Content provided in partnership with
Measuring outcomes: applying cost-benefit analysis to middle-sized and smaller public libraries - Public Libraries
Library Trends, Wntr, 2003 by Glen E. Holt, Donald Elliott
ABSTRACT
THE RECENT DEMAND FOR MORE ACCOUNTABILITY from public libraries has made it essential that true cost-benefit analysis be applied to their operations. With funding from the Public Library Association, the authors developed a cost-benefit analysis methodology and applied it to five large public library systems. The present article describes their ongoing research to modify their methodologies to make them viable for application to public libraries of much smaller size.
OUTCOMES MEASUREMENT IN PUBLIC LIBRARIES
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
Like it or not, American public libraries have entered the age of accountability. This shift is transforming library statistics and measurements--what statistics are gathered, how they are gathered, and how they are interpreted and applied. To put the matter simply, library assessment, like public school assessment and higher education accreditation, is shifting from measuring outputs to measuring outcomes. The shift marks a transformation in viewpoint. Input-output measurement methodology--the established system of library accounting--follows an industrial production model. The library represents a black box. On one side of the black box, boards and administrators drop in "inputs," including financial resources to purchase staff, materials, and support services. From the other side of the box emerge "outputs," which find their principal expression in raw or adjusted counts of circulation and visitation. A whole reportorial culture emerged to address library inputs and outputs. A few professors gained considerable reputation by defining appropriate inputs and outputs (Zweizig & Rodger, 1982; Van House, Lynch, McClure, Zweizig, & Rodger, 1987). State libraries hired staff whose principal tasks were (and are) to collect library input and output statistics, ensure their internal consistency, and pass them to officials at the state and federal level. The federal government set up a section in the Department of Education (DOE) to gather the state compilations and turn the forwarded statistics into an annual publication that belatedly aggregated inputs and outputs. (1)
Meanwhile, the Public Library Data Service (PLDS) collected its own sets of input and output statistics using categories and presentation tables often different from DOE (Public Library Association, 2001). Two input-output reporting families now lived side by side, and, because of their different methods for parsing the library world, the two sets of measurements intersected and supported each other only incidentally. Within the framework of input-output statistics, the libraries that circulate the most books and count the most visitors while spending the least amount of money per circulation and visitor are "the best libraries." Implicit in this measurement is the notion that all circulations and all visitations are equal, and that the largest numbers produced at the lowest costs represent hallmarks of efficiency and even quality. Intriguingly, this point of view did not have its strongest exponent until after a decade of life in the networked-computer Information Age and years after civic and political leaders were pushing public libraries to exercise many nontraditional service roles to improve the quality of life in their constituent cultures (Hennen, 2002). Hardly any of these service innovations, however, found their way into traditional counting mechanisms.
The difficulty with these statistical appliances is that they measure what libraries do, not the benefits their constituents derive from them. Politicians, taxpayers, and major donors care about how much the public benefits from the resources provided to libraries, not how many volumes circulated during the last month. When it comes to outcomes, all circulations are not equal (e.g., some represent reading; others represent browsing to find something to read). All visitations do not represent equal consumption of services or equal value to the library customer (e.g., stopping by to use the restroom or copier represents a different benefit from that derived by the prospective entrepreneur whom staff help to get the statistics needed to start a new business). In the age of public-sector accountability, these differences raise questions: What is the worth of a library in the networked-computer age? How do shifts in use patterns reflect changes in customers' valuations of library services, and how would customers prefer that library resources be added or reallocated? What benefits are conferred on different types of library customers by their variant uses of public libraries? And, how can those benefits be measured?
At least two different professional groups in the year 2000 organized meetings that mark a growing trend toward moving library measurement culture from outputs toward outcomes. The first of these was a gathering of invited participants at a February 2001 conference hosted by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). The subject was "Issues for Libraries: Measuring the Information Age (NISO, 2001)." Hampered by hideous weather and the seasonal flu bug that deterred travel by many scheduled participants, this conference addressed how networked computing was changing libraries and how library measurements had to change because of this shift. Along with standards, best practices, and electronic service measures, outcome measures played a prominent role in the conference agenda. Participants left Washington, DC, with examples of several different projects that were attempting to measure service outcomes or benefits. One of these was the St. Louis Public Library cost-benefits methodology. The second meeting was a gathering of recipients of fall-2000 grants made by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) (2000). The meeting began with the statement of the meeting's legal context: the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act (1993). This legislation required "every government agency to establish specific performance goals for each of its programs, preferably with performance indicators stated in objective, quantitative and measurable terms (Shepherd, 2000)." Following the mandate of this legislation, IMLS consultants helped grant recipients devise strategies and methodologies by which they would measure the impact and/or benefits of the federal funds they were receiving. A revision of this seminar was repeated in the fall of 2001 for that year's grant recipients. (Even the granting agencies have entered the age of accountability. Can foundations and charitable trusts be far behind?) Neither the NISO conference nor the IMLS training advocated a dismissal of library input-output measurements. Nor do the authors of this paper. Like other advocates of outcome-based measurement, however, they do believe that the library community can build a strong case for its continued economic legitimacy by measuring the benefits that libraries provide their constituents (Weil, 2000; Rudd, 2000). The social sciences provide a number of these outcome-based measurements. Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is one of these measurements. CBA has been used by economists to measure the benefits of education, pollution control, and locks and dams--to name only a few applications. The St. Louis CBA project applies the tool to measure library outcomes.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: News
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »