Alisha Azevedo: “Spending by research libraries appears to be rising, especially for digital materials, according to new data from the Association of Research Libraries. The data are part of the association’s Library Investment Index, which ranks the association’s member libraries each year based on total library expenditures, salaries and wages of professional staff, spending on library materials, and the number of professional and support staff. The upward trend for the 2011 fiscal year was the first in several years. The economic downturn in 2008 and the tight budgets that followed caused a drop in spending on all of the index’s categories, said Martha Kyrillidou, senior director of the association’s statistics and service-quality programs, in an e-mail interview. She added that it “remains to be seen if this is a temporary reversal or a true shift to sustain itself more than a year.”