Library Tech Highlights from ACRL’s State of Academic Libraries Report 

Three insights into library tech trends

Posted on October 9, 2024 in Blog Posts

Authors:

Daniel Pfeiffer
A librarian reviewing the library tech highlights from the ACRL State of Academic Libraries Report

ACRL just released the hotly anticipated results of its 2023 annual survey on “The State of US Academic Libraries.” This report offers key metrics gathered from 1,414 institutions in the US during the past year, offering an unrivaled view into trends and impacts. We previously covered the data ACRL gathered on remote work in libraries, which cast an interesting picture of the present and future of remote work. Though this current report doesn’t offer any new findings about remote work, it provides some interesting, even surprising, insights into the current state of library technology.  

Below are three highlights. 

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💸 Subscription costs place large burden on library expenditures. 

It’s no surprise that subscription costs add up quickly, but the final accounting is still shocking: ACRL finds that ongoing subscription costs comprise 34.9 percent of total reported expenditures. The report doesn’t mention AI, but this percentage seems likely to trend upward in the coming years as academic libraries purchase subscriptions to AI tools and premium AI chatbot models. 

💽 Digital materials are on track to dominate library collection holdings. 

The report finds that digital materials comprise 47 percent of library collection holdings—with one big stipulation. If you drop out doctoral institutions, which tend to possess more physical books than other academic libraries in their large research collections, from these data, then digital materials represent more than 80 percent of the total collection size at other institution types.

♻️ Most circulation is digital. 

A small point, but one worth noting: the report finds that only 1.6 percent of reported circulation is physical items. Curiously, digital circulation is down over the past year, but still higher relative to 2019. The report doesn’t speculate why this last year saw a downturn. Perhaps more students are using generative AI to come up with lists of research materials and looking for them on the open web? Hard to say, but it seems reasonable to imagine that AI tools are having some impact on how students and researchers are using academic libraries.

📄 Read the full report (PDF) 

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