Survey of US Higher Education Faculty 2023, Use of the Academic Library's VIrtual Reference Services

Survey of US Higher Education Faculty 2023, Use of the Academic Library's VIrtual Reference Services

Institutional size mattered as 63.24% of faculty at high ed institutions with more than 20,000 students FTE felt their academic library had a subject specialist in their field while only 31.21% of faculty at colleges with fewer than 3,000 students felt the same.

More than half of female faculty (50.16%) felt their libraries offered them a subject specialist while only 44.25% felt the same. Broken out by race or ethnicity, African American faculty were the most likely to feel that there was a library subject specialist for them (63.04%) while Hispanic faculty were the least likely (38.46%).

Broken out by academic field, it was faculty in medicine, the hard sciences, engineering/computer science/mathematics and economics/finance who were much likelier than others to feel that they did not have a subject specialist in their academic library.

This study looks at the incidence and volume of faculty use of virtual reference services operated by academic libraries. Survey participants describe their use of virtual reference and their extent of familiarly with it. It also looks at the extent to which virtual reference acts as a gateway to other library services, including consultations with library subject specialists. Data in the report is based on a survey of 725 faculty at nearly 500 higher education institutions in the United States.

Data is broken out by 12 personal and institutional variables including size, type or Carnegie class, tuition level and public/private status of the participant’s affiliated institutions, as well as personal characteristics such as academic field, tenure status, academic title, gender, income and other variables.