The Measure of Outsourcing

Staff -- Library Journal, 2/1/1998

So far, no vendor serves people better than the librarians who work there already

The Outsourcing Task Force of the American Library Association (ALA) has worked through its first meetings and an open hearing. American librarians watch and wait for its report. Many library directors don't understand why ALA must issue some dictum about the good or evil of a stratagem as common as outsourcing. "Haven't we been outsourcing cataloging for decades?" they ask. Some protest that they outsource even some management when they hire search firms, consultants, and fundraisers. They tell us that "outsourcing" is an old and useful practice.

Today, however, a handful of vendors trying to increase their share of the library market have taken oursourcing to extremes. Many people believe they are dangerous extremes that undermine fundamental principles of library service. One executive of an old-line library supplier put it to me this way: "We think it is only a short time until a community hands us the keys to their libraries and tells us to go and operate them." That time has already come to Riverside County, California. County officials, unwilling to pay the price asked by the city public library that had provided the service, contracted with a private vendor to operate their public library. In Hawaii, librarians and the public forced the state library to tear up an outsourcing contract for the selection and acquisition of books for the state's public libraries. All that remains of that ill-fated experiment is litigation and the unfulfilled expectations of all involved.

The impossible question in all of this is how to evaluate an outsourcing effort. What is the proper measure of whether outsourcing is the best way to provide library service or any portion of it?

That it is less expensive is simply not good enough. The history of libraries, indeed of all public agencies, is rife with disasters caused by the requirement to do business with the lowest bidder, whatever that vendor's reputation or fiscal health.

Then comes the claim that outsourcing is more efficient. Unfortunately, efficiency is nearly always measured in dollars, and that is not an adequate measure of a public service. It usually translates into cutting staff, costs, and hours and frequently does not take into account the resulting erosion of service.

Circulation, a standard measure in public libraries, won't work here, because it is too easy to skew a book collection to appeal to market-driven popular tastes. That will not serve more fundamental needs for better-informed citizens, or better-educated children. Indeed, none of the easy, bottom-line measures that a commercial vendor uses to index success work for a public library. Few truly measure the impact of an outsourcing deal on library service to all the citizens.

The most important measure of any change in the operation of a library is the result in the quality of library service to all the potential users in the jurisdiction. We must ask if the change meets the library's obligation to reach out to nontraditional users. We must be sure it finds ways to attract those who don't currently use the library. We must be sure it doesn't simply improve the pickings for the library's current regulars. We must ascertain that after the change, the whole community is better off, not in terms of lower costs but in terms of better library service. The hours of service ought to be the same or greater. Support for the library should be increasing. The citizens should not have to go to other libraries to meet their normal library and information needs. The children should be reading more, doing better homework, getting better grades. The library should be spending more for materials. Librarians should be on hand to help all comers when that help is needed. The newest technologies should be used to support the service.

If we allow private companies to make a buck doing what good government has done so well for so long, we have to set the same rigorous measures and standards for the service they provide. We can't allow vendors simply to come in and lower costs and claim success. We can't let higher profits be the measure of effective library service. The only valid measure is how well and how fully the library serves all the people, and, so far, no outsourcing firm can prove it does that better than the librarians who work there already.