A Selection of Findings from The Survey of Institutional Digital Repositories, 2012-13 Report

New from The Primary Research Group.
From the News Release:

227-page study explores the habits and practices of 38 digital repositories from a collection of universities and non-higher education institutions in the United States, Canada, England Ireland and Australia, and a host of countries from developed and developing areas alike. With over 400 benchmarking tables, the report cites budgetary and revenue data as well as cataloging and open access statistics, detailing just what items these repositories contain: books, journals, magazines, textbooks, audio and video files, and much more.

Selected Findings

• 84.21 percent of survey participants say their digital repository contains journal articles written by faculty, while just 50 percent say their repositories contain faculty-written books
• Only 5.41 percent of participants say the repository has–either along or in concert with others–established any form of peer review network
• For the repositories in the sample, median spending on marketing the digital repository to users over the past year was $0; the majority of participants (if they had spent anything at all) spent well under $1,000
• For US-based repositories, the mean percentage of downloads originating from US sources is 66.94 percent, while the mean for repositories in all other developed countries is 15.61 percent
• According to our survey, the biggest departmental contributor to the digital repository is the Physics department, as 42 percent of participants consider this department to be either a “significant” or “heavy” contributor
• 43 percent of survey participants say their repository contains no archived photographs or digital images
• 80 percent of the repositories in the sample are funded largely from the main library budget
• The mean number of unique visitors per year to the digital repository’s website is 69,350

Here’s a brief excerpt from the report (14 pages; PDF).

Filed under: Data Files, Journal Articles, Libraries, News, Open Access, Patrons and Users