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Indicator IV-11
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Research Libraries
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NOTE TO READERS: Please include the following reference when citing data from this page:
"American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Humanities Indicators, http://HumanitiesIndicators.org".
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This indicator relies primarily on data collected by the ARL. The association’s current membership includes 123 of North
America’s largest research libraries, 107 of which are located in the United States and 16 in Canada.
Robert Molyneux, formerly of the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information, has analyzed these data, focusing on a sample of 12 ARL research libraries1 located on the campuses of large public universities in the United States and looking back to the first years of the twentieth century. Molyneux has limited his analysis to these institutions to avoid distortion due to year-to-year differences in the numbers and types of institutions that comply with the ARL’s request for data.
His analysis reveals that after an initial decline, libraries’ expenditures on their collections grew steadily, if slowly, between the early 1920s and the mid-1950s (Figure IV-11a). Then, starting in the late 1950s, the pace of growth accelerated rapidly. This spurt in spending lasted until 1971, when it ceased abruptly. Average library expenditures on materials and binding first dropped by approximately 5% and then remained near this reduced level for a decade. The early 1980s saw the beginning of another surge in expenditures, with spending increasing in small increments nearly every year for two decades. This trajectory was reversed in 2005, when a drop of 6% in mean library spending on materials occurred.
Figure IV-11b reveals that until the early 1980s the trend in volumes added by these libraries closely tracked the trend in spending: modest growth followed by an extended period of accelerated growth, a sharp drop, and then a plateau. But from there the trends diverge. While spending had begun to pick back up by 1982 and expenditure growth continued apace into the early 2000s, the average number of volumes added was relatively constant from the mid-1970s onward.
Other statistics available directly from the ARL for its entire membership depict trends in the costs of serials versus monographs, as well as changes in levels of purchases and expenditures for these two types of materials from the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s.
Between 1986 and 2000, the median unit cost of serials rose a dramatic 120% (Figure IV-11c).
However, with the proliferation of electronic serials that began in the late 1990s—and the duplication of content in different access formats (print and electronic)—the ARL unit cost per serial subscription data have grown less reflective of actual serial prices. Unit cost per serial subscription is calculated by dividing total expenditures for serials by the total number of serials, but that total has grown tremendously due to counting of multiple formats of the same serial title. The decrease in serial unit cost reported in the figure between 2000 and 2005 are thus the product not of actual price declines but of such double counting.
In an effort to avoid such duplication and to produce data that more accurately reflect serial price trends, ARL has moved to tracking serial titles as of 2006-07. (For more about the Association’s efforts to address the challenges involved in measuring library serial costs in an age of electronic access, see the ARL publications
“Reshaping ARL Statistics to Capture the New Environment” and
“The Impact of Electronic Publishing on Tracking Research Library Investments in Serials”.)
Trends in monograph prices and the relationship between prices and expenditures are rather different than those observed for serials.
Monograph costs were more stable between 1986 and 2005. Thus, while the median unit price increased somewhat during the late 1980s,
it had begun to decline in the early 1990s and by 2001 monograph prices had returned to their 1986 levels.
Prices remained in this vicinity through 2005. During the period of gradual price decline beginning in the early 1990s, libraries reduced
expenditures,
which kept monograph purchases approximately 20% below 1986 levels for several years.
As prices began declining more sharply in 1999,
an increase in library spending resulted in purchases returning to their baseline levels by 2002. But while serial spending and serial
purchases increased steadily thereafter, monograph expenditures and purchases began to drop once more. By 2005, expenditures were
10.8% lower than in 1986, with purchases at a level that was 6.8% lower.
Other data gathered annually by the ARL on its university libraries indicate the relationship between levels of crucial university library resources—collections and staff—and the size of the student population between 1986 and 2005. (The ARL does not collect data relating library resources to the number of faculty, the other major users of library services.) These data show that while the median number of serials purchased per student held steady from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, this number began to rise in 1999 and by 2005 purchases represented a 30% increase over the 1986 level (Figure IV-11d). In contrast, the median number of monographs purchased per student dropped sharply during the late 1980s and thereafter remained well below 1986 levels. In 2005, libraries purchased approximately 37% fewer monographs per student than in 1986. The number of library staff, excluding student assistants, per student also dropped (Figure IV-11e). After an initial increase, the figure declined in every year but three. The cumulative effect was a 25% decline in the median number of staff per student.
The NCES’s
Academic Library Survey
(ALS) is a census of the nation’s academic libraries. The term academic libraries, as used by NCES, refers to libraries that are located on the nation’s college and universities campuses and that serve as informational resources for those institutions. Many of these have a research orientation and supply a variety of supports—large collections, access to the growing number of electronic indices, and the expertise of librarians—to humanities scholars. ALS data on the proportion of college and university resources flowing to academic libraries provide another measure of the extent of support for scholarly research in the humanities. These data reveal that between 1975 and 2000, academic libraries commanded a decreasing share of college and university budgets (Figure IV-11f). Although the decline was gradual, it was steady. Thus, over the period, the median proportion of the nation’s postsecondary schools’ budgets spent on libraries decreased by over a third, from just under 4% of total institutional spending to 2.4%.
Any subsequent edition of the Humanities Indicators will include additional statistics generated from an analysis of the ALS public-use data files currently available from NCES. Unlike the published data on which this indicator relies, the raw ALS data can be disaggregated by type of institution; this will allow for the exclusion of academic libraries, such as those on the campuses of associate’s degree–granting institutions that are not designed to support original scholarly research.
Note
1 The 12 member libraries included in Molyneux’s sample are those at the Universities of California (Berkeley), Illinois (Urbana), Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio State, Washington, and Wisconsin. In every academic year since 1907/1908, all 12 of these institutions have provided responses to key items on ARL’s annual survey of its membership.
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