Open Content Activities in Libraries: Same Direction, Different Trajectories — Findings from the 2018 OCLC Global Council Survey

This report synthesizes findings from the 2018-19 Global Council survey on current and future planned open content activities for a global cohort of research and university libraries.

Summary Report

This report is the culmination of efforts from across the OCLC membership to answer the question raised at a Global Council (GC) meeting: “What is the status of open access and open content in libraries across the globe?” The underlying open content survey was conducted in 2018-2019 by the OCLC Global Council in partnership with staff from OCLC Research. The survey’s broad definition of library open content activities and global scope offers a new perspective on open content activities within the library community as it uncovers and highlights the maturity and versatility of these activities.

Open Content Activities in Libraries: Same Direction, Different Trajectories—Findings from the 2018 OCLC Global Council Survey synthesizes survey findings on current and future planned open content activities and areas of investment for a large cohort of research and university libraries. This subgroup of 511 respondents from 69 countries is highly involved in open content activities (97%), and the overwhelming majority are stepping up their activities and planning new ones. Overall, the figures suggest a future increase in involvement of 10-18% across all open content activities. Future growth areas that indicate likely new emerging services are the management of open research data and interactions with (digitized) open collections through statistical and machine learning techniques.

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Errata

Page 12, figure 1

The divided portions of the EMEA and APAC sections of the pie chart in figure 1 inaccurately represented the numeric values shown in the legends. This error has been corrected and the pie chart now accurately represents the data. This change has been corrected in the report and in the graphics gallery PowerPoint of figures on the supplemental web page.The author thanks Sylvia Moes for spotting the error.

Page 21, table 7* 

  • The data in column AU (%) was in error. The data has been replaced with AU (%): 94%, 91%, 77%, 64% 91%, 64%.
  • The columns containing the data for the UK (#, %) and CA (#, %) were missing. The following data has been inserted into the table:

UK (#, %): 30, 90%; 14, 93%; 16, 63%; 27, 81%, 14, 57%; 29, 83%
CA (#, %): 17, 71%; 8, 88%; 13, 77%; 15, 80%, 10, 70%; 15 73%

Page 24, figure 6* 

  • Subheading UK: The fourth label, “Institutional repository (n=14; 85%)” was in error. It has been replaced with “Digital collections library (n=14; 85%).”
  • Subheading NL: The first label, “Digital collections library (n=14; 85%)” was in error. It has been replaced with “Institutional repository (n=14; 86%).”

* These changes have been corrected in the report and in the graphics gallery PowerPoints on the supplementals web page. 

Suggested citation:

van der Werf, Titia. 2020. Open Content Activities in Libraries: Same Direction, Different Trajectories—Findings from the 2018 OCLC Global Council Survey. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research. https://doi.org/10.25333/vgmw-ba86.