International Survey of Research University Faculty: Use of eBooks

The 118-page survey of more than 500 faculty looks closely at research university faculty attitudes towards eBooks, helping to answer questions such as: who among faulty use eBooks and who does not? How much do they use eBooks? Which faculty want their library to spend more on eBook collections and which want to spend less?? For what purposes are eBooks being used? Teaching? Research? Recreational reading? Which eBook collections are most popular and how does access vary by academic field, age of survey participant, academic title and other variables? The report also gives detailed data on how easy faculty find it to access eBook collections and how they assess their library’s efforts in information literacy in this area. Data in the report is broken out by more than 10 criteria including but not limited to: country of origin of faculty member (with separate data for the USA, Canada, UK/Ireland and Australia), age and gender of faculty member, academic field, size of university, academic title or position, world university ranking, and many other useful variables. Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: • Men had a greater preference than women for books in paper format; nearly 62% of men preferred books in paper format vs. less than 51% of women. • Faculty support for spending more on eBooks, vs those who want to spend the same amount currently spent and those who want to spend less, is greatest in Australia, where 52.87% want to spend more on eBooks. • When broken out by academic title, Deans, department heads, and faculty with distinguished/endowed chairs read or referred to the most eBook titles per year, a mean of 9.33; lecturers and instructors read or referred to the fewest, a mean of 4.57 titles. • Use of eBook textbooks was lowest in the USA and only a shade more than a quarter of US faculty found eBook textbooks useful in their work in any way. Faculty from the following universities participated in the study: Australian National University, Brown University, Carleton University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University. Drexel University, Emory University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Griffith University, Imperial College London, McGill University, Miami University, Monash University, Penn State - University Park, Penn State College of Medicine, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton University, Rice University, Rutgers University, Saint Louis University, Staffordshire University, Swinburne University of Technology, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin, University of Michigan, University College Dublin, University Nottingham, University of Alberta, University of Birmingham, University of California at Davis, University of California Riverside, University of California Santa Barbara, University of Chicago, University of Connecticut, University of Idaho, University of Leeds, University of Maryland, University of Maryland College Park, University of Michigan, University of Nebraska at Omaha, University of Nottingham University of South Florida, University of Strathclyde, University of Technology Sydney, University of Toronto, University of Utah, University of Western Australia, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Virginia Commonwealth University Washington State University, Washington State University Tri-Cities, Western Michigan University and Yale University.