This morning we published the US Faculty Survey 2015. We have been running this survey on a triennial basis since 2000 to examine the attitudes and behaviors of scholars at four-year colleges and universities across the United States. The survey provides the higher education community with a regularly updated snapshot of its faculty members at a moment in time, as well as trend analysis of changes.

What does this latest snapshot show us? Some key findings include:

  • Reversing a trend we saw in 2012, the library catalog/website is increasingly important for faculty as they conduct their research
  • There is a substantial increase in the perceived importance of the role of the library in helping undergraduate students develop research, critical analysis, and information literacy skills.
  • Faculty members tend to favor tools that allow them to manage or preserve their data on their own as opposed to support from other entities within and outside of their college or university.
  • For many of the ways they use monographs, faculty prefer print over electronic formats

We also included medical faculty for the first time in this survey. These respondents sometimes have attitudes and practices that parallel their colleagues in the social sciences and physical sciences, but often are unique in the way that they discover and access information, conduct and disseminate research, teach, and use the library.

As you peruse the survey—and its coverage in Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and my post on monographs in The Scholarly Kitchen—what findings jump out to you? As DePaul University Librarian Scott Walter tweeted earlier today, “What we each choose to highlight in tweet-length references to @IthakaSR faculty survey is like a Rorschach test for academic librarians.”