Putting a Price on Sharing: Fresh Cost Data as an Essential Ingredient of Evaluating Interlibrary Loan Services

Abstract:In an age when information is abundantly available online, libraries must continuously demonstrate relevance both to users and to funders. Libraries can do this by showing that essential services are being provided to users efficiently, and at a reasonable cost. This paper examines challenges that library administrators face in evaluating collection sharing services, due to the scarcity of detailed cost information and a lack of current benchmarks against which to measure their own library's data. The authors have been involved with a multiyear project to create the OCLC Interlibrary Loan Cost Calculator, a free internet-based tool that acts as a virtual real-time collection sharing cost study. Designed in collaboration with experts from the resource sharing community and built by OCLC Research, the calculator has the potential to fill in the knowledge gaps regarding current collection sharing costs, allowing for more comprehensive evaluations of this core library service.