Abstract
In times of economic distress, the roles and activities of institutions are scrutinized with particular fervor. The library is no exception. Yet, though library activity is increasingly being discussed in economic terms, no economic model exists that expresses what it is that a library does. At the core of the difficulty is the abstract character of library output. To circumvent this difficulty, various measures of library performance, for example, circulations of library material, have been recommended as criteria for funding libraries. In this paper I suggest a microeconomic model of library activity. This model treats library output as an abstract quantity and shows how it relates to other components of library performance. In terms of this model, the likely consequences of basing funding on such measurable outputs as circulation are analyzed. In both the centralized authority and free market versions of the model, we conclude that basing funding on circulation will result in a diminution in servic...
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