Libraries & the Mega-Internet Sites

I got one of those e-mails designed to try to entice me to buy a $90 book. Won't happen, but the tease is interesting:

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 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:

•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.

•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.

•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 the website at www.PrimaryResearch.com