Determining value

In The Nature of the Book, his magnificent study of early printing in England, Adrian Johns brings to life the struggles between the stationers and the printers over who should control what gets published. One of the most compelling arguments on the part of the stationers was that they were gentlemen and, as such, possessed independent incomes. Because of this, they would not be influenced by financial concerns in determining what went into print. They would act for the good of the nation. The printers, however, being tradesmen and depending on printing for their livelihood, would be forced to make decisions based on their own economic interests. It was self-evident that this would be a bad thing [1].

How different this is from the present, where the argument of economic self-interest is about the only argument that counts. So dominant has discussion in economic terms become that it can be difficult to even find the language to speak convincingly about social value in other than economic terms. When I wrote an editorial arguing for the importance of fighting for the preservation of fair use, it was easy to find the words to describe the economic interests of the producers who want to maintain as much control over content as possible. I found it more difficult to describe the importance to our society's social fabric of maintaining a certain level of free-flowing information [2]. In contemporary society, an argument that does not rest on an economic calculus does not count for much.

Most librarians, however, still have a fundamental belief in the value of their services that rests on something other than economic principles. This tension is reflected in the tone of discussions in venues like MEDLIB-L, where the disdain and even disgust for administrators who put everything into financial terms are expressed in withering language. The members of our profession have a visceral resistance to evaluating what we do in terms of dollars and cents. And yet, we operate in environments in which, increasingly, those are almost the only evaluative terms that matter.

Some of us clearly resent the fact that we have to justify our existence at all. It is so self-evidently obvious to us that libraries are critical components of our organizations that we become infuriated (as evidenced by those comments on MEDLIB-L) when our users (or our potential users or, more importantly, the administrators who pay our bills) do not see it that way. Many librarians have never gotten over their dismay at the change in the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) standards that removed the requirement for a “library.” Yet, the change in standards did not necessarily imply a perception that what librarians did was any less valuable—it was part and parcel of a change in the standards overall to focus on outcomes rather than on telling organizations how they ought to be structured. So the standards now require that organizations manage “knowledge-based information” without mandating how that management should take place. If having a library is the best way to do that, fine; but if an organization can find a more cost-effective way to meet the same end, then the organization is free to do so.

If I put myself in the shoes of the administrator of a health care organization, I cannot find anything to argue with in that approach. As a library director, I am always concerned about not having sufficient resources to do all the things that I think we need to do. We will always have more good ideas and more clear needs than we have resources to support them. So whenever I can get the same results by spending less, it is my responsibility to do so.

This responsibility certainly can make librarians' jobs more difficult, if we feel that part of that job is to persuade these organizations that having a functioning library is the best way to meet those requirements. On the other hand, perhaps it is good for us to be presented with that kind of challenge. How sure are we, really, that having a library is the best way?

When I look at the struggles that information-technology organizations have in justifying their budgets, I am grateful for the fact that academic libraries were established long before universities developed the current mania for funding models that are based on a very careful cost calculation of every unit. Imagine if you had to develop a rationale for funding a library that was based on the cost of every unit of service. How much does it cost for someone to come into the library and browse through an article on the shelf? How do you recover that cost?

I am not at all unsympathetic to the need for good cost analyses. In my institution, for example, the Lister Hill Library provides primary services to six schools and to the health system. We are in the process of trying to “rationalize” the way money flows throughout the university, so that all schools and units are treated “fairly and equitably.” What this means for the library is that every school and program that we support should get full value for the contributions that they make. It does not matter whether the funding comes off the top or directly from the schools—some kind of allocation process always exists, and whatever funds are used for central services are funds that do not go directly to the schools. The deans are quite justified in asking, “How does this support the mission of my school?” It is very difficult for me to know what to tell them, in dollars-and-cents terms. We have never been very good at this valuation.

The problem is even more acute for hospital libraries, because the financial pressures on hospitals tend to be more intense. The “suits”—the administrators, the financial people, all those folks charged with keeping the hospital from going under financially—have to look at every single expense and attempt to track it back to some positive outcome that relates to revenue. They are well trained to do that. Libraries present them with unique challenges. Where is the return on investment?

It is a little easier in the academic setting, where the focus on the bottom line is not quite so acute. Nonetheless, universities are running themselves much more like businesses now and are trying hard to incorporate modern business practices into their operations. Financial managers in the academic setting have just as great a responsibility to ensure that money is not wasted as do their colleagues in the more bottom-line conscious health care setting. From the vantage point of the hospital financial manager, whether the institution is for profit or not-for-profit is irrelevant, the basic principles of financial management are the same.

Years ago, at a regional meeting, I participated in a roundtable discussion on the topic “marketing library services to senior management.” I said, semi-facetiously, that the key was to figure out what kept the people in charge awake at night and then figure out how the services that you were providing could help them sleep better. In the long run, I still think this way is as good as any to focus thinking about what the library ought to be doing. In every organization, there are many more good ideas, and many more unmet needs, than can be tended to with the available resources. The people who have the job of allocating resources will, quite appropriately, allocate those resources toward the things that they feel are the top priorities and the most critical needs, in other words, those areas of the organization's struggle that keep them awake at night. They may feel that the library is worthwhile; they may say all of the right words about information being the heart of the enterprise. But in the competition for funding and priority and attention, they are going to focus on what they feel is most critical to moving the organization forward. If they do not see the library in that light, it would be irresponsible of them to allocate more resources to the library than to something else that they perceive as more critical. The library does not automatically deserve a share of the budget. The administrator's responsibility is to focus resources on those areas that will keep the organization afloat.

Good librarians want to do it all. They want to continue to do all of the traditional services, but they also want to continue to take on more, to learn more, to do more—and to do it with less. But doing everything is not an option. Certainly not if one wants to do anything well. So how do we make the choices about what we need to focus on? What services are critical? What have we been doing that we can manage without doing? What are the key success factors for this organization? These choices are not about downsizing—this process is a matter of good management and assurance that the resources that are devoted to our libraries are providing the biggest benefits possible to the institutions that we serve.

In this context, the Medical Library Association's (MLA's) benchmarking project is so very critical. The Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) has kept statistics for many years, and they have been an invaluable source of data to use in making the case for the importance of our libraries and for the necessity of having sufficient resources. There is plenty of dispute about how to measure effectiveness and how to measure service—no one would argue that the AAHSL statistics are sufficient indicators of quality. But they are very important and very valuable, and, until the MLA benchmarking project began, hospital libraries had nothing comparable. Nearly 400 libraries contributed data to the first round. The more that participate in the future, the more valuable the data will be.

In this issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association, Abels, Cogdill, and Zach present their first paper from the MLA-funded study of the value of libraries. This paper presents a taxonomy of library contributions—a schematic for looking at what the library does in relation to the goals of the institution. The authors make a key point: “to the extent that [library and information services] (LIS) can be shown to make a contribution to achieving any of the organization's mission-related goals, it is deemed to be contributing to the bottom line, even if the specific benefit of the contribution cannot be isolated or measured in monetary terms” [3]. Looking at what we do in this way enables us to take our value-oriented activities and discuss them in bottom-line terms. Future articles from this research group will explore ways to apply this taxonomy to different situations.

We are not likely to see any significant shift away from the discussion of “value” in economic terms in the foreseeable future. The U.S. economy is just coming out of one of the largest economic expansions ever, and, during that period of time, the insistence on measuring value in financial terms expanded as well. Now, as the economy tightens, the insistence on measuring value against the bottom line will only increase. Because we believe in the social value of what we do, it becomes ever more important for us to find ways to express that value in bottom-line terms. The belief in our hearts that we are doing a “good thing” may be what gets us back in the trenches every day, but the coolly calculated work of our brains, making the case for the bottom line, will help to get us the resources to keep doing that work.