Earlier this year we published findings from the US Faculty Survey 2015. We have been running this survey on a triennial basis since 2000 to examine the attitudes and behaviors of scholars at four-year colleges and universities across the United States. The survey provides the higher education community with a regularly updated snapshot of its faculty members at a moment in time, as well as trend analysis of changes.

Key findings from this latest snapshot of national findings include:

  • Reversing a trend we saw in 2012, the library catalog/website is increasingly important for faculty as they conduct their research
  • There is a substantial increase in the perceived importance of the role of the library in helping undergraduate students develop research, critical analysis, and information literacy skills.
  • Faculty members tend to favor tools that allow them to manage or preserve their data on their own as opposed to support from other entities within and outside of their college or university.
  • For many of the ways they use monographs, faculty prefer print over electronic formats

As has been our practice with previous cycles of the survey, Ithaka S+R deposited the dataset for the US Faculty Survey 2015 for preservation and access.  With the ingest process now completed, ICPSR has released the dataset.  Please contact us directly if we can provide any assistance in accessing and working with the underlying data.

The dataset for the UK Survey of Academics 2015 is currently being processed and will be available at a later date.  All of the Ithaka S+R dataset deposits for cycles of these surveys can be viewed here.