Study looking at academic library ROI is underway
By Judy Luther, Informed Strategies, Ardmore, PA, USA
Value, or return on investment (ROI), in many forms has long been a topic of interest among the library community. While value has been a recurring theme in recent trade literature and on conference agendas, much of what has been written and discussed has centered on the cost-justifications of collections or the relative time-savings of electronic literature in research processes.
The demand for academic libraries to justify their expenditures continues to grow. As University of Alabama at Birmingham Librarian T. Scott Plutchak has commented, “It used to be that the way you put together a library budget was to look at like institutions and then argue for a little more. Now my provost is saying to me, ‘If I give you X dollars, what is the return on investment to the University?’”
Given the increasing interest in the ROI for academic libraries, in early 2007, Elsevier’s Global Customer Marketing team partnered with the library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, information sciences researcher Dr. Carol Tenopir and me to develop a new model for quantifying the return on an academic institution’s investment in its library. The goal for this study, now underway, is to determine an ROI that extends beyond the usual assessment of the value of academic library resources and encompasses the contributions a library makes in the revenue-generating activities within its university.
“If I give you X dollars, what is the return on investment to the University?”
As a single-institution case study, what differentiates this ROI project from others done in the public and corporate library sectors is its focus on how an academic institution benefits from library investments that are, in turn, used in revenue-generating activities. In particular, the study delves into the role that library collections play in the generation of grant funding. The study’s results may help academic library directors calculate their libraries’ ROI to their institutions. Doing so may, in turn, open discussions with university administrators interested in how libraries support their institutions’ priorities in the areas of research and grant funding.
UIUC Library Director Paula Kaufman is presenting the findings of this study, including its ROI model, at Elsevier’s Digital Libraries Symposium during the American Library Association’s Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia. A white paper detailing the study results is being published soon in print and in PDF at www.elsevier.com/libraryconnect. (bbj)
