Information services in the commercial sector: key issues and trends

Abstract

Summarizes results drawn from a questionnaire survey, undertaken by the Library and Information Statistics Unit (LISU), Loughborough University, UK, to review the key issues and trends in 10 sectors of ‘libraries in the workplace’ and to make comparisons between them. The complete study involved 285 organizations (from 897 mailed) in 10 sectors and the present summary is restricted to the five ‘commercial’ sectors: law; financial services; energy; pharmaceutical industry; and management consultants. Data from four noncommercial sectors is included in some cross sectoral tables. Results reported include: current periodical titles received; enquiries answered from the library; provision of desktop access to electronic media; fraction of total expenditure allocated to different materials; most common uses of the Internet; libraries accessing periodicals in more than one format; where the library or information centre reports to; professional and support staff employed; photocopies obtained from other sources; number of CD-ROM databases held and online databases accessed regularly; services offered; changing methods of database access; numbers of searches for selected sectors; and average expenditure per user. (The full report is available from LISU).