ACRL Report Offers Guidance for Measuring Value of Academic Libraries
Library service measurement can be linked to the outcomes that university administrators notice By Josh HadroSep 14, 2010
When library budgets are under siege, sometimes the best defense is a good offense: the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) has released a comprehensive report collecting research on the value of academic libraries.
While not exactly a manual for immediate application, the study, titled Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report, gives library administrators pointers for further research and direction for conducting local assessement.
The report is also designed to serve as a primer for academic officers seeking to understand the contribution of the library in the context of a multi-faceted higher education institution. The report was authored by Megan Oakleaf of the iSchool at Syracuse University.
"[T]he demonstration of value not about looking valuable; it's about being valuable," the report concludes. To that end, the report "lays out multiple assessment perspectives and invites librarians to adapt them to their local circumstances."
Value and ROI
Oakleaf surveyed a broad range of literature concerning the assessment of library value, which often makes a distinction between internal and external value measures.
The report aims to directly influence university-wide decision makers—the executive summary was explicitly written for a non-library administrator audience—and focuses primarily on financial value considerations along with measures of the library's impact on campus.
In several places, the report indicates how better statistics tracking and correlation to library use could be used to bolster a library's position.
More data needed
Specifically, the included Research Agenda cites ten areas for suggested focus: "student enrollment, student retention and graduation, student success, student achievement, student learning, student experience, faculty research productivity, faculty grants, faculty teaching, and institutional reputation."
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Efforts to measure ROI regarding faculty research and grants have recently gotten much attention. The ACRL report comes on the heels of a study led by Carol Tenopir, who is engaged in a multi-part effort to track the return on dollars invested in and by academic libraries called "Value, Outcome, and Return on Investment of Academic Libraries."
Her recent findings (included in Oakleaf's survey) track grant awards returned per dollar spent by universities on libraries, while future research will focus on creating models for calculating ROI along with "web-based tools for determining ROI that can be used to demonstrate value at specific libraries and to help them set priorities."
Tool kit coming
Similarly, ACRL has plans to release a toolkit to aid in the measurement of value:
We look forward to the upcoming release of the toolkit, developed by the ACRL Assessment Committee, to provide academic librarians with tools and examples they can emulate. We will begin creating more professional development opportunities so that academic librarians can develop the assessment and research skills needed. We will look at securing funds to help further the research agenda within this report and will seek out partners as appropriate.
The report also draws on a wide range on library literature beyond the domain of academic libraries, devoting sections to lessons from school, public, and special libraries.
Next steps
"The most important step is to start," begins the section describing potential ways forward.
Recommendations include small-scale local studies that focus on particular outcomes as suggested by the Research Agenda, as well as an embrace of assessment management systems and other programmatic methods to collect quantitative data.
Essential questions based on the Research Agenda items—such as "how does the library contribute to student enrollment?" and "how does the library contribute to faculty grant proposals and funding?"—cap the report, along with descriptions of surrogate measurements, data sources, and possible areas of correlations to standard areas of library data collection.
