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The global cooperative in the Asia Pacific region Rethinking the boundaries of the academic library Improving access to library materials Web-scale Management Services ... in their words Download this issue (7.0 MB pdf)
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How valuable can libraries become?By Andy Havens and Tom Storey In the current economic climate, every dollar spent in support of libraries—whether public, academic, school or special libraries—is being more closely scrutinized than ever. In these circumstances, value calculations and Return on Investment (ROI) tools can provide powerful arguments for continued funding. In most cases, a snapshot of the value that your library provides will necessarily look backward, taking into account current services and resources. But are there ways to calculate value going forward? In an information landscape that seemingly changes from day to day, a view of your library’s future value may be an important consideration for budgetary analysis and planning.
In 2006 at a conference in Charlottesville, Virginia, John Lombardi, then Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, challenged librarians to come up with a bold and exciting plan for the digital age—a plan with clear goals and objectives, one that would meet the university’s future needs in a purposeful way. Otherwise, he said, they would face continuing questions regarding their relevance and a declining share of the university budget. As we reach 2011, John’s call to action is even more relevant. Libraries are under mounting pressure to show their effectiveness and quantify their value—particularly in today’s tough economic environment. Up against popular search engines and Internet research services, as well as competing departments and organizations, libraries need hard evidence that demonstrates their impact. We in the library community know that libraries play an important role in our schools, universities and communities. We see it almost every day. And most of us would agree that libraries are not failing to produce value. But in today’s economic malaise, what we know may not be as important as what we can show.
A brief history of library ROIROI and value calculations have been used for decades to provide a solid, logical rationale for library funding and support. Special libraries and public libraries have been doing research and studies in this area for nearly 20 years. Academic libraries began studying value measurement in the 1970s with a sharp focus on ROI beginning in 2000. In the public library community, the Massachusetts Library Association, the Chelmsford Public Library in Massachusetts and Maine State Library first devised a library use calculator that many public libraries have adopted to promote their value. The calculator uses estimated retail costs for 15 library services, such as items borrowed and computer use, to determine the value of individual library use and to calculate return on investment of local dollars. Also, studies in Florida, Pennsylvania and South Carolina determined that for every tax dollar received, public libraries returned between $4.48 to $8.32 in value to the state’s economy.
Donald W. King, Honorary University Professor, Bryant University, who was involved with two of the three studies, has been a part of more than 70 library-related ROI studies, as well as research projects determining the value of information provided by the Census Bureau, the IRS, the Defense Document Center and NTIS. An award-winning statistician, Don says that one of the tools he uses to determine return on investment in public and special libraries is contingent valuation, a common tool used to evaluate nonpriced goods and services by examining the economic implications of not having them. “We asked the question, if you didn’t have a library, how much would it cost users to get the information they need?” Don says. “This is just an economic indicator; it’s not absolute, but it’s a very good indicator. We asked people if they didn’t have the library, what would they do? There is always about 20 percent who wouldn’t do anything, but most would find an alternate information source, which involves time and money.” Studies in Florida and Pennsylvania also used an economic input-output model called REMI (Regional Economic Models, Inc.) that provides a means of estimating the impact of libraries on other economic sectors. This model extends economic analysis beyond actual users of the library to a set of direct and indirect effects that libraries cause. For example, in Florida in 2010, it was estimated that for every dollar invested:
In addition, for every $3,491 invested in libraries, one job is created, demonstrating the increased importance of public libraries during the current recession. “Libraries make an economic contribution by just being there,” Don says. “Salaries and wages of staff and purchases they make increase economic activities. After visiting the library, patrons use other services in coffee shops, restaurants, banks—all of these retail activities go up. There was a study done in the U.K. that looked at the economic effect on businesses when a U.K. library shut down on strike. Revenues at retail establishments nearby went down 23 percent. We call that the halo effect.”
Libraries make an economic contribution by just being there. Salaries and wages of staff and purchases they make increase economic activities.”
—Donald W. King, Honoray University Professor, Bryant University The potential impact a public library can have on economic development cannot be overstated. Alex Fisher, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Columbus Partnership, says his experience as Deputy Governor of Tennessee, where he led Tennessee’s economic development efforts, taught him that good public libraries can attract businesses to a city. Case in point. He was competing with two other states for a company expansion, which Tennessee eventually won.The reason? A fabulous, new downtown library. A consultant on the company’s real estate site selection team told him that, “Any time our firm has a close competition, we do a ‘secret shopping’ experience at the local library. We hang out at the library in each community to get a true sense of the values of that community.” Academic libraries can trace the beginnings of a culture of value measurement to 1970, when the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) published the Management Review and Analysis Program and the Collection Analysis Program. Both in part were about measuring the return on investment that universities make in their research libraries based upon carefully assembled statistics and information.
ROI measurement reached a turning point in 1999 when ARL launched its New Measures Initiatives, which included LibQUAL+, an assessment tool that has now been used by more than 1,000 libraries. These programs made substantial progress in creating new tools and raising the visibility and importance of library assessment.
The most recent effort, which builds upon ARL’s and ACRL’s programs, is The Lib-Value Project. Carol Tenopir, Professor in the School of Information Sciences, and Director of the Center for Information and Communication Studies, University of Tennessee, and Paula Kaufman, Dean of Libraries, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, are the Lead Investigators of The Lib-Value Project, an IMLS-funded, three-year research study focusing on value and ROI in academic libraries. Many libraries are participating in the value measurements, including Syracuse University, other New York universities, University of Pittsburgh, Bryant University, University of Tennessee and University of Illinois. Lib-Value builds on two earlier projects that looked at the library’s role in helping a university obtain research grants. Phase One, conducted by the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in partnership with Elsevier, found that $4.38 in grant income was earned for every dollar invested in the library. Phase Two expanded the study to eight libraries in eight countries and found that for every monetary unit invested in the library, the respective institutions receive an ROI of between 15.54:1 and 0.64:1 in research grant income alone. Lib-Value seeks to define and measure some of the other ways in which the library creates value and is different from previous studies, Carol says, because it is taking a comprehensive look across the library and breaking down value into pieces by functional areas: special collections, teaching and learning, e-journals, e-books, space, information commons. It is looking at the value of these functions to all library stakeholders. The goal is to have a vault of tested methods ready for libraries to use to determine the value of each activity. Lib-Value also goes beyond ROI to look at multiple methods and measures of value that academic libraries bring to the entire academic community. “With the help of ARL, our team is creating a resource where libraries can select the elements they want. Libraries are measuring some things, but they need a comprehensive approach and resources that will help. They have multiple measures for multiple functions; they have pieces of the value measurement irregularly measured.” One of the major reasons for undertaking this research is to determine what investments make sense, Carol says. “We’re not just trying to prove that what libraries do now and have always done is great. Libraries have new opportunities brought about by changes in technology and scholarship. There are so many new things libraries can do—services built around collaborative science, publishing, institutional repositories, to name a few. Library roles are changing and we want positive change. This study will help academic libraries make tough choices to stay relevant. Which one of these new opportunities has the most value to our constituents?”
The term ‘return on investment’ has two different meanings. It’s an umbrella word for value in a general sense; it’s also a financial term in a narrow sense—dollars in and dollars out.”
—Carol Tenopir, Professor in the School of Information Sciences, and Director of the Center for Information and Communication Studies, University of Tennessee The term ‘return on investment’ has two different meanings, Carol says. It’s an umbrella word for value in a general sense; it’s also a financial term in a narrow sense—dollars in and dollars out. The financial term does not illustrate the intrinsic value of the library—increased donations, increased prestige, recruiting of students and faculty, student prestige. “ROI in a financial sense is appropriate in certain services, that’s why we started with the grants process. But a solely financial outlook is not enough to measure the entire library. Lib-Value looks at ways to measure ROI and also other quantitative and qualitative measures of value.” The soft side and the hard side to demonstrating value
Phil Sykes, University Librarian at Liverpool University and Chair of Research Libraries U.K. (RLUK), a consortium of 29 research organizations in the U.K. and Ireland, including the three U.K. national libraries, says that there’s a soft and hard side to demonstrating value. The soft side is about refuting a growing narrative of library decline that has taken hold in the minds of newspaper editors and some university senior managers. “The basis of that negative narrative is that, with the widespread availability of information on the Internet, libraries have begun to shrink in importance and use,” Phil says. “Actually, we already have bags of evidence that paints a much healthier, thriving and positive picture of university libraries.” For example, U.K. libraries can point to SCONUL annual statistics that show a 130 percent increase in access to documents over the last few years, including a 17 percent rise in book issue. In addition, RLUK members can document an 8 percent increase in number of students using their libraries this year as compared to last. “Students are very satisfied with U.K. libraries, and the only elements of university provision they think more important than libraries are teaching quality and course content,” Phil says.“We need to assemble what evidence we have and deploy it effectively, and in the right form, to the right audience to shift the narrative about libraries from negative to positive.” The harder and more rigorous side of demonstrating value is about coming up with analytical and statistical techniques that link what libraries do with the desired outcomes for a university—successful students for example, or high-quality research.
“The Research Information Network has given us convincing evidence that levels of journal provision correlate with research success; CIBER at UCL has unearthed evidence that journal usage levels probably drive research success to a strong degree; and Huddersfield University has shown that there is a strong correlation between the level of use of library materials and degree classification. “A current project at RLUK is also yielding some interesting conclusions: that student satisfaction correlates strongly with library size and the amount of information skills received for example. But with all these things, it’s difficult to prove definitively that the library ‘input’ causes the institutional output.”
We must recast our image of libraries. They have always been at their best when they have not merely been dead-tree collection sites, but instead have been collective intelligence centers.”
—Janna Anderson, Associate Professor and Director of the Imagining the Internet Center, Elon University Libraries as collective intelligence centersTrying to come up with ROI and value measurements for 2020 takes a certain amount of forecasting and future gazing. What will libraries look like in 2020? What should they look like?
Remove the shelves and take away the books says futurist Janna Anderson, Associate Professor and Director of the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University’s School of Communications. “Today and in the future, we must recast our image of libraries. They have always been at their best when they have not merely been dead-tree collection sites, but instead have been collective intelligence centers.” Human knowledge has always been the value sought, says Janna. Books on paper are generally no longer the ideal way to find that knowledge; the world is moving too quickly. Accelerating change requires a paradigm change, she says. “We need smart people to facilitate, orchestrate and leverage our advanced abilities to acquire and share knowledge in the future. Be future-focused.” Janna says that libraries today should strive to create a space that fosters intellectual expansion, where learners can consult specialists with the ability to quickly access specific deep-knowledge resources. And all the while, live locally but think globally. “Librarians should be leaders in crowd-sourcing for problemsolving. They can be conductors who bring individual people and ideas together to create intellectual symphonies. What if every library was also a ‘home’ base for human resources in that community, for the knowledge leaders who could do livestreaming, online presentations that are also recorded for future use and stored on video/wikis that extend that conversation? We can do this today—see the TEDTalks and other resources now emerging.” Janna says that libraries that are reimagined as collective intelligence centers can also build upon a particular specialty, becoming global institutes or think tanks focusing on documenting and expanding upon knowledge of one particular type—keeping in mind that human sources and accurate, timely information is the key. Expert people from all over the globe could work together through a particular library to produce well-edited and constantly updated collective-intelligence works. “Yes, Wikipedia comes to mind as an example—what if every library in the world had staff assigned to take on the responsibility of curating several particular Wikipedia entries?” According to Janna, the first steps to imagining the ROI for your library in 2020 are:
Are we “between two missions?”Four years after his talk at the library assessment conference in 2006, John Lombardi, now President of the Louisiana State University System, sees the research library as a critical element in the future of universities in the digital age, though he’s not sure how the library will be precisely defined or what the evaluation parameters will be. “Libraries have always referenced their functions to the critical missions of the university, and as those critical missions change or the methods for achieving them change, libraries will need to demonstrate that their skills and services are essential,” he says. “If you want a model, look at the Library of Congress. They do digital stuff exceedingly well, but it isn’t cheap. You need a lot of specialized talent that libraries are not used to.” John sees librarians becoming providers and enablers, less expert-oriented and more service-oriented. “Their significance will have a service orientation. Kids, of course, are totally digital and computer-savvy. There is no intimidating factor at all. But they need skills at sorting what they get. Librarians can teach students and scholars to navigate what is important in this unruly and unmediated digital world.”
We don’t know where it’s going, or how it will end up. Anyone who thinks they do is just fooling themselves. There is instability in the environment. Everyone used to know what a library was. But there are no agreed upon parameters for this digital onslaught.”
—John Lombardi, President, Louisiana State University System University libraries are struggling to respond to the rapid pace of technology and are trying to do multiple missions at the same time, John says. “They’ve got their traditional mission and the new digital mission and the new mission hasn’t settled down yet—it’s not entirely clear what capabilities they’ll need. The digital landscape belongs to no one and to everyone. Since digital real estate is close to being a free good, it complicates the relationships of power and authority, all of which traditionally depended on the management of scarcity.” Calculating ROI for the traditional mission of libraries involves measurements of cataloging, collection development and check-outs. Much of that, now, is being done by someone else, John says. In a new world, where libraries don’t have as much control over those functions, how do you determine value? “We don’t know where it’s going,” he says, “or how it will end up. Anyone who thinks they do is just fooling themselves. There is instability in the environment. Everyone used to know what a library was. But there are no agreed upon parameters for this digital onslaught.” To help everyone understand the underlying drivers in their jobs, John uses the mantra: money matters, performance counts, time is the enemy. Resources provide the opportunity to perform, but whatever resources you have, you must perform at a high level. People forget how competitive universities have to be. What would an administrator need from libraries in the future to move them higher in the funding stack? John offers these suggestions:
“If researchers and teachers and students tell us that libraries are essential to their success, that is persuasive evidence of their relative importance within the university,” John says. “As libraries succeed in demonstrating their centrality to the expansion of student and faculty online activities, universities will have to make the critical investments needed to support a large-scale, library-based online enterprise.” Future value: moving from library use to library impact
A recent report from ACRL outlines a new direction for library value measurement. The Value of Academic Libraries, prepared by Megan Oakleaf, Assistant Professor, Syracuse University, lists ten areas where research needs to be done to show the library’s distinct impact on users. It is a subtle but key shift moving from measuring library use to showing how libraries play a vital role in fundraising and student and faculty recruitment, retention and success—be it graduation, tenure, GPA, job placement or publication. The information landscape today is a crowded space. The library is competing—for money and mindshare—against other departments, other public entities and commercial information services. The competition happens in the open marketplace, not in some protected, rarified sphere. The library needs to produce value that commands funding, to show it is about more than information—it is a source of impact and support and transformation for its users and communities. Since issuing the report, ACRL has turned its attention to strategies for pursuing the research agenda Megan recommended, identifying funding sources for projects, and developing training and support materials for its members. The ACRL report lays out ten specific areas that need further research to show the library’s impact on the mission of the university. The areas are:
“The exciting part of demonstrating academic library value is the chance it gives the profession to not only examine the value we’ve already created for our institutions, but also to expand that value through developing new services and improving established ones,” says Megan.“The exploration of library value is only partially about our past; it’s primarily about our future.” Picture what your success in 2020 looks likeWhile, as John Lombardi says, no one can predict with certainty the library environment in 2020, we can be assured of one thing: it will be different than today. Probably radically different. Whatever measurements your value or ROI calculations are based on today, they are almost guaranteed to shift and transform. Picking any one element of change in the information landscape—the growing popularity of e-books, the rise of social search, the increased use of smartphones—isn’t the point. What matters is that there be a way to demonstrate your library’s value no matter what technology, services and cultural issues are in play. If, in 2020, you can look back and say, “These are the ways we have helped our constituents and our community thrive,” you’ve got a better chance of maintaining—and improving—your funding sources. Make the ROI calculation part of the process by which you roll out new programs and services. That way, in ten years, you’ll be able to quantify all the great, new things your library has been doing.
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More and more frequently, stakeholders and funding bodies are demanding metrics in order to evaluate performance and determine value. A new culture of value measurement is emerging to meet this challenge both now and in the future to position libraries as a vital element in community greatness.
In the early 1980s, the Association of College and Research Libraries (
“Although work of this kind has been going on for at least two decades, we haven’t found the philosopher’s stone yet,” Phil says. “We have unearthed useful correlations, but it’s difficult to prove the direction of causation.
