Valuing Your Library

How do you begin to put a price tag on a library and its services? While many of us may agree that access to a library’s community space, and the stories, information, and resources within is invaluable, it is also powerful to specify just how much worth libraries bring to their communities. 

Whenever a patron borrows materials, uses a resource at the library, or attends programming, they are gaining value from their library. We may think of these as “free” services, but people who live in a library system’s service area invest in their library by paying the local taxes that help keep their library running. You can check out the blog post, A Search Through Local Revenue Sources, for a recap of the many different ways libraries are funded or check out this dashboard to find the latest data on each Colorado library system’s revenue. Selecting the radio button “Revenue Sources” in this dashboard will show the breakdown of local, state, federal, and other funding sources.

To show stakeholders and community members just how much value, in monetary terms, they receive in exchange for their contributions to their local library, Library Research Service (LRS) provides a return on investment (ROI) calculator, which makes its calculations based on an individual’s usage of the library. Recently, LRS completed a thorough reboot of the calculator to include updated approximations based on recent research, so anyone can find out approximately just how much value they get for every $1 dollar they invest into their library. Below you’ll find some advice for using this calculator, and we strongly encourage everyone to check out this new and improved Library Value Calculator on lrs.org for themselves…

Continue reading this post on LRS.org and check out more posts on research in a library context from Library Research Service.

LRS’s Colorado Public Library Data Users Group (DUG) mailing list provides instructions on data analysis and visualization, LRS news, and PLAR updates. To receive posts via email, please complete this form.