Beyond eBooks

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.

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