Cost effectiveness

About ways to measure cost effectiveness.

One of the ways that a library may wish to demonstrate value is by providing evidence of economic impact or value for money.  

There are different ways of measuring costs and economic impact. 

Urquhart and Turner in Reflections on the value and impact of library and information services: Part 2: impact assessment suggest that economic impact is usually measured by cost benefit analyses or return on investment studies. 

A basic cost analysis of a clinical librarian service was conducted by Booth et al in 2002.

Cost effective analysis is a comparative analysis of the costs and effectiveness of alternative interventions or services.   

For example: 

• competing methods of providing training 
• use of different databases for information retrieval

See a beginners guide to cost effectiveness analysis, written by Claire T. Hulme in 2006. 

This uses a case study of mediated searching or information skills training in health libraries as an example. 

Willingness to Pay is a method that has been used as a proxy for determining the economic benefits of health library services . 

See the following papers by C. Urquhart et al.:

• The North Wales Clinical Librarian Project. Final Project Report, 2005
• Evaluating the contribution of the clinical librarian to a multidisciplinary team, 2006
• Changes in information behavior in clinical teams after introduction of a clinical librarian service, 2007