The Survey of Academic Library Subject Specialists: Economics & Finance (Highlights)

Highlights from a recently released report by the Primary Research Group.
From the Summary:

This report is based on a survey of 35 academic library subject specialists in economics and finance, predominantly from research universities, including Northwestern, Georgetown, Princeton, and many others. The study gives detailed data on budgets and spending patterns of subject specialists in economics and finance, including information on usage of eBooks, traditional books, databases, and scholarly journals. The study also reports on collection development plans in a broad range of subject areas including energy economics, agricultural economics, macroeconomics, microeconomics, accounting, portfolio management, international financial regulation, econometrics, mathematical methods, economic area studies in Asia, Europe, and North and South America (each region reported on separately), and many other subject areas.

• MA- or PhD-granting institutions in the sample had a mean budgetary allocation of $163,676 in 2012 for Finance or Economics
• A mean of 36.67 percent of purchases of e-books in finance and economics by foreign country libraries were accounted for by purchases from university presses, as opposed to just 15.2 percent of those by libraries in the United States
• In the last year, libraries in the sample received a mean of 18.57 specific suggestions from patrons to purchase particular books, monographs, databases, journals, and other information resources
• Libraries with specific budgetary allocations for finance or economics will spend a mean of $200,458 on specialized databases, while libraries without these allocations will spend a mean of $78,839
• 28.57 percent of libraries in the sample maintain a digital repository to which authors from the subject areas of finance and economics within their college contribute

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Filed under: Academic Libraries, Data Files, Funding, Libraries, Management and Leadership, Open Access, Patrons and Users, Reports