But I'm not talking Elvis here. Le Roi.
That is, ROI.
Return on Investment.
George and Alane have been sending me lots of great links to materials.
Anyone read much on this topic? Fascinating research and methodology on how to calculate a public library's economic return on money spent. (The latest I read was that for every $1 spent on the library, the community/cardholders received $4 in return. Those are pretty good statistics! Even better results ($10 to $1 for some areas) on the results page.
They sent me studies from St. Louis (Glen Holt), Florida and Kansas City.
And I'm sure there are plenty more studies out there.
Anyone? ROI demonstrations you've done/would like to see done for your library?
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Jose Marie Griffiths is about to release a report detailing the ROI of Florida's libraries. From what I hear, it builds on the earlier work of McClure, et al. and basically does what they proposed in Chapter 7 "Chapter 7: Proposed Study to Measure Public Library Economic Impacts" of the "Economic Benefits and Impacts" report. It is funded by IMLS and should be out this month.
A little different tack is the one taken by a different study in Kansas through the University of Kansas Policy Research Institute - their report entitled "Role of Public Libraries in Local Economic Development" looks at how libraries can participate in such activities. That report can be found here - http://www.ku.edu/pri/resrep/pdf/m260.pdf
A similar report was prepared by the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs and can be found here - "Enhancing Economic Development Through Libraries" http://www.iira.org/pubsnew/publications/IIRA_Reports_18.pdf
While these services would be only one portion of the total ROI picture, it seems to me that the idea of economic development and the library's role in it is the one that seems to resonate with funders / decision-makers more so than the other "traditional" services that libraries provide to their communities. I think they see this as easier to measure or more concrete as opposed to the "softer" measures such as literacy - even though I would argue that there are "hard" measures of the impact in this area.
Stop by sometime - cj - http://www.technobiblio.com
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