International Survey of Research University Leadership: Evaluation of the Academic Library

The 125-page study presents the findings from a survey of 314 deans, department chairmen, provosts, registrars, trustees, chancellors, vice presidents, administrative department directors and other upper level administration and management from more than 50 research universities in the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia. Data is broken out by title and also by department or work role, such as for fundraising and marketing, technology transfer, student services, educational administration and other categories. Data is also broken out by country, for public and private universities and by other variables such as level of compensation and gender, among others. We asked these higher education leaders what they thought of the overall performance of their library, of the performance of the library in meeting the needs of their particular departments, and of library performance in a range of areas: cost control, information literacy, collection breadth, supplier of bibliometrics, and other areas. Those sampled also give their opinion on which items the library should be spending more, or less, or about the same, with specific data on books, eBooks, journals, workstations and other content, practices and items. Just a few of the study’s many findings are that: • Younger administrators were more pro-library than older administrators; nearly 69% of those aged 31-39 awarded an “A” grade to their library while only 47.25% of administrators 60 or older did the same. • The best paid administrators, those earning more than US $250,000 per year, were also less enthusiastic than others at lower pay grades about increasing the library budget: only 20.83% of them wanted to increase library spending. • Support for increased spending on library workstations was strongest from those in positions in university business and finance, where 41.18% wanted to spend more and 5.88%, much more, and in student services, where 47.06% wanted to spend more, and 2.94% much more. • Virtually all frequent visitors to the library, those making more than 50 visits per year, were 50 years of age or over. The highest-level officials – deans, provosts and chancellors – were the most likely visitors, averaging 17.84 visits per year. • Administrators in North America were particularly disillusioned about their library’s performance in information literacy and positive performance assessment fell off considerably from the highest to the lowest ranked universities. Some of the affiliated institutions of the administrators participating in the survey were: Australian National University Baylor College of Medicine Brown University Carleton University Carnegie Mellon University Case Western Reserve University Columbia University Drexel University Emory University Georgia Institute of Technology Griffith University Imperial College London James Cook University Lehigh University Massey University McGill University Monash University Penn State University Princeton University Queen Mary University of London Rice University Rockefeller University Rutgers University Saint Louis University Swinburne University of Technology 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 Connecticut University of Florida University of Idaho University of Leeds University of Maryland University of Michigan University of Missouri University of Nottingham University of Reading University of South Florida University of Tasmania University of Technology Sydney University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center University of Toronto University of Utah University of Western Australia Virginia Commonwealth University Washington State University Washington University in St. Louis Yale University