Lib Value: Measuring Value and Return on Investment of Academic Libraries

Library professionals are looking for new ways to measure and express the value of their libraries to their parent institutions and to measure how well they meet the rapidly changing needs and expectations of their users. They need both to find the best ways to meet patron needs and to communicate the value of their operations to administrators and funders. Developing a strategy to help libraries attain these goals is the focus of the Value, Outcomes, and Return on Investment of Academic Libraries project, “Lib-Value” for short. Funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Lib-Value is a three-year study that began in December 2009. Carol Tenopir of the University of Tennessee (UT) leads the project as Principal Investigator (PI) with Paula Kaufman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as Co-PI. In addition to the teams at UT and UIUC, Donald King of UT and Bryant University, Bruce Kingma of Syracuse University, and Martha Kyrillidou and her team at ARL round out the partnership. Lib-Value builds on and goes beyond two previous studies that looked at return-on-investment (ROI) of grants income.1 Lib-Value expands the focus of the research to consider both ROI and value more broadly, including the value of library collections and services to research, teaching and learning, and social and professional areas.