May 27, 2015

Academic Librarian Salaries Fall; Tech Spending Grows

Research & Markets added the Primary Research Group’s Survey of Academic Libraries, 2012-13 Edition to its offerings as of March 29. The report contains data from 110 American academic libraries.

When it comes to spending, libraries feel they’re not falling behind with the rest of their schools: almost 69 percent expect their resource allocation to keep pace with other departments. However that isn’t necessarily enough to go around: some 60 percent of colleges in the sample with more than 10,000 students say their capital budget has declined over the past two years, and more than 63 percent of libraries in the sample say that salaries and benefits for their librarians have declined in real terms over the past year.

(The Association of Research Libraries Salary Survey, on the other hand, found that academic librarians’ salaries in 2010-2011 increased 1.5 percent in the United States and two percent in Canada. As LJ reported, while that’s the smallest percentage increase since 2005, it is still greater than consumer price index increases during the same time period.)

Materials spending has grown slightly, by less than 2 percent, the Primary survey found, but unsurprisingly, the real growth category is technology: a quarter of libraries in the sample have bought ereaders, iPads, or other devices on which patrons can read ebooks, and community colleges have spent a mean of almost $45,000 on new computers or workstations for library instructional technology center.

Other topics addressed in the complete report include digitization of special collections, conference attendance and library staff training, views of open access, use of cloud computing and inventory tracking technologies and more.

This article was featured in Library Journal's Academic Newswire enewsletter. Subscribe today to have more articles like this delivered to your inbox for free.

Meredith Schwartz About Meredith Schwartz

Meredith Schwartz (mschwartz@mediasourceinc.com) is Senior Editor, News and Features of Library Journal.

Share
http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/04/academic-libraries/academic-librarian-salaries-fall-tech-spending-grows/
lj.libraryjournal.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-22
68657
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:XJ3MZHBGLGJLARDTWWSZ4JWSUHF4J7N2
<urn:uuid:20501750-606a-4f61-bc29-312679754330>
2015-05-27T17:53:38Z
216.70.86.237
sha1:74MYOD2QNSEQB7XUZVA6344E5RKPWGOS
<urn:uuid:3abbaf80-ddea-447b-b8bd-9c6389f505c0>
http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/04/academic-libraries/academic-librarian-salaries-fall-tech-spending-grows/
length
response
<urn:uuid:4c2181ee-c472-44ad-88f0-13af7ec71b0e>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-206-219.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-22
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf