Medical & Scientific Library Plans for the Print Materials Collection

The study looks closely at the plans of 25 major medical and other scientific libraries for their print materials collection. Survey participants include Carnegie Mellon University, Colorado State University, the Spanish National Research Council, the Linda Hall Library, the Cleveland Clinic Library, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the University of Bath, Ashland Inc., the Royal College of Nursing, and the Harrell Health Sciences Library of Penn State University, and many others. The report covers library acquisition plans in journals, books and eBooks, practices on culling print materials, trends in surveying end users preferences on paper vs, digital information access, preferred rates of change in paper/digital access models, and other issues of interest to academic, corporate and government medical and other scientific librarians. The report helps its end users to answer questions such as: are medical and scientific libraries phasing out paper? If so, in what areas and how quickly? Are certain kinds of scientists more supportive of paper-based access? What is the demand for paper-based journals? How comfortable are patrons with eBook access? Billions of dollars are still being spent on paper-based scientific and medical materials for libraries: what is the future of these expenditures? Just a few of the study’s many findings are that: • Spending on ebooks in 2016 by the libraries sampled decreased. • The percentage of subscriptions accounted for by joint print and online journal subscriptions in the sample is expected to decrease from 13% in 2017 to 12% in 2018. • Only 7% of total subscriptions of medical libraries are accounted for by print only journals, while this figure is 15% in the case of non-medical libraries. • In 2015 hospital libraries in the sample spent a mean of $145,200 on print books. Data in the report is broken out for medical and other scientific libraries, by type of sponsoring organization and by library size defined by number of librarians.