Survey of US Higher Education Faculty 2023, Requesting the Library to Purchase New Materials

Survey of US Higher Education Faculty 2023, Requesting the Library to Purchase New Materials

This 73-page report gives extensive and detailed data on who, how often, and for what kinds of materials, do faculty request that their academic libraries make purchases of new resources.  The study also gives detailed data on just how often such requests are fulfilled and for whom, enabling readers of the study to compare effective fulfillment rates – for example – for male vs female faculty, or full professors vs. instructors or associate professors – or Caucasian vs. Asian origin faculty – or faculty in visual arts vs. those in economics or history.



The study gives unique data sets for requests for each of the following types of materials; databases, journals and other periodicals, print books, eBooks, and audio-visual resources.  For each type of resource, the study shows which faculty most often make requests, and 13 tables of data highlight demand for each type of resources.We asked: How many times in the past year have you requested that your library make a purchase for you?

On average, faculty requested that their library make a purchase for them 2.08 times in the past year.

Broken out by work title, assistant professors requested purchases most often (3.31), followed by professors (2.95), while adjuncts made the least requests at just 0.39 requests in the past year. Carnegie class or college type had an interesting effect where those at MA/PhD granting colleges had by far the highest average number of requests at 4.39, while respondents working in all other types of college or university averaged less than 2 requests. Respondents at private colleges made far more requests (3.32) than their public counterparts (1.36).