Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries and their Services
5. A Sense of Place
5 A Sense of Place
5.1
Introduction
Traditionally, the library has been seen as the heart of the academic institution, a place of fundamental importance to every researcher, teacher and student on campus. Traditionally, too, researchers as well as students visited the library regularly, consulted the contents of its shelves, talked to library staff, filled in forms to order books or articles from that library or one in another institution, and spent time browsing, reading and working within its walls. Many researchers still visit their library. They go to find items they know they want and know to be there; sometimes to browse, especially books, grey literature and new issues of journals; to recommend books for purchase; to obtain journals and books which they take away to photocopy for free in their own department (commonly, libraries charge for photocopying); and to get away from the telephone and other distractions of working life. That is not to say that they find university libraries entirely to their satisfaction as workplaces: many do not visit precisely because they no longer find libraries conducive to quiet work. There are shifts in the patterns of these activities, however, driven quite strongly – though not entirely – by the electronic availability of resources. The role of the library as a place in researchers’ working lives is becoming very different from what it traditionally has been. This section reports on the changes that are taking place and the reasons for them.
5.2
Frequency of researchers’ personal visits to the library
Librarians have known for some years that researchers are visiting their main institutional libraries less and less frequently, and many have a good idea of the scale of the change in their own libraries. This has important implications for library strategy, and in particular on planning for the physical configuration of the library. We sought to measure the change across the sector, and to assess whether the fall in visits to the library is likely to continue. Researchers were asked to record the frequency with which they personally visited their main institutional library in 2001 and 2006, and also to anticipate the likely frequency of their visits in 2011. The results, shown in Figure 8, are unequivocal: researchers’ visits to libraries have declined markedly since 2001 and the decline is set to continue, albeit at a slower rate. The graph shows that, overall, whereas 40% of researchers personally visited their main institutional library at least once a week in 2001, by 2006 this proportion had fallen to 22.5%; and researchers’ own predictions indicate that it will continue to decline, to 18.5%, by 2011. As might be expected, there are significant differences between researchers in different disciplines. For some time now it has been recognised that researchers in the arts and humanities are heavier users of libraries in person than researchers in the sciences, and our findings bear this out. In 2001, 55% of arts and humanities researchers visited their main library at least once each week but by 2006 it had declined to 48% and the downward trend is set to continue; in 2011 just 40% of them anticipate that they will be visiting their library frequently. In other disciplines, the fall in visits over the past five years has been much sharper, and the survey indicates that while numbers will continue to fall in the years to come, the rate of decline may be less precipitate. The trend for social science researchers mirrors the average, falling from 43% in 2001 to 22% in 2006 and is on course to fall further to 19% by 2011. It is, however, researchers in the life and physical sciences where frequent use of institutional main libraries [19]