STUDYING THE COST AND VALUE OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION-SERVICES - APPLYING FUNCTIONAL COST-ANALYSIS TO THE LIBRARY IN TRANSITION

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.