The Survey of Academic Library Subject Specialists: Economics & Finance

• Publication date: May 2012

This report is based on a survey of thirty five library subject specialists in economics and finance, predominantly from research universities, including Princeton, Georgetown, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon and the Library of Congress.  The study gives detailed data on budgets and spending patterns of subject specialists in economics and finance, including information on usage of eBooks, traditional books, databases and scholarly journals.  The...

This report is based on a survey of thirty five library subject specialists in economics and finance, predominantly from research universities, including Princeton, Georgetown, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon and the Library of Congress.  The study gives detailed data on budgets and spending patterns of subject specialists in economics and finance, including information on usage of eBooks, traditional books, databases and scholarly journals.  The study also reports on collection development plans in a broad range of subject areas including energy economics, agricultural economics, macroeconomics, microeconomics, accounting, portfolio management, international financial regulation, econometrics, mathematical methods, economic area studies in Asia, Europe and North and South America (each region reported on separately), and many other subject areas.
The study reports on the financial support received from libraries from departments of economics and finance, as well as direct measures of grant and endowment support for economics and finance collections.  Among other issues discussed are: the impact of blogs, collection spending growth in economics/finance vs other areas, relations with patrons, collection development decision making, monitoring of scholarly references, relations with faculty, information literacy efforts, and breakdowns of how economics/finance subject specialists spend their work time, among other issues.
Just a few of the report's many findings are that:
 
-Colleges in the sample currently enroll a mean of 1354 finance and economics majors. 
-The mean budget allocation for the colleges in the sample that had a separate budget for economics and finance was approximately $190,000 in 2012. 
-38.89% of libraries in the sample have received contributions from other departments within their college as to better afford information resources in economics and finance desired by those departments. 
-About 13% of the libraries in the sample had a specific endowment for books in economics and finance.  
-Community and 4-year college libraries and libraries with less than 10,000 students enrolled will be most aggressive in growing their Macro and Microeconomics collections, 33.33% of the former and 25% of the latter increasing spending in these areas. 
-25% of libraries in the sample will increase spending for Healthcare Economics, including 50% of MA and PHD granting college libraries and 23.08% of research university libraries. 
-The blogs Naked Capitalism and Paul Krugman's blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, are monitored or indexed for faculty or personal interest by 5.26% of survey participants. 
-40% of survey participants have monitored publications produced by faculty of their college to evaluate the extent to which their library holds journals or other publications cited in works published by these faculty. 

Knowledge Management Industry