Speakers: Neal K. Kaske, Mary Lou Cumberpatch, Guy Dobson
Key questions:
- what are the levels of use made of the electronic resources offered by your library
- what are the estimated cost savings fromt he use of these electronic resources
Assumptions:
- value of staff time saved can be estimated
- using only direct labor costs provides conservative estimates
- value of the public’s time can also be estimated! conservative estimate for general public’s time is placed at $6 an hour, below minimum wage – so if patron uses library website for 10 minutes, that’s $1 in value.
- levels of use measured by standard web metric packages is accurate
- usage numbers are local numbers…
- some search/time numbers are estimated… ie., time to search for phone calls is 15 minutes (so it’s a rough average)
Must know what we are counting: looks like they defined what a search was for each database they included in the count and equated that with a patron coming into the library, pulling out an index, and doing a search. That type of stuff…
aside … I’m sitting 15 feet from the screen, and I can’t read the slide! at least 15 points, with sub-points, in small font, all text… break that slide up!
Showing an example of data and $$ values associated with that data – ie., website visited 3 million times, dollar value = $322,000 – page views = 1 minute = $.10 each…
Guy Dobson:
He is figuring total value by mining SIRSI records on borrowing use and an averaged item price. Nice. Some patron’s library cards are worth more than $10,000 per year, because they check out so much!
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