Today's Library & The Future of Scholarly Communications

Librarian Survey 2018 Methodology & Data

Springer Nature’s Strategy & Market Intelligence team prepared an online survey to explore current perceptions of library challenges and librarians with their stakeholders. 

The survey aimed to reach a broadly representative range of responses, and the majority of respondents were from academic libraries, with a broad mix of both research and teaching-focused institutions .

See below for the survey methodology, demographics and questionnaire, or explore the full dataset on Figshare.

Methodology & Demographics

  • The questionnaire was open from 2nd October to 15th November 2018 and sent to more than 80,000 contacts on various e-mail lists, promoted on social media, and also made available on a library listserv. Respondents were offered entry to a prize draw to win a gift card worth $300.
  • The survey was hosted on Qualtrics and questions translated into Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, French and German.
  • More than 1,200 responses were received. Respondents who completed only a handful of questions, who completed the survey in less than 2 minutes, or gave nonsensical responses to open-ended questions were removed. This left 770 respondents. It is not possible to give an exact estimate of response rate, because it is not known how many people viewed social media or listserv links.  The data was then cleaned and analysed using Q.