Analytics & Reporting: Return on Investment

The PALNI Return On Investment Task Force collaborated with IDEA to create an open source survey instrument for libraries to gather feedback from stakeholders (faculty, administration, and staff).

The survey instrument is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and is able to be freely used by PALNI, The IDEA Center Inc. and by the general public and other rights as governed by Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License including commercial remix and reuse.

The survey will be a Formative Assessment of the Educational Role and Institutional Effectiveness of the library. We will use the results to Implement Improvements, to Advise Allocation of Resources and to disseminate this information to educate and advocate for the library to the decision-makers on campus.

How can I get my tuition money's worth from the library? from the Office of the Dean of Libraries at the University of West Florida. See other tabs on the linked guide for Institutional ROI, and how to calculate Return on Investment.

“Tell us in a few sentences about a time that Libraries staff, services, resources, or spaces had a positive impact on your academic work.”

Syracuse/Megan Oakleaf IMLS Grant Project: "Syracuse University requests $50,000 and will provide an additional $12,889 in cost share to perform preliminary planning activities to pioneer the integration of library data in institutional learning analytics and develop detailed proofs of concept and models to guide academic libraries preparing to engage in this emerging and important use of data to support student success."

Return on investment (ROI) measures are a concrete means of demonstrating to institution administrators and public audiences the vital role academic libraries hold within both their respective communities and on a global scale. While libraries have traditionally been rather modest about broadcasting their own worth, today they must learn to make clear the often unrecognized ways in which they contribute to institutional success. This demonstration of value is exactly what LibValue, an IMLS-funded grant project, aims to empower.

We scoped an experiment around existing data from the library instruction request system and the University data warehouse. What we learned has direct implications for our program planning (demographics, sequencing, curriculum development), resource allocation, and delivery of library instruction. This session will provide an overview of our experiment, dive into the challenges we faced, outline our methodology, highlight preliminary results, and invite attendees to envision experiments for their own campus.