Survey on Public and Academic Libraries 2013 & 2015

Introduction

As a central part of its strategy, EBLIDA is committed to the idea of establishing an online Knowledge and Information Centre (KIC) for the library community within the European Union to help Libraries argue for access for all to the benefits of the information society in all formats. Therefore EBLIDA invited Library Associations to participate in a multi-country survey covering 36 European nations in order to help develop the Knowledge and Information Centre.

The survey offers statistics over libraries and describes the number of Public and Academic Libraries (including National and University Libraries) their number of registered users, media stocks, number of loans, number of visits, e-visits and number of staff.

Furthermore we wanted to know, is there a library act in the country and is there a fixed book price (with or without reduced VAT) existing.

First round 2013

Out of the 36 Countries approached (27 EU, 6 EU Candidate and 3 EFTA Countries) 25 countries participated in this survey.

Participating Countries:

Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom.

Second round 2015

Out of the 36 Countries approached  15 countries participated in this survey.

Participating Countries:

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden, Turkey and United Kingdom.

The return rate of the questionnaire and the limitations of the national data collection efforts for libraries make it impossible to give a Europe wide overview.

Despite the shortcomings, the KIC Survey does serve the purpose of describing Public and Academic Libraries in a sustainable way. It shows their value and importance in this competitive information service providers environment.

Survey text:

PDF and Word file.

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