ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

From Inside the DLSEF

By Dr. Katharine M. Stokes

College and University Library Specialist, Library Planning and Development Branch, Division of Library Services and Educational Facilities, U.S. Office of Education, Washington, D.C. 20202.

Many of you have by now received a free copy of Library Statistics: A Preliminary Report on Academic Libraries, 1966-67. The thirty-eight-page report groups selected libraries by public and private control, further subdivided by universities, other four-year institutions with graduate programs, four-year institutions without graduate programs, and two-year institutions. Within each of these eight groups, institutions were listed by four geographic regions.

The staff of the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) of the Office of Education selected 395 libraries which could be considered representative of all types of academic libraries and manually edited the reports, prepared the tables for publication, and pressured the printer for priorities. These heroic efforts were in response to ACRL members’ insistence that they need data on the past academic year by January in order to prepare and justify budget requests for the following fiscal year. On December 22 the NCES Statisticians were hard at work in spite of Christmas coming on!

The final report of this survey will be issued later in the year. In addition to data for all of the individual libraries that have reported, it will contain summary statistical tables. In these, the OE hopes to represent all academic libraries by including estimated data for those libraries not responding to the HEGIS (Higher Education General Information Survey) questionnaire.

In the meantime, the NCES has offered to supplement the library data on individual institutions not included in the preliminary report if you request statistics on ten or fewer libraries and the request is accompanied by an explanation of the need for these particular institutions’ data, so that the staff can develop a more responsive sample in the event that this type of publication is issued next year. This offer was communicated to ALA and was publicized at the recent Midwinter meetings.

If your library has not already received a copy of the Preliminary Report … ‚ it should be arriving shortly. Requests for statistics of libraries not included in it should be addressed to:

Director

Division of Statistical Operations

National Center for Educational Statistics

U.S. Office of Education

Washington, D.C. 20202

Last year’s report, Library Statistics of Colleges and Universities, 1965-66: Institutional Data, issued in March 1967, resulted from a grant to the Library Administration Division of the American Library Association (ALA- LAD) by OE’s Bureau of Research. Since the grant did not include funds for publications, ALA-LAD agreed to underwrite this phase of the project on the basis that the printing costs would be recovered from sales of the report, at $3.50 a copy.

All this background may be familiar to most of you. However, the almost daily requests that we receive for last year’s report and refer to the ALA indicate that some of you did not read the September 1966 ACRL News very carefully.