Stop the Madness: The Insanity of ROI and the Need for New Qualitative Measures of Academic Library Success

Abstract

Return on Investment (ROI) has become the new mantra of academic libraries, a relentless and in many ways foolish effort to quantify impact in the face of budget challenges and the questioning of our continuing relevance to the academy in an all-digital information world. ROI instruments and calculations fundamentally do not work for academic libraries, and present naive and misinterpreted assessments of our roles and impacts at our institutions and across higher education. New and rigorous qualitative measures of success are needed. Academic administrators and government funders are asking for new evidence that libraries still matter and make a significant difference in the quality of academic life and the ability of colleges and universities to advance their missions. Are the dollars being invested producing value in economic terms? Academic libraries, under the impact of decreasing or at best flat budgets, have embraced valuation research as a worthy tool to document and demonstrate measurable financial outcomes. ROI has been applied in the corporate library, and in the public library, where questions on contribution to the bottom line, impact on the local economy, and user cost avoidance have been studied. New work in academic libraries has looked at the relationship between investment in electronic resources and grants revenue in the university, and between student retention and library use, for example. One must question the rigor of some of this research, the ability to track and control for the variables and vagaries of learning and research. One must be concerned about the sponsorship of some of these studies, and the integrity of the process and the outcomes. This paper is not a scientific study or a literature review or a reasoned analysis of the assessment literature on academic libraries. It is a polemic and a call to action. It is an appeal for the academic library to step away from inappropriate, unsophisticated and exploitable ROI research as a miscalculated, defensive and risky strategy. Certainly, academic libraries must embrace and advance rigorous assessment programs. We need effective and honest ways to explore issues like user satisfaction, the usability of systems and services, market penetration, cost-effectiveness, productivity, impact, and success in advancing institutional priorities. A focus on outcomes can link the academic library to more effective qualitative measures which help us to understand library contribution to successful graduates, productive faculty, and institutional advancement. In finance parlance, rate of return or rate of profit or return on investment is the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested, at least according to Wikipedia. For purposes of measuring ROI, both the initial and final value of an investment must be clearly stated, and the rate of return can be calculated over a single period,