Primary Research Group has published The Survey of Academic Library Subject Specialists: Economics & Finance, ISBN 1-57440-202-1.

This report is based on a survey of 35 academic library subject specialists in economics and finance, predominantly from research universities, including Northwestern, Georgetown, Princeton, and many others. The study gives detailed data on budgets and spending patterns of subject specialists in economics and finance, including information on usage of eBooks, traditional books, databases, and scholarly journals. The study also reports on collection development plans in a broad range of subject areas including energy economics, agricultural economics, macroeconomics, microeconomics, accounting, portfolio management, international financial regulation, econometrics, mathematical methods, economic area studies in Asia, Europe, and North and South America (each region reported on separately), and many other subject areas.

The study reports on how finance and economics subject specialists use their time, breaking down their activities among categories such as information literacy, acquisitions and collection development, and other areas. The report measures the extent to which university presses account for materials purchases in the field, and gives detailed info on the impact of blogs in economics and finance. Other topics covered include data on spending accounted for by contributions from economics and finance departments to economics and finance library purchases, and spending accounted for by grants or endowments specified for materials purchases in economics and finance.

Just a few of the many findings from this report are:

• MA- or PhD-granting institutions in the sample had a mean budgetary allocation of $163,676 in 2012 for Finance or Economics
• A mean of 36.67 percent of purchases of e-books in finance and economics by foreign country libraries were accounted for by purchases from university presses, as opposed to just 15.2 percent of those by libraries in the United States
• In the last year, libraries in the sample received a mean of 18.57 specific suggestions from patrons to purchase particular books, monographs, databases, journals, and other information resources
• Libraries with specific budgetary allocations for finance or economics will spend a mean of $200,458 on specialized databases, while libraries without these allocations will spend a mean of $78,839
• 28.57 percent of libraries in the sample maintain a digital repository to which authors from the subject areas of finance and economics within their college contribute

This study is available in print and PDF format for $95.00. Site licenses are offered at $199.00. To view a table of contents, list of questions and participants, and sample data, or to order a copy of the report, please visit our website.