The Ithaka S+R Library Survey 2006 was developed as a complement to our Faculty Survey 2006, exploring the attitudes and practices of librarians on a variety of topics, including the role of the library in faculty research, the print to electronic transition for scholarly journals, and the increasing prominence of electronic resources in research and teaching.

In 2006, for the first time, we sought to offer extensive comparison between the faculty attitudes and practices to the attitudes and perspectives of academic librarians on the perceived roles of the library and librarian on campuses, the impact of transitioning to electronic material on library practices, the place of digital repositories in the campus information-services landscape, and the future plans of academic libraries. Comparing and contrasting the responses of librarians and faculty on similar topics offered insights to libraries about how their efforts aligned with the priorities of their faculty and were perceived by this group.

Librarians surveyed are those with responsibility for collection development – one per institution – at a wide variety of 4-year academic institutions across the United States. Library directors were also surveyed at the largest research universities.

“Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education” details our findings and provides trend analysis and recommendations from these surveys. For those who are interested in investigating this data on their own, we have deposited the raw dataset with ICPSR (see “tools” section below).

Some of the findings that have proved to be of greatest interest have focused on these topics:

  • Attitudes towards the possibility of a transition away from print format, both for scholarly journals and monographs
  • Perceptions of libraries and their value, including specific library functions, and how these perceptions are changing
  • Preferences in research practices, including disciplinary differences and changes over time
  • Attitudes towards archiving of both print and electronic resources
  • Preferences that lead authors to choose among scholarly journals in which to publish their articles, as well as attitudes towards digital repositories