2014

Happy Holidays from LRS!

December 2014

Wishing all of our fellow library data lovers a wonderful holiday season and a happy 2015! We will be taking a couple weeks off from the Weekly Number and will return on January 7. In the meantime, we encourage you to check out (or revisit–for long time readers of our blog) this heartwarming post about …

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Pew Survey finds that two-thirds of Americans would like to do more to protect their personal data

December 2014

Librarians have long been advocates for the privacy rights of ordinary citizens, whether they are protecting citizens from the government, corporations, or even libraries themselves. While it is not news that Americans are increasingly concerned about the status of their personal information, the extent to which they are concerned about their privacy across various media …

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40% of surveyed school district library supervisors reported cuts in district funding from the previous year

December 2014

New research results from the Lilead Project showcase the first national effort to study school district library supervisors since the 1960s. Funded by IMLS and deployed by the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, the Lilead Project collected data via a national survey (which they intend to repeat) for a baseline for future research …

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SLJ Survey indicates two-thirds of U.S. schools offer e-books, representing a slow but stable growth in e-book access

December 2014

As part of our look at e-book usage in U.S. libraries for 2014, we see in School Library Journal’s latest survey of school libraries that e-books are not faring quite as well in this environment as they are in public libraries. In fact, in the survey of 835 U.S. school libraries, one of the most …

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Library Journal Survey reports median size of e-book collection in U.S. public libraries exceeds 10,000

November 2014

In their fifth annual study of e-book usage in U.S. public libraries, Library Journal found that while e-book demand is still on the rise, there has been a significant waning in its intensity, based on the responses from the 538 libraries that participated in their survey. LJ suggests that a strong possibility for this apparent …

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ALA report on the impact of CIPA finds that software filtering negatively impacts disadvantaged students

November 2014

Banned Books Week and Banned Websites Awareness Day only come around once a year, but for students, learning is affected all year long by the content they are able or not able to access. A report by ALA, Fencing Out Knowledge: Impact of CIPA 10 Years Later, seeks to understand the long-term impact of the …

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LIS starting salaries are up almost 3% for new graduates according to Library Journal survey

October 2014

As part of our periodic look at Library Journal’s Placements &Salaries Survey, we found good news rolling out overall for 2013 graduates. The 2014 survey (http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/10/placements-and-salaries/2014-survey/renaissance-librarians) looked at just over 2,000 of last year’s LIS graduates in order to assess changes in job description, salary, and geographic distribution across the profession. The general trend appears …

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Survey of US public librarians finds that almost half think there is an increased demand for language learning materials

October 2014

We have all likely felt the pressure, at one time or another, to grow more competent in a foreign language. Now, public librarians across the country are feeling the pressure to provide more diverse and accessible language learning products and services. Library Journal recently conducted a survey of public librarians from 337 libraries across the …

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