International Survey of Research University Faculty: Use of Academic Library Subject Specialists

The study presents data from a survey of more than 500 international research university faculty from 50+ universities in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland about their use of their academic library subject specialists. The study provides detailed data on who uses academic library subject specialists and how often; it also presents detailed evaluations by faculty on their experience with their academic library subject specialist, and their self-perceived need for their subject specialist. Data is broken out by many criteria such as faculty academic title, faculty gender, national location of the university, faculty academic discipline, university public/private status, university enrollment size, faculty teaching load and other useful criteria. Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: 51.39% of survey participants noted that their libraries had a subject specialist in their area of scholarship. Scholars in institutions ranked in the top 18 worldwide were slightly more likely than others to feel that their library had a subject specialist in their area of scholarship; nearly 61% thought so. Postdocs were the least likely to feel that the library had subject specialist for them – only 28.57% of them thought so, while nearly 60% of professors did Faculty from institutions with less than 12000 students enrolled were less likely than those at their larger peers to be satisfied with their academic library subject specialist. Scholars from the following institutions were surveyed for the report, Australian National University, Baylor College of Medicine, Brown University, Carleton University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Curtin University, Drexel University, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Griffith University, Imperial College London, James Cook University, Massey University, McGill University, Monash University, Penn State University, Queen Mary University of London, Reading University Rice University, Rockefeller University, Rutgers University, Saint Louis University, Swinburne University of Technology, Trinity College Dublin, UConn Health Center, University of California, Davis, University College Dublin, University of Alberta, University of Birmingham, University of California Santa Barbara, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Riverside, University of Chicago, University of Florida, University of Idaho, University of Leeds, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Nottingham, University of Reading, University of Tasmania, University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, University of Toronto, University of Utah, University of Western Australia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Washington State University and Yale University.