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----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dawn Vogler Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 1:33 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [slm] Return on Investment Recently, I received a troubling email from a librarian regarding a governing board member who saw no use for the library. He considered it the lowest priority for the community. She feared he would sway the other board members and really alter the course of her library. She asked for some ways to justify the library to him and I really liked this example from WebJunction and I'm Curious George: http://www.webjunction.org/do/Navigation?category=498 Return on Investment. Do a little creative exercise to help demonstrate what your library means to the community. Let's take a public library serving 7,500 people. Using statistics from the PLA Statistical Report: Public Library Data Service, 2000, that library would have roughly 40,000 adult circulations and 30,000 children's circulations per year, and a $353,000 budget. (I used the 2000 report because it breaks out children's circulations.) Next, let's consider book prices, as reported in The Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2003, 48th Edition. If an average novel costs $28 in hardcover and $6.80 in paperback, and the average juvenile book costs $21, and our hypothetical library circulated 40,000 adult books (half hardcover, half paperback) and 30,000 children's books, you have saved the people of your service area $1,326,000 in book sales. All of a sudden, you have a return on investment, just in book circulation, of 375%! If you come up with valuations on reference transactions (try comparing them to the lowest price research in "Google Answers") and story hour attendance (compare to the child's price at a movie theater, or the price of enough Chuck E. Cheese tokens to keep a four year old busy for the equivalent length of time as your story hour), you will see that the return is even higher. These are numbers that can convince even the flintiest elected official or grantor. Libraries are different from the private sector, to be sure. But some of their principles can go to work for our libraries. And applying these principles to our libraries is a way of proving to business people and government officials that we are at least as serious about what we do as they are! Try it - you may be surprised! Dawn Dawn Vogler Library Management Consultant Texas State Library & Archives Commission PO Box 12927 Austin, TX 78711-2927 (512) 936-4449 phone (512) 463-8800 fax _______________________________________________ slm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.tsl.state.tx.us/mailman/listinfo/slm
