This special report presents results from a survey of 50 corporate and other business libraries. Data is broken out by company sales volume and by type of industry, and the report presents a similar range of data for corporate libraries that Law Library Benchmarks presents for legal libraries. More than 200 detailed tables of data highlight developments in purchasing, digital licensing, use of ebooks and site licenses, policies in knowledge management and virtual library development, as well as spending on books, journals, databases, reference works, directories, cataloging systems, and other information vehicles.

This report, our sixth survey of corporate libraries, presents a broad range of data, broken out by size and type of organization. Among the issues covered are: spending trends on books, magazines, journals, databases, CD-ROM, directories and other information vehicles, plans to augment or reduce the scope and size of the corporate library, hiring plans, salary spending and personnel use, librarian research priorities by type of subject matter, policies on information literacy and library education, library relations with management, budget trends, breakdown in spending by the library vs other corporate departments that procure information, librarian use of blogs and RSS feeds, level of discounts received from book jobbers, use of subscription agents and other issues of concern to corporate and other business librarians.

This study is based on interviews with IT directors and assistant directors of leading college and university libraries and consortiums, including The Research Libraries Group, Vanderbilt University, the University of Texas, Lewis & Clark College, Salt Lake Community College, the University of Washington, the California Institute of Technology, Hutchinson Community College and Australia?s Monash University, Among the many topics covered are: investment in and maintenance of workstations, implementation of wireless access, policies towards laptops in the library, digitizing special collections, establishing digital depositories, preserving scholarly access to potentially temporal digital media, use of Ebooks, services for distance learning students, use of url resolvers, web site development and management, use of virtual reference, investment in library software, IT staff size and staff skill composition, range of IT staff responsibilities, use of outsourcing, relations between Library and general University IT staff, uses of PHP programming, catalog integration with the web, catalog enhancement software and services, web site search engine policies, use of automated electronic collection management software, technology education and training, development of technology centers and information literacy, library printing technology and cost reimbursement, and other issues of concern to library Information Technology Staff Directors.

This special report looks at the management and development of America[alpha]s thriving special collections in .lm and photography. The report pro.les the following collections: The University of Louisville, the Photographic Archives; the University of Utah[alpha]s Multimedia Collection; The American Institute of Physics[alpha] Emilio Segre Visual Archives; The News.lm Library at the University of South Carolina; The University of California, Berkeley Paci.c Film Archive; the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive; The National Archives and Records Administration[alpha]s Special Media Preservation Laboratory; the University of Washington[alpha]s Digital Initiatives. The report covers digitization of photographs and .lm, special collection marketing, collection procurement, funding and .nancing, approaches for optimizing both sales revenues and educational uses, development of web-based sale and distribution systems for photography and .lm, systems to assure copyright compliance, the development of online searchable databases, and many other aspects of .lm and photography special collection management.

Of key findings. Description of university, library, and staffing -- Cataloging productivity -- New technologies, enhancement of online catalogs -- Transition to metadata standards -- Cataloging of web sites and digital, special collections -- Library catalog/ metadata training and presentation -- Database maintenance, holdings, and physical processing -- Relationship with acquisitions departments -- Staff education -- Other issues facing library cataloging staff -- Curry College -- The University of North Dakota -- Haverford College -- University of Washington -- Yale University -- Brigham Young University -- Illinois State University -- Louisiana State University -- Pennsylvania State University.

"This report looks closely at the electronic and print serials procurement and management practices of eleven libraries including: The University of Ohio, Villanova University, the Colorado School of Mines, Carleton College, Northwestern University, Baylor University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of San Francisco, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center"--P. 6.

This special report looks at the efforts of ten leading art libraries and image collections to digitize their holdings. The study reports on the efforts of The National Gallery of Canada, Cornell University?s Knight Resource Center, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, The Illinois Institute of Technology, The National Archives and Records Administration, McGill University, Ohio State University, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the joint effort of Harvard, Princeton, The University of California, San Diego, the University of Minnesota and others to develop a union catalog for cultural objects. Among the issues covered: cost of outsourcing, cost of in-house conversions, the future of 35 mm slides and related equipment, use of ARTstor and other commercial services, ease of interlibrary loan in images and the creation of a union catalog, prioritizing holdings for digitization, relationship of art libraries to departmental image collections, marketing image collections, range of end users of image collections, determining levels of access to the collection, digitization and distribution of backup materials on artists lives and times, equipment selection, copyright, and other issues in the creation and maintenance of digital art libraries.

The new report from Primary Research Group is based on interviews with webmasters from the San Jose Public Library, the Salt Lake City Public Library, the Alexandria Library, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Public Library, the Houston Public Library, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the Colorado Virtual Library and the Boston Public Library. A free sample chapter is available for download. A few of the report?s conclusions are summarized below:CONTENT MANAGEMENTLibraries take widely varying approaches to the issue of how should control the website and who should be empowered to add content to the site. Some libraries prefer to centralize access in the hands of just a few librarians who act as gatekeepers to the website. Others prefer to empower as many librarians as possible to contribute to the site, and to oversee their own contributions to the site. To achieve this, some libraries have purchased off the shelf content management systems, while others have developed in-house content management systems that allow non-technical librarians to function independent of the need for technical help. THE IMPACT OF CASCADING STYLE SHEETS (CSS)Cascading style sheet, that allow librarians to edit entire sites, or subsets of site, with one click of the mouse, have become popular ways to introduce some uniformity and lower the labor demand of editing public library websites. Cascading style sheets are important because librarians are finding more and more reasons to add more and more content to their sites. Public library websites have often quickly become unwieldy monsters that voraciously eat up librarian time. Correcting and editing these beasts by hand is dangerous and cascading style sheets allow proper measured feeding without loss of limb. MOST POPULAR PAGESSome of the most popular pages on the public library websites surveyed were the events calendar, basic library info page, database gateways and children?s and teen pages.STAFFINGRelative to the importance of the library website to the overall success of the library, the size of most library web staffs, when such staffs exist, is quite small. Usually one to three individuals run the website, and they often have other responsibilities. The strategy that most have pursued to overcome their small staffs is to devolve responsibility for content to subject specialist librarians, and to empower them to be able to edit the portions of the website for which they are responsible. UNIQUE CONTENTMost librarians interviewed stressed the need to develop unique content that would draw traffic to the website. Among the type of content mentioned were: interactive storytelling and educational games, reading lists and contests, book reviews by librarians posted online, subject guides, and events calendars. CHILDREN?S & TEEN SERVICESOne of the most vibrant areas for website development has been services for children and teens. This age group grew up with access to the world wide web and it is truly the only generation for which web use and communication is as natural as turning on the television for most Americans. Libraries have responded with books clubs, personalized spaces, interactive stories and games, and other features aimed at this audience. Nonetheless, many libraries have just scraped the surface of their potential in this area. We like what the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Public Library has done in this area, developing unique content, focused marketing and web teams to create a unique site for Charlotte area children. SPECIAL COLLECTIONSMany libraries have plans to digitize their special collections, or at the very least, to digitize finding aids for those collections and increase access to them through the library website. We expect that this will soon become a major area of public library investment and a challenge for website administrators who must devise access schemes to digitized resources.