For immediate release
August 29, 2007
For more information, contact:
Martha Kyrillidou, ARL
martha@arl.org
(202) 296-2296
ARL Introduces Expenditures-Focused Index of University Library Members
Washington DC—Beginning with the ARL Statistics 2005–06 data, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is introducing an Expenditures-Focused Index of the Association’s university library members for describing the amount of resources invested in these institutions.
The Expenditures-Focused Index is a summary measure of relative size among the university members of the Association. This index does not attempt to measure a library’s services, quality of collections, or success in meeting the needs of users.
The new index is composed of four variables that are part of the historical data elements in which university ARL libraries most resemble one another: (a) total library expenditures, (b) salaries and wages of professional staff, (c) total library materials expenditures, and (d) total professional and support staff.
The Expenditures-Focused Index was developed through rigorous analysis of ARL Statistics data undertaken for ARL by Bruce Thompson, Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology and CEHD Distinguished Research Fellow, and Distinguished Professor of Library Science, Texas A&M University, and Adjunct Professor of Family and Community Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine (Houston).
The Expenditures-Focused Index is a publicly available alternative to the ARL Membership Criteria Index, which was established in 1980 and revised in 1987. This new index is highly correlated with the Membership Criteria Index but less impacted by changes in collection size, the electronic availability of content, and the rapidly changing context of library collections.
The development of an Expenditures-Focused Index was incorporated into the recommendations of the ARL Task Force on New Ways of Measuring Collections and approved by the ARL Board in February 2007.
The Expenditures-Focused Index for 2005–06 is freely available on the ARL Web site http://www.arl.org/stats/index/; it is also featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 2007–8 Almanac, vol. 54, no. 1, page 34, http://chronicle.com/weekly/almanac/2007/nation/0103401.htm (login required).
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 123 research libraries in North America. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is located on the Web at http://www.arl.org/.
