Yesterday I was lucky to visit  San Francisco Public Library’s main location to attend The Future of Libraries 5.0: The Recovery Engine on the Hard Times Train, an annual event organized by the Pacific Libraries Partnership.

This was a fantastic event.  I’ve been to an awful lot of library conferences and events in the last few years about the “future”.  It seems to me we’ve been talking about the emerging role of the library as an *insert ambiguity here* ever since I got into this field.  I’m a fan of such talk, I love the innovation discussions, the hypothetical scenarios, the utopian dreams, the sci-fi inspired tech-heavy theoretical library landscapes of the year 2055.  I do think its useful to project, imagine, experiment and dream.  If we didn’t do that things would get pretty dry and indeed, the horror of not being adaptable or flexible or responsive or better yet anticipatory would become a reality and libraries would, for lack of a better word, suck.  That said, it is important not to get lost in all of the philosophical nonsense, and consider the important things that we are doing RIGHT NOW to determine the future.  The future does, after all, begin with the present, and more importantly it is determined by action and not words.  That right there was the success of the Future of Libraries 5.0 conference.  I walked away with solid, tangible, replicable case studies.

There were a few different high points for me at the Future of Libraries 5.0.  Its going to take more than one blog post to offer thoughts in a concise, non-boring manner, so I’ll start with a brief promotion here of the Benefit Study that the Friends of San Francisco Public Library did with Berk & Associates.  Studies and methodologies like this are worth promoting so that everyone else out there can benefit from the work.  Here’s a link to the executive summary of the report.

This graphic (I’m a sucker for cool, descriptive information graphics like this one) does a really nice job of displaying five of SFPL’s service priorities while it describes both the qualitative and quantitative benefits of these services.  From the Quantification of Benefits section:

“We are able to assign a dollar value to a small portion of the many benefits that SFPL provides to the San Francisco community. These quantifiable benefits are related to the library’s direct services, for which the library tracks usage data and for which a defensible methodology can be employed to determine their value. Quantifiable benefits include the circulation of library collections and the use of a wide range of library services, including computers, trainings, programming, and other specialized services. The value of most of these services was estimated by determining the market cost of a comparable service or other means of acquiring the same benefit. This market value was then multiplied by the number of uses by SFPL patrons in the 2005-06 fiscal year. The total value of these benefits for the 2005-06 fiscal year ranges from $87 million to $207 million.”

In the end, this translates to the following bite-sized, memorable, statement:

“For every dollar spent supporting SFPL, the citizens of San Francisco see a return in the range of $1.40 to $3.34.”

I participated in a community needs assessment project last year with another large urban library, and its purpose was to help inform and steer the creation of a long-term strategic plan.  It will certainly do so nicely, but after looking at this report, methodology, and vocabulary, it occurred to me that an economic benefit analysis which quantifies the value of libraries (and discusses in depth and breadth the qualitative benefits) is a great supplement for an assessment project.  Similarly, it could be used to get buyin from politicians, the business community, and other stakeholders that your library might be interested in getting involved in a community needs assessment.

Readers, dig into this report.  There’s a way to simplify and replicate this process at home, on the cheap.  Enjoy!