Although many institutions are aware of the use that could be made of the available data, a surprising number do not use it to any great degree. A more detailed analysis of the feedback on the use of Athens will be included in the final report. 5 User support 5.1 Questions about this topic were mainly designed to assess academic or departmental involvement, present or future. It should be stressed that these responses came from LIS staff who may, as some commented, not have a complete knowledge of all use of external datasets in their institutions. Although the picture was more varied than that for dataset administration, responses indicate that most remains in central services.
Departmental involvement is most likely for specialist applications or subject specific datasets.
Two interviewees also mentioned that in the negotiation of service level definitions central services may be concerned to establish the limits of their responsibilities to individual departments and would like to exclude user support for subject-specific datasets from their role. Several interviewees thought departmental involvement unlikely in the near future, citing the library s recognition that user support is a major part of their role and patchy IT skills in academic departments as the main reasons. The responses to last year's user survey questionnaire gave a broad picture of financial arrangements in the responding institutions. However, finance is a very complex area perhaps less suited to the straitjacket of a questionnaire form. The majority of the institutions surveyed already used devolved budgeting or were moving towards devolution using a variety of models, although to varying extents.