Academic and special libraries

PDA/DDA: Patron Driven Acquisition/Demand Driven Acquisition refers to non-purchased titles that the library offers, meaning titles that can potentially be activated.

Periodicals: Yearbooks, series, report series, regular conference reports and similar publications.

Manuscripts: Original documents of all kinds that are handwritten or typewritten.

Graphic materials: Documents where images constitute the main informational content, such as graphic art, reproductions, art prints, photographs, posters, technical drawings, and similar items. In this statistic, no distinction is made between graphic and cartographic documents.

Cartographic materials: Representations in a reduced scale of a concrete or abstract phenomenon located in time and space. This includes two- and three-dimensional maps, globes, plans, topographic models, relief maps/tactile models, and aerial photographic presentations, but does not include atlases and other cartographic documents in codex form or microform, as well as AV documents. In this statistics, no distinction is made between graphic and cartographic documents.

Musical score documents: Documents that mainly contain the reproduction of music in written form, usually by means of musical notation. They can appear as loose sheets or in codex form.

AV documents: Documents where the content is dominated by sound and/or images and require the use of special equipment to be viewed or heard (e.g., phonograph records, audio tapes, CDs, audiobooks, slides, etc.).

Other library materials: Remaining information-bearing materials such as patents and microforms.

Realia: Non-information-bearing materials that are made available and registered as borrowed. This can include various types of equipment such as AV equipment, devices for reading digital files, various accessories such as chargers and similar items, tools, equipment for recreational activities, etc.

Tasks: The sum of systematic searches and professional support/research.

Primary target group: Individuals and institutions within the library's defined user group as of December 31 in the statistical year.

Employees: The number of permanent employees as of December 31 who work with the library's service offerings.

Man-years: The number of agreed full-time man-years as of December 31 associated with the operation or development of the library services. Man-years in administrative positions related to the operation of library services are included.

Interlibrary lending: Loans/copies to another library under a different administrative unit (e.g., another university). For the borrowing library, this is an incoming loan. Includes the number of received requests, the number of dispatched loans, and the number of dispatched copies to other libraries.

Interlibrary borrowing: Incoming loans are loans from another library under a different administrative unit (e.g., another university). For the lending library, this is an interlibrary loan. It reports the number of dispatched requests, the number of received loans, and the number of received copies from other libraries. Loans from another library under the same administrative unit are not counted as incoming loans.

Based on international standard ISO 2789 (Information and documentation - International library statistics)

Name: Academic and special libraries
Topic: Culture and recreation

Division for Education and Culture Statistics

The figures are given on national and county level.

Annual.

None.

Collected and revised data are stored securely by Statistics Norway in compliance with applicable legislation on data processing.

Statistics Norway can grant access to the source data (de-identified or anonymised microdata) on which the statistics are based, for researchers and public authorities for the purposes of preparing statistical results and analyses. Access can be granted upon application and subject to conditions. Refer to the details about this at Access to data from Statistics Norway

The purpose is to show statistics from activities executed during the year by the special and research libraries. The statistics intend to give useful information to central and local authorities and others that in some way or other are involved in the running or financing of a library. The library statistics has been published once a year since 1980 in co-operation with the National Office for Research and Special Libraries and The Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority. From the publication year 2011 in co-operation with the National Library.

Users of the statistics are: Ministry of Culture and Equality, Ministry of Education and Research, the library sector, and individuals interested in various documents related to information, research, education and recreation.

No external users have access to statistics before they are released at 8 a.m. on ssb.no after at least three months’ advance notice in the release calendar. This is one of the most important principles in Statistics Norway for ensuring the equal treatment of users.

The statistics are developed, produced and disseminated pursuant to Act no. 32 of 21 June 2019 relating to official statistics and Statistics Norway (the Statistics Act).

The statistics cover special and research libraries in universities and state colleges, in public and private special libraries and the National Library. The National Library updates a list including all the libraries. The statistics include figures of collections, increase and decrease of books and periodicals, printed and electronic. In addition figures are given on expenditure and persons employed.

Sources are the libraries themselves. However, the statistics are prepared in order to make it available through professional library systems.

The survey intends to cover the whole library field. The National Library is the owner of the data and compiles statistics of their own.

Questionnaires are dispatched and collected by the National Library. They are also responsible for reminding and for updating of the population. A great part of the libraries deliver their data electronically, by filling in the questionnaires which they can find on an Internet website. Statistics Norway receives a prepared data file from the National Library based on collected data. This file forms the basis of the official statistics.

Editing is defined here as checking, examining and amending data. Logical addition and coherence is checked. Besides, a comparison with the questionnaires from previous year is made in order to uncover great deviations.

None

Loans excludes renewals from 2012 and onwards.

Some libraries do not answer all questions. The reason might be that they do not have data to report, wrong interpretation of some questions, or respondents might also unconsciously have given erroneous data, influencing the statistics.

Although the response rate is nearly 100 per cent, dropouts would cause small errors comparing with years before.

A revision is a planned change to figures that have already been published, for example when releasing final figures as a follow-up to published preliminary figures. See also Statistics Norway’s principles for revisions.