INFORUM 2011

Possibility of Using Return on Investment in the Library World

Author

Zuzana Helinsky, Zh Consulting, Sweden

Documents to download

• Full text

• Presentation

Abstract

Marketing libraries and e- resources with a special focus on internal marketing, ie ‚owner marketing‘. How to get our message over properly to the decision makers in our library world – to those who control our budgets and therefore our destinies, the university chancellor, the local councillors, or the board of directors.

We need some measurement of benefits as a percentage of the amount spent. This is what our owners are interested in. This is the language they understand – for example using Return on Investment. Many university libraries have been dealing with this issue for some years now, but not all of them. It is a very good way of reviewing our services and products and looking at them through our owners' eyes as well as those of our users,

We can, for example, measure how many citations are from electronic sources. Or measure how many hours work libraries save for researchers to assess our impact on their productivity. Or measure what proportion of faculty are regular users of the library, which is not always obvious because of the extended access to electronic resources from anywhere, not just through the physical library. Or how often can we demonstrate that our university has quoted library materials in its proposals, reports, or articles?

In the Nordic countries councils are beginning to discuss the impact of access to culture on the health of their citizens, and its impact on their general education. This has huge potential for reducing unemployment, which is always politically and financially negative for the city or municipality.

Author's professional CV

Zuzana Helinsky is a director of zh Consulting a company specialising in services to the publishing and library community. She is a qualified librarian, with wide international business experience. For the last 20 years she has had a variety of jobs providing services to libraries around the world. Zuzana speaks regularly at international conferences and lectures for seminars and business classes. She was Director of Publisher Relations for Prenax Global, the international and innovative subscription management company. From the mid 90’s she was Manager of International Business for BTJ, Sweden’s largest library service company. In the mid 80’s she created and managed BTJ’s subscription service, which had grown to 20 million dollars. Arriving in Sweden from the Czech Republic in 1969, she gained a degree in Philology and History at Lund University and has a Masters Degree in Library and Information Science from Boras Bibliotekshogskola. She worked for several years in a variety of posts in the serials department at the University of Lund. Zuzana’s mother tongue is Czech and she is also fluent in Russian, Swedish and English. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Serials – the journal of the United Kingdom Serials Group.