From the highlights page:Primary Research Group has published Research Library International Benchmarks. The 200-page study is based on data from 45 major research libraries from the USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, the UK, Italy, Japan, Spain, Argentina, and other countries. The report presents a broad range of data on current and planned materials, salary, info technology and capital spending, hiring plans, spending trends for e-books, journals, books and more. Provides data on trends in personnel deployment, discount margins from vendors, relations with consortiums, information literacy efforts, workstation, laptop and learning space development, use of scanners and digital cameras, use of RFID technology, federated search and many other pressing issues for major research libraries, university and otherwise.Just a few of the reports many findings, presented in more than 500 tables, are:The average discount from list prices that the libraries in the sample received from their book distributors for reference books was 11.9% with a range of “0” to 30%. U.S. libraries received nearly 3 times the discount of non-U.S. libraries, a mean of 15% to only 5.67% for non-U.S. libraries. For 27.45% of the libraries in the sample, spending on salaries and benefits had declined in real terms over the past two years (from staff reductions, pay reductions in real terms or a combination of these factors).Nearly 37% of the libraries in the sample increased spending somewhat onmaintenance of IT equipment stock, while only 12.24% reduced suchspending. A shade more than half held such spending constant over the pastthree years. Mean spending on materials/content by the libraries in the sample wasapproximately $4.25 million, with a median of $1.91 million. Mean spendingfor the university libraries in the sample was $5.47 million. The nominalincrease in materials spending this year for the libraries in the samplewas 4.46%. …

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