This article was first published in Triblocal.com, 10/14/09.
An ROI is biz-speak for "return on investment." If you own stock in a profitable company your ROI comes in two forms: your dividend and (you hope!) the rising value of the stock when you sell it. 10% in a given year is considered very, very good.
Public entities also have ROIs. These are calculated by taking the market value of the services provided and dividing this by the cost of delivering those services … but before I tell you what the Lake Villa District Library's ROI is I need to explain something about the history of public libraries.
To simplify, one can say that (in general) public libraries satisfy the needs of several overlapping markets (which is to say taxpayer needs). The oldest need is the one for adult education. When the public library movement began in the middle 19th century it was part of an overall "betterment" movement … with the idea being "how does one make an investment in the type of individualized public education people need in order to make the community a better place to live?" Fiction books, aside from a few classics, did not have a place in our earliest public libraries. Our non-fiction and reference collections, plus many of our professional services, are aligned with meeting this oldest need.
This created something of a problem some years later inasmuch as more and more people were reading popular novels "like popcorn" and were growing tired of having to either purchase or rent them (very similar to how people today acquire DVDs). Library historians call this period in the late 19th century the "fiction controversy." This led to a simple quid pro quo: public libraries began to buy popular fiction because that was what their taxpayers wanted them to buy - and taxpayers increased their support for them because they no longer had to pay as much for the fiction titles they wanted to read. This is the second oldest need, and one which our fiction collection addresses.
The third oldest need is to meet the reading needs - the basic educational needs as well as the ongoing recreational needs - of children. This is why we have a Youth Services Department.
Of course, things change and there are new needs because the world has new formats (videos, DVDs, CDs, etc.) but the general mission largely remains the same: purchase cheaply and make available for free.
Now for our ROI. Last year, the Lake Villa District Library circulated a bit more than 1.1 million items. These, if purchased by individuals, would have a market value on the order of $30,000,000.
One might argue that many of these would be rented, not purchased, and this is true … but this is offset by the fact that I haven't accounted for the value-added of reference services (finding answers for people, both adults and children), the value of our online databases (something never envisioned 100 years ago), or the value of our staff's guidance in helping people find what they would like to read (or view, etc.)
The library's operating expenses, last year, were approximately $3,000,000.
Thus, the library's ROI - its return on investment to the taxpayers - was on the order of 1000%.
How's that for government efficiency?
Bob Watson
Director
Lake Villa District Library
1001 East Grand Avenue
Lake Villa, Illinois 60046
1-847-356-7711 x 210
