May 31, 2016
Institutional library budgets across the globe will increase by 1.4 per cent overall this year, reports the Annual Library Budget Survey, carried out by the Publishers Communication Group (PCG), Ingenta’s publishing consultancy arm.
The worldwide study, which interviewed senior librarians in 686 institutional libraries across the globe about their budget spend predictions for 2016, discovered that libraries in the Middle East and Africa region expect the highest levels of budget growth at 4.2 per cent, followed by Asia Pacific (+2.8 per cent) and South America (+2.1 per cent).
In contrast, the survey found that the outlook in more mature markets was far less optimistic, with North American libraries predicting a very modest 1 per cent rise in budget spend, and European libraries anticipating a decrease in spend of 0.1 per cent.