Bridging the Gap: Using Dollar Values to Demonstrate the Value of Library Services.

Full abstract: http://tinyurl.com/59x6u6

*Please note I scribbling madly during this session and may have missed some details. I apologize, if you have questions about the presented paper please contact the author. If you find out I got something wrong, please let me know so I can correct it on my post.

The librarian assigned dollar amounts to services and resources to demonstrate the value of the things the library provides to the patron. She determined the value of reference services, copy services, table of content services, and ILL.


She determined reference costs to be $25/15 minutes of search time. She decided upon this figure based off an article in the Wall Street Journal which looked at how much it would cost for the hospital to out source it and go with an outsourced information professional.


In house copies were valued at $5/article. She arrived at this amount after she established a two week audit looking at and tracking photocopying, faxing, and printing which allowed her to establish that the average length of an article was 16 pages. It cost 10 cents per page to actually copy the article. Then she analyzed the value of the collection. She determined the total value of articles within the journal subscription by taking the total cost of the journal subscription divided by number of articles within each issue to find out the cost per article for that title. She determined that the total cost of the library's collection at $3.23. Therefore the cost of copying an average article plus the cost of the library collection ($1.60+3.20=$4.80 rounded to $5) was $5.

To determine the cost of an ILL article she used the NLM figures for average ILL fees. It was suggested that she instead use the cost of getting the paper directly from the publisher as if she wasn't a library using Docline and ILL to get articles. However, to completely accurate she was told that she would have to find out the exact cost of each article she requested from each of the publisher's websites. She decided this would be too time consuming and that is why she decided to use NLM's ILL average costs. Personally I don't understand why she couldn't do a two week audit of costs (similar to what she did to determine the average number of pages within the article). For two weeks she could find out how much each ordered article would have cost had she gone straight to the publisher. She could then take those numbers and determine an average cost.

She treated in house table of content services to be the same cost as inhouse copying costs.

Finally she took all of this information, started tallying it up and attaching a sheet to every one of her searches or article requests. It said something similar to, "Without the library services this information would have cost you X to obtain."

By attaching dollar amounts to her services she not only was able to better inform her patrons and her administration of her true value but she was also able to better track her library's growth on a monthly basis. She showed growth each year, an average of 85% each year
The average increase in what they produced was 85%. Provided a quick picture to admin.

Her budget went up 120% and her productivity cost only went up by .01 cent. Unfortunately the hospital was having difficult financial times in which departments had to cut staff and she was forced to cut her staffing costs. So her resource budget increased but her staffing budget decreased due to what she felt was the hospital's difficult financial situation. Despite library cut backs to staff she felt that her efforts at least saved her job and allowed for her position to be kept and filled when she left the hospital.