Value Added Content

I was never very fond of (nor good at) math during my school days.  One could say it's the reason I've chosen to surround myself with books for a living.  But numbers are a very important factor in measuring the very lifeblood of the public library.  How many programs did we offer?  How many people came?  Is this better or worse than last year?  Last month?  How much better or worse?  How many items did we circulate?  How many do we own?

I adore numbers now!

I was thinking about value the other day.  As in, what is the monetary value of what we offer our community?  Our collection contains approximately 25,000 items.  If you estimate a value per item of $20 (which is low-balling it), we offer a half-million dollars worth of items to our community at any one time.  On a personal basis, if a person checked out the maximum 25 items, and did this every week for a year, they would have checked out $26,000 worth of materials.  Or, in other words, if they had wanted to purchase all of those items for their personal collection, that's how much money it would have taken them to do it.

By the end of 2014, we will have circulated somewhere around 110,000 items for the year.  At $20 per item estimate, that is over $2.1 million of value we brought to the community.  We have an annual acquisitions budget of $80,000 - or 26 times less than the circulation value to our community.

Granted, some items may circulate just a couple times in the year.  Some may circulate not at all.  That is why we are constantly evaluating our collection and weeding under performing items.  On the flip side, some items will circulate dozens of times in a year.  The hottest new movies, for example, can average one checkout per week all year long.  So, 52 circulations for an item that cost us $20.  The total value on that $20 investment is $1,040.

It's popular in the media to talk about the value of libraries and the sustainability of the current library model, as if the very existence of libraries is somehow tied to the popularity of the printed word.  And the caveat to all of this talk of value is that, were all of the libraries in Carroll County to suddenly vanish and no other alternatives took their places, would our patrons literally spend $2.1 million on the items they get from us for free?  Probably not.  A portion of it, but not the entire thing.  Many people would simply do without.  But the point is, they don't have to.

And that is the enduring value of libraries.  Communities need a repository for the informational and entertainment materials that they cannot afford to purchase for themselves.  They need a place where they can safely be exposed to ideas and not be judged for their interests.  And that is something that will never go out of style.