Library director and
administrators at all types of colleges and universities consent their
libraries must educate undergraduates research skills and information literacy,
however the Ithaka S+R Library Survey 2013 also suggests libraries are progressively
more tailoring their services to address institutional needs.
Ithaka, a nonprofit research
organization that promotes modern forms of teaching and intellectual
communication, before surveyed library directors in 2010. That survey captured
libraries in the middle of a complex changeover from print to electronic
resources. Based on the responses of 499 institutions in the fall 2013 survey,
that shift has been, “from a budget allotment outlook, almost completed.”
Yet library directors and faculty
members remain split on the value of electronic collections of books and
journals. Instructors are more likely to prefer ebooks -- more than 50 percent
of respondents in Ithaka's 2012 faculty survey said they “play an important
role” in research and teaching, while only about one-third of library directors
agreed. Meanwhile, two-thirds of library directors said they “would be happy to
see hard copy collections [of scholarly journals] discarded and replaced
entirely by electronic collections,” compared to 40 percent of faculty members
surveyed in 2012.
