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Professors may recall that, in March and April this year, they were invited to join a survey on library research support services. With assistance from the four Dean's Offices, which distributed the survey email to faculty, we received a total of 78 completed responses.
The survey followed the standard format of Ithaka Faculty Survey, which has been applied widely in research institutions in North America and the UK. The HKUST version consisted of 5 areas:
- Discovery of research and teaching material
- Access to scholarly material
- Data preservation and management
- Scholarly communication practices
- The role of library
Being a diverse research community, it is no surprise that our respondents show very different choices in many questions, from where to find research information, their preferred information sources and formats, to their attitudes on research data management and open access of research output. However, there seems to be one aspect that most respondents agree upon: they depend on the Library for their research.
A good majority of the survey respondents indicated that the Library's collection is the most important information source.
This effort is only part of the beginning of the Library's effort to plan future research support services. We will use the result as a basis to initiate more conversation with our research community. You can find a summary of the survey at http://library.ust.hk/ithaka/results-summary.html. | 
