International Survey of Academic Research Library Dataset Purchasing Practices

The study presents data and commentary from 26 academic research libraries about their current practices and future plans in purchasing and managing large datasets, both as part of their general collections and as agents for other departments of their universities. The report provides detailed data on their past, current and expected future spending, as well as how such spending is financed. Survey participants break out data services demand and use by academic specialty, defining demand from the humanities, social sciences, business/finance, biological/medical sciences, engineering and art/architecture. Survey participants also name some of their recent data acquisitions and give their advice on how to deal with data publishers, how they share costs with other university departments, and how they cultivate data librarianship. The study helps its readers to answer questions such as: how are libraries acquiring data librarianship expertise? How are they negotiating with data publishers and how prepared are these publishers to deal with libraries? Is library spending for data growing and if so, which libraries are increasing spending and which are not?