[Air-L] Some Results from the Survey: Libraries & the Mega Internet Sites

[primarydat at aol.com]

Primary Research Group has published Libraries & the Mega-Internet 
Sites ( A Survey of how Libraries Use and Relate to Google, Yahoo,  
Wikipedia,  eBAY, Amazon, Facebook, YouTUBE & Other Mega-Internet 
Sites), ISBN 1-57440-096-7.

This report presents data from more than 120 academic, special and 
public libraries from the US, UK, Canada and other countries about how 
they use and relate to the mega-internet sites such as Google, Yahoo, 
Facebook, MySpace, eBay, Amazon, and others.

In many ways the mega-sites have transformed library management, 
fostering change in information literacy education, library marketing 
and public relations, cataloging, digitization, collection management 
and other aspects of librarianship.  The report provides hard data on 
exactly how libraries are dealing with the emerging internet giants, 
how they are adopting, negotiating, repelling, and embracing them. Just 
a few of the reports conclusions are reproduced below:

•   31.1% of the libraries in the sample had ever purchased an e-book 
 from Amazon.  Non-U.S libraries were more likely than U.S. libraries to 
purchase an e-book from Amazon.  Indeed, more than 45% of the non-U.S. 
libraries in the sample have purchased an e-book from Amazon, while 
only 29.63% of the U.S. libraries in the sample have made such a 
purchase. College and university libraries were the most likely to ever 
have purchased an e-book from Amazon; 35.62% of the academic libraries 
in the sample had made such a purchase.  The tendency to purchase 
e-books from Amazon correlated positively with library budget size; 
44.44% of the libraries in the sample with a budget exceeding $4.5 
million have purchased an e-book from Amazon, while only 24.14% of 
those with budgets of less than one-half million dollars have made such 
a purchase.



•   More than 32% of the librarians responding to the survey considered 
Wikipedia an “unreliable information source and don’t recommend its 
use,” while another 65.3% considered it “generally reliable but to use 
with some caution”, and only 2.48% considered it “as reliable as print 
encyclopedias”.

•   Just over half of the libraries in the sample reported that their 
library staff and patrons did not really use Google Scholar much. Three 
in 10 participants answered that they used it “reasonably often,” while 
just over 8% reported using it “extensively.” Fully 9% of the libraries 
in the sample were completely unaware of Google Scholar.

•   Awareness and use of Google Scholar generally increased as library 
budgets increased. No library with a budget below $500,000 reported 
using Google Scholar extensively.

•   Over 28% of participants reported that they were currently working 
with a search engine organization to digitize and make available online 
elements of their collection. Larger libraries were far more likely 
than smaller libraries, in terms of budget size, to be working with a 
search engine to digitize elements of the collection. More than half of 
the libraries in the sample with an annual overall budget of greater 
than $4.5 million are working with a search engine to digitize parts of 
their collection, while only about 11% of libraries with annual budgets 
of less than $1.5 million are working with a search engine for this
purpose.

•   Overall, 23.14% of the libraries in the sample had offered workshops 
that included instruction in use of the Yahoo search engine. Nearly 
half of all public libraries in the sample had offered instruction in 
use of the Yahoo search engine.

•   11.67% of the libraries in the sample have ever offered a course to 
their patrons on how to use eBay. More than 41% of the public libraries 
in the sample have offered such a course, as have 29.63% of libraries 
with budgets of greater than $4.5 million.

•   17.36% of the libraries in the sample had a presence on the social 
networking site Facebook.  Interestingly, 25% of non-U.S. libraries in 
the sample had Facebook pages, far more than the 16.51% of U.S. 
libraries in the sample. As might be expected of a social networking 
site that got its start exclusively focused on academia, academic 
libraries were much more likely than other types of libraries to have a 
Facebook page. 22.67% of the higher education libraries in the sample 
have a Facebook presence.


•   Only seven libraries in our sample have digitized and sold digital 
print on demand copies of out of copyright works or other works for 
which they have copyright permission, and then have sold these items 
through online retailers. Of those that have done this, 16.67% sold 
through Amazon, another 16.67% did this through Google, and 66.67% 
through some other online bookseller.

•   9.24% of the libraries in the sample have one or more YouTube 
accounts for the library.  16.67% of the non-U.S. libraries in the 
sample have at least one YouTube account while only 8.41% of the U.S. 
libraries in the sample had a YouTube account.

•   24% of the libraries in the sample use Yahoo Groups.  Non-U.S. 
libraries were far more likely to use Yahoo Groups than the U.S. 
libraries in the sample; 58.33% of the non-U.S. libraries in the sample 
use Yahoo Groups, while only 20.2% of U.S. libraries did so.

•   20.66% of the libraries in the sample have staff who use Google Docs 
special productivity tools, including Google spreadsheets, word 
processing capabilities and other features.

•   10.74% of the libraries in the sample not currently using Google 
Blogger plan to do so in the near future.  A quarter of non-U.S. 
libraries the sample had such plans, as did 9.17% of the U.S. 
libraries.

The 100 page report presents more than 300 tables of data defining the
relationship between libraries and the megasites.  For further 
information visit our website at www.PrimaryResearch.com