LISU Annual Library Statistics 2001, Featuring Trend Analysis of UK Public and Academic Libraries 1990‐2000

Citation

Revill, D. (2002), "LISU Annual Library Statistics 2001, Featuring Trend Analysis of UK Public and Academic Libraries 1990‐2000", New Library World, Vol. 103 No. 6, pp. 236-237. https://doi.org/10.1108/nlw.2002.103.6.236.2

This annual, invaluable and well‐known series of statistics covers public, academic, national, government and National Health Service (NHS) libraries. It can trace its history back to 1985. It gives percentage changes over the previous year, previous five years and previous ten years. There are useful additional sections on population figures, book and periodical prices, the retail price index, dollar exchange rates, number of serial titles published, serials price projections, book production figures, public lending right statistics and inter‐library lending. This year there are no entries for further education, school and “workplace” libraries (other than those for government and NHS). They are excluded, as information about these sectors is generally lacking and hence is not conducive to the estimation of sector totals, averages and trends. Several efforts have been made over the past few years to gain better knowledge of these areas.

It is a loss to these sectors that adequate information is unavailable. Without aggregated data it is difficult for managers to benchmark and generally assess their performance and hence improve matters. It is high time they got their acts together. This is a self‐imposed handicap. Data are presented anonymously; therefore fears of breach of confidentiality are irrelevant.

Half of the publication is concerned with public libraries. A general decline in provision and use is noted. Real book spend per head of population is now down to £1.47 annually. There are, however, growth areas in non‐book materials and electronic resources. These have contributed towards the 100 per cent increase in income generated compared with 1989/1990. In the same period additions to stock are down by 22 per cent, staff are down by 16 per cent and issues by 24 per cent. A new feature in this section is information on public library user satisfaction taken from the “CIPFA Plus” surveys, to which 181 authorities subscribed. Similar, standardised, “satisfaction” data are not reported by universities, even though many do carry out qualitative surveys and standardised survey forms have been suggested and promoted by the Society of College, National and University Librarians (SCONUL) in the past.

Academic libraries have fared somewhat better than their public library counterparts. Staff numbers have risen, yet not sufficiently to match the growth in student numbers. Opening hours have increased, while the provision of computer workstations has practically doubled over the last five years. There are now 41 workstations per student in the “new” universities’ libraries, 51 in the “old” universities and 36 in the higher education colleges – an overall reduction of 48 per cent over five years. This is one of the few figures where a negative result signifies an improvement! Public libraries have much further to go in this regard. Only 55 per cent, apparently, provide access to the Internet.

Information on the impact of electronic sources, in all sectors, is still at an embryonic stage. Much more needs to be done in this area including some data from the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA), in order to make sense of overall provision and use in universities and the relative contribution made by libraries compared with computing services and the teaching departments themselves. Similarly, the scope of “academic services” needs to be further analysed, as, when libraries are excluded, it accounts for more expenditure than that on libraries and this difference is growing. A breakdown of this category into computing, media, and whatever else it covers, would have been most informative.

We are indebted, once again, to LISU for making sense of the figures in generally useful explanatory commentaries. For example, a 48 per cent increase in spending on books in the “old” universities is soon reduced to a fall of 27 per cent, when greater student numbers and inflation are taken into account (p. 112). Problems still exist arising from changes in definitions, methods of data collection, response rates and various reorganisations. These are, perhaps, inevitable. The publication presents a mass of useful information against which practitioners (and their masters) can compare their own performance and assess the health of libraries in the UK.