What’s the Return on ROI? The Benefits and Challenges of Calculating Your Library’s Return on Investment

In good economic times and bad, Americans have been making significant investments in their public libraries for more than a century. Library buildings have been designed and built, collections have been created and maintained, staff hired to provide a broad array of services, and more recently libraries have provided access to information technology. These investments have resulted in improvements to library collections, both print and electronic, services and facilities. Yet, for a great many public libraries the reality must be acknowledged that they are faced with strong competitive pressure resulting in a tug-of-war for funding with other municipal agencies and the continual need to justify their funding and even their existence. For many decades, public libraries enjoyed the support of their communities and funding decision makers as they were viewed as a public good with obvious positive social impacts. A public good is a service that is difficult to exclude someone from using and that one person’s use does not deny someone else the use of that good or service. Yet, there is increasing pressure for a library to be able to articulate the tangible and intangible value of the library to interested stakeholders such as funding decision makers, library board members, and the community at-large.