Special report: survey results - What's really on your minds? This year's IWR readers' survey reveals growing anxiety over the corrupting effect of free internet resources on user attitudes, and management's failure to buy into information services. Bobby Pickering takes a closer look at just what's going on.

Diminishing budgets and lack of senior management buy-in for prioritising information services and strategies are among the chief concerns of IWR readers, according to our 2005 Reader Survey.

Close to 60% of the survey's 765 respondents cited pressure on budgets as a major concern to them over the past year. Issues around managing emails, documents and records - particularly for compliance and information auditing - were the second most cited concern (42.1%), while the rising cost of information sources was cited by over 40%.

Well over a third of readers said they were also grappling with the development of core online infrastructure, such as intranets and content management strategies. Few had given much thought to cutting-edge activities, such as developing online archives and digital repositories, blog services and social computing facilities.

A sharp division was revealed when we filtered the survey results according to job descriptions. The issues of major concern for those respondents who identified themselves as librarians showed a marked bias towards funding and service provision: 61.7% of librarians cited pressure on budgets as a major concern, 58.8% cited the rising cost of information resources, and 38.5% said the rising cost of scientific journals was a major concern. Librarians also gave great priority to making services available online and dealing with copyright issues.

When we excluded librarians from the results, the remaining information professionals (those who identified their job titles as information manager, knowledge manager, document/records manager, information director, etc) had a different set of priorities, although they were just as concerned about budgetary constraints. For these information professionals, developing intranets and content management strategies were the top concerns, along with email, document and records management.

Top of your agendas

IWR also asked readers what concerns they had that weren't on our list. This yielded many issues, although trends could be discerned.