is based on data from 45 major research libraries from the USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, the UK, Italy, Japan, Spain, Argentina, and other countries. The report presents a broad range of data on current and planned materials, salary, info technology and capital spending, spending trends for e-books, journals, books and much more. Provides data on trends in personnel deployment, discount margins from vendors, relations with consortiums, information literacy efforts, workstation, laptop and learning space development, use of scanners and digital cameras, use of RFID technology, federated search and many other pressing issues for major research libraries, university and otherwise.

(PRWEB) June 11, 2008 -- The 200-page study is based on data from 45 major research libraries from the USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, the UK, Italy, Japan, Spain, Argentina, and other countries. The report presents a broad range of data on current and planned materials, salary, info technology and capital spending, spending trends for e-books, journals, books and much more.

A few of the report's findings, presented in more than 500 tables, are listed below:

Mean spending on materials/content by the libraries in the sample was approximately $4.25 million, with a median of $1.91 million. Mean spending for the university libraries in the sample was $5.47 million. The nominal increase in materials spending this year for the libraries in the sample was 4.46%.

The corporate and legal libraries in the sample expanded their content spending in very few subject areas. University libraries tended to hold spending on most subject areas constant but increased in areas such as medicine/healthcare, engineering, and business/finance and economics. In general, information investment in the humanities and social sciences showed more growth than investment in the pure sciences.

Spending on e-books by the libraries in the sample was a mean of $150,086 in 2007 with a range of "0" to $2 million. More than 60% of the libraries in the sample plan to increase spending on e-books over the next two years, while less than 7% plan to decrease e-book spending.

53% of libraries in the sample said that they would be not be digitizing much of their general collection of out-of-copyright books, and nearly 35% said that they had no plans to extensively digitize any of their collections.

A mean of 21% of the articles obtained by the libraries in the sample from other institutions come from the digital repositories of these institutions rather than from traditional inter-library loan channels.

44% of large research libraries plan to increase spending on outside or outsourced Web design, evaluation and consulting, but most smaller research libraries plan to hold such spending constant.

More than half of the libraries in the sample spend less than 10% of their staff time on information literacy issues. 19.5% spend from 10% to 20% of their staff time on these issues, and 12.2% respectively spend from 20% to 30% and 35% to 50% of their staff time on these issues. Only 2.33% spend more than half of their staff time on information literacy issues.

The report is available for $95.00; $105 for a PDF copy. For further information, view our website at www.PrimaryResearch.com.

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