Findings from Law Library Benchmarks Survey

From Research and Markets' press release for its Law Library Benchmarks, 2012-13 Ed.:

The study looks closely at the budgets, spending, technology acquisition, web use and other practices by law libraries in the USA and Canada. Data is broken out by size and type of law library and for law libraries in the USA and Canada.

Just some of the study's many findings are that:

- 50% of libraries in the United States and 30.43% of those in Canada feel that the space allocated to their library will decrease in three years time.

- Libraries in the sample spent a mean of $3,462 on online databases per lawyer employed in 2011 and a maximum of $20,835. Libraries in the United States spent a mean of $3,883, while those in Canada spent about $2,647.

- University libraries spent a mean of $1,141,321 on salaries, more than twice the mean $487,504 spent by government and courthouse libraries and more than four times the $243,054 spent by law firm libraries.

- In 2011, 41.33% of libraries in the sample increased their overall library budget.

- Law firm librarians in the sample spend a mean of 9.03 staff hours per week in finding new clients for the firm.

- Materials budgets are expected to decline in real terms in 2012.

- Libraries in the sample spent a mean of $5,892 on salaries per lawyer in their organization.

- Print resources still accounted for 53.65% of the materials budget for the libraries in the sample though only 42.5% for law firm libraries.

- 3.8% of the libraries sampled used the cloud service DropBox for cloud computing services.

- Libraries with less than 100 lawyers in their organization spent a mean of $32,027 on scholarly journals.

- Print subscriptions to magazines and newspapers cost libraries in the sample a mean of $68,998 in 2011.

[JH]