I haven’t actually ponied up for this yet - some unexpected expenses plus the onset of Tinselkrieg have forced me to postpone a few things - but I do want to take a look and see if there are any conclusions one can draw in terms of multi-year trends.
A few items of note from Primary Research Group’s press release:
- Companies in the oil/gas and pharmaceuticals industries accounted for many of the libraries which reported increased budgets in 2008. In the Bay Area there’s been at least one large (and controversial) pharma library closing that I know of, so interesting to see this.
- The median amount of time spent reviewing content vendor license contract terms was 30 hours (the mean was 117.2).
- Average spending on ebooks (I assume mean, rather than median) was slightly less than half as much as was spent on print books.
- Over 29% of respondents said the library has become more important to competitive intelligence research efforts (compared with 20% who said it had become less important). Of course, this could also be reported as “About half of libraries said the library had not changed its importance to competitive intelligence research efforts,” but that’s not going to sell studies.
I’ve commented on past editions of the study here and here, and you can find out more on the latest edition here.
November 25, 2008 at 11:20 pm
[...] Librarian” blog post “2oo9 Version of the Corporate Library Benchmarks Study“ [http://thecorporatelibrarian.com/2008/11/25/2009-version-of-the-corporate-library-benchmarks-study/] is interesting and worth further [...]
December 1, 2008 at 2:03 pm
The publication date is December 2009. Is that correct???
December 1, 2008 at 11:30 pm
The site now correctly says “December 2008.”