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Education Dept. Releases Biennial Report on Academic Libraries

December 13, 2011, 1:07 pm

In the 2010 fiscal year, academic libraries in the United States lent about 11.2 million documents to other libraries and spent about $1.2-billion on electronic subscriptions to current serials, according to the results of a survey released today by the National Center for Education Statistics, the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Education. The survey report, “Academic Libraries: 2010 First Look,” presents statistics on library services, collections, library staff, expenditures, electronic services, and information literacy, covering some of the same ground as a similar report from the Association of Research Libraries. Conducted every two years, the Education Department survey gathers information from two- and four-year degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the United States. Among the other 2010 findings: Academic libraries employed almost 89,000 full-time staff members, about 30 percent of them librarians, and about half of libraries’ expenditures went to cover salaries. The report breaks down statistics according to the size and Carnegie classification of institutions but does not further analyze them.

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  • badger74

    Without names–useless. Waste of $$$.

  • retired_president

    Can anyone point out even one worthwhile endeavor of the DoE? The entire Department is a waste of money.

  • mbelvadi

    By names, do you mean institution names or do you want to see individuals’ salaries?
    For more detail from NCES about individual libraries, see their web site tool, http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/libraries/compare/

  • ftuer

    In all of the syllabi I’ve  published the past three years I describe a grading scheme that I imported from another university where I had previously worked to explain to students what I see as an A, an A/B, B, etc.  I give credit to that insitution for the original idea. How can we expect our students to cite if they never see us cite anything! I think we should do it more often and more consistently, but have to admit that I am not as diligent as I should be!

  • http://www.briancroxall.net Brian Croxall

    Your last point here about students needing to see us cite is the subject of another post I’m working on. Glad to see I’m not alone in thinking this way!

  • torshi

    Yes – except I am that cheaper person.  I’m not an adjunct; I’m full-time contract faculty (NTT).  I invest a lot of time in my courses, and I am reluctant to make the value of my labor even less than it already is by giving away its products.  

    I don’t mind if people copy sections from my syllabus.  It happens. No one has ever acknowledged me as the source.  That’s okay.  I don’t find other people’s syllabi helpful, except to look at the number and timing of tests and papers they assign.  My syllabus revisions are driven mostly by my frustrations with my current classes.

    But a syllabus and other course content are not at all the same.  The syllabus is only a template.  I’ll re-use it, and its value to me is not diminished by its being used in many other courses.  That’s not at all true of my quizzes, writing guides, theory guides, class exercises, case studies, media links, reading questions, and paper assignments.  When someone else uses these, with or without acknowledging me, the content usually becomes no longer usable in my classes.  That’s a lot of lost hours, with no benefit to me.  Occasionally, they have even asked for this content for paid freelance work they are doing (instructor manuals).  I am willing to share–but only as much as I am willing to lose permanently, content I am willing to give up using or hours I am willing to spend copying material for a colleague.  It is truly a gift, not an exchange.  It is possible that other people could develop material I would want to use, but it hasn’t happened.  And the word’s getting out about my innovative assignments, or other faculty members’ acknowledging me as the source of their teaching ideas, would *not* be good things for me here.  Students, on the other hand, often send me links to good content or tell me about good examples, and I credit them as the source.

  • http://twitter.com/mcburton mcburton

    Using version control systems like Git can be somewhat frustrating, I know it took me a long time to 1) understand version control and 2) understand the unique complexities of Git (vs. other systems like SVN or CVS). That said, once I began to grok Git and GitHub (I am by no means a master) it opened up a whole new world of possibilities. For instance, you can publish html directly to the web using GitHub (http://pages.github.com). They even have a whole system for managing and publishing blogs using Github. The technical configuration is a bit conceptually complicated, but IMHO simpler to set up than WordPress (although you have to use a third party like DISQUS to manage comments). The key difference is you edit files on your computer, using whatever editor you’d like, rather than writing in a text entry field on the blog itself. Obviously it isn’t as powerful as WordPress, but with systems like Octopress (http://octopress.org/) I think you can do some pretty interesting things.

    I would love to see folks start publishing their syllabi online and if they do it through GitHub it would enable super easy “forking” and re-publishing on the web for students and other interested parties.For what it is worth I just came across Gitbox, which looks like an easy to use mac app for managing git version repositories (their tagline is “Version control as easy as Mail”). They have a special running this week:http://gitboxapp.com/

    I am in no way being paid by Gitbox, nor can I speak to the quality of the software. I’m simply advocating anything that makes using git and github easier. 

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