Libraries and data. What’s not to love?

23Jul08

Whoas! The National Center for Educational Statistics report on academic libraries is now available.

Reading this report will help young professionals put large scale library operations into context. Analysing data collected by the 2006 Academic Libraries Survey (ALS), the report focuses on services, collections, staffing, expenditures, e-services, and information literacy. Academic institutions are defined and separted by order of the Carnegie classification system, which makes it easy for me to tease-out tabulations pertaining exclusively to community colleges. In short, it’s the type of publication that you should have read in grad school, but didn’t.

Key Findings (with spin):

In academic libraries, ALA-accredited master’s degree recipients account for 28% of full time staff. This means that even the greenest professionals find themselves in management positions when entering the workforce.

In an average of total expenditures for all US academic libraries, saleries and wages account for 50% of budgetary spending. At community colleges that number jumped to 71%, revealing the greater demand for services and institutional support among this population.

A little over 48% of academic libraries report that they define information literacy or the information-literate student. The numbers become smaller when institutions are asked whether they incorporate IL into their missions and strategic plans. Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic, but my hope is that the importance of IL in academic institutions is underreported. What are librarians doing if they are not teaching students how to identify, retrieve, criticize, and synthesize information? That’s what we do.

During a typical week during the Fall semester, 3,617 academic libraries report 1,000,863 reference transactions. While greadily scarfing raisins in the parking lot of Stop & Shop yesterday, I can report recieving one reference question from a patron that approached my car’s open window. I think my job is safe.