A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Key Findings -- Funding

Tables IVA and IVB show per project funding for library research by source. The information in Table IVA, Federally-funded projects, yields the following key finding:

• Total Federal funding for library research since 1983 has been approximately three and a quarter million dollars. (See section below on the Digital Library Initiative for a qualification of this statement.) In other words, total Federal support for library research has averaged less than $275,000 per year.

Federal funding for library research peaked in 1987. Annual Federal funding for the entire period to all library research projects has been approximately one-quarter of the typical annual funding of OERI national centers of research in other topics.

The information in Table IVB, projects funded from non-Federal sources, yields the following key finding:

• Total non-Federal funding for library research since 1983 has been under $6 million ($5,593,797), or approximately $430,000 per year.

Taking the information compiled in Tables IVA and IVB together,

• Total funding for library research, Federal and private, has averaged less than three-quarters of a million dollars per year since 1983.

A special subset of funded library research projects is made up of the Federal Digital Library Initiative (not included in the analysis above), three Mellon Foundation-funded projects in 1993-94 and one Kellogg Foundation-funded project in 1995. The Mellon Foundation projects were a baseline study (Princeton University, 1993, $210,000), an evaluation development project (Columbia University, 1994, $700,000), and an assessment of economic factors (Princeton University, 1994, $290,000), all concerning the electronic or digital library of the future. The Kellogg Foundation project was for institutional and policy issues, also in relationship to the development of a digital library, part of the Foundation's HRISM project (Harvard University, 1995, $650,000). In other words, this highly significant injection of funds for library research from two of the nation's largest foundations has all been, in effect, for the same project, or, at least, the same "priority," reinforcing the even larger investments by non-traditional Federal sources in the same area.

• As funding for library research from traditional sources, such as the U.S. Department of Education, and in traditional areas involving physical collections, their use and access, has declined, funding for library research from other Federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, and from two large private foundations, has sharply increased in the specific research area of digital or electronic library planning -- which was not included among the priorities of the 1980s studies.

Figure 2

[Key Findings -- Priorities]

[Conclusions]