37.5% of Law Libraries Decreased their Budgets in 2013
New York, New York (PRWEB) April 17, 2014 -- Primary Research Group Inc. has published Law Library Benchmarks, 2014 Edition, ISBN 978-157440-285-8. The 155-page study gives extensive data and commentary on law library spending plans and management practices including current and future expected budgets, spending on salaries, and materials such as online databases, print reporters, online and print directories, books, eBooks, journals and other information resources.
The report presents data from 60 law libraries from the United States and Canada including law firm libraries, university law libraries, courthouse libraries, private company libraries and others, with data presented separately for each library type. The data is also broken out by library and parent institution size. The law firms in the sample employed a mean of 188 lawyers. A list of survey participants is available on our website.
The study helps its readers to answer questions such as: by how much will university law libraries increase or reduce spending on journals in 2014? What percentage of law firm libraries plan to reduce space allocated to the library? What percentage of book budgets are accounted for by eBooks? How have law libraries dealt with the downturn in the legal profession over the past five years?
Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:
• For 37.5 percent of survey participants, the overall library budget decreased in 2013.
• The courthouse libraries in the sample had the largest budget decreases, a mean of 7.25 percent.
• Libraries in the sample spent a mean of $320,931 on online databases in 2013; spending is expected to increase slightly in 2014 to $330,688, or by about 3.3%.
• The materials/content budget is nearly evenly split between print resources and electronic resources; the former accounted for a mean of 50.52 percent of the budget; the latter, 49.48 percent.
James Moses, Primary Research Group, Inc., 212-736-2316, [email protected]
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