Tuesday, July 15, 2008

New report on library funding from OCLC. http://www.oclc.org/reports/funding
From their announcement:
"From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America
OCLC was awarded a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to explore attitudes and perceptions about library funding and to evaluate the potential of a large-scale marketing and advocacy campaign to increase public library funding in the U.S. The findings of this research are now available in the latest OCLC report, From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America.
Among the findings from the report:
  • Library funding support is only marginally related to library visitation.
  • Perceptions of librarians are an important predictor of library funding support.
  • Voters who see the library as a "transformational" force as opposed to an "information" source are more likely to increase taxes in its support.
The report suggests that targeting marketing messages to the right segments of the voting public is key to driving increased support for U.S. public libraries."\

July 15, 2008 - Thanks to the comment by Krafty Librarian to this post, I am adding the link to the OCLC Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources report from 2005: http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm
I linked to that report on this blog back when it came out. If you want to check out all of my posts that mention OCLC and their great reports and services, click here.

2 comments:

The Krafty Librarian said...

Ooh interesting. The funding report really fits in with OCLC's perception report http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm
I was fortunate to hear George Needham speak about it and it was illuminating.

Teresa Hartman said...

Thank you very much for commenting, and for the link. (I will add it to the post.) I agree with the people who see libraries as "transformational" - libraries ARE transformational forces.