Eg. Abels et al., STUDYING THE COST AND VALUE OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION-SERVICES - APPLYING FUNCTIONAL COST-ANALYSIS TO THE LIBRARY IN TRANSITION, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47(3), 1996, pp. 217-227
Citations number
30
Categorie Soggetti
Information Science & Library Science","Information Science & Library Science
Library managers must respond to institutional demands for the justifi
cation of maintaining or supplementing resources and services. The dif
ficulty of assigning costs and values to library and information servi
ces and resources is magnified by the advent of a broad variety of com
puterized and electronic modes of library service. This article provid
es a general discussion of the issues relating to costs of library and
information services in the library in transition, reviews the functi
onal cost analysis method, and presents selected data gathered from a
larger study on the costs and value of various library services, The r
esults of applying functional cost analysis to reference service show
great variation in unit costs, within and across libraries, indicating
that there are substantial challenges remaining in determining the so
urces of these variations, and in understanding the cost basis of libr
ary services.