Colleen Cook

Library Investment Index – Why is it Important?

The Association of Research Libraries(ARL) has engaged in the implementation of the Task Force on New Ways of Measuring Collections’ recommendations and developed a new index, the Library Investment Index, originally called the ‘Expenditures-Focused Index’ which was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education for the first time in 2007. The Expenditures-Focused Index was renamed the Library Investment Index in 2008 to better reflect the notion that library expenditures are reflective of investments in intellectual, scholarly, and community capital. This paper offers a closer examination of the implications of the Library Investment Index and discusses its importance for the research and wider library community. It addresses both the methodological advantages and limitations as well as the political significance of the development of this index. Introduction In an environment where physical library collections are being replaced or supplemented by terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes, and yottabytes of information, it is questionable whether the units of volumes held, volumes added, and serial subscriptions can continue to offer the utility they had in the past. The challenge of measuring collections in new ways gave rise to the work of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Task Force on New Ways of Measuring Collections which engaged into a two year process and moved from debate to action on these issues. The Task Force1 was convened in December 2004 and built on much of the earlier work and debates that engaged the ARL directors during the 1990s.2 During its two-year investigation, the task force systematically collected qualitative feedback through one-on-one interviews with nearly every ARL library director. During the second year of its operation, the task force deployed two top researchers in qualitative and quantitative methodologies, Yvonna Lincoln and Bruce Thompson. Two reports were produced for the ARL community: “Research Libraries as Knowledge Producers: A Shifting Context for Policy and Funding,”3 documenting the results of the qualitative inquiry, and “Some Alternative Quantitative Library Activity Descriptions/Statistics That Supplement the ARL Logarithmic Index,” documenting the results of the quantitative inquiry.4 ARL Task Force on New Ways of Measuring Collections: Interview Results During interviews conducted by Task Force members with more than 100 of the 123 ARL directors in the spring and summer of 2005, a number of key issues surfaced that needed to be addressed. Themes from these interviews highlighted that: Data is not expressing uniqueness of materials; Relevance to teaching, learning, research is not adequately reflected; Collections go beyond printed volumes; Research library is more than collections—it 2008 Library Assessment Conference 148 includes its services and ARL is not telling the story with the ARL Membership Criteria Index; Increase in expenditures for electronic resources is changing collections; Ownership and access are not contradictory approaches; Consortial relationships/cooperative collection development is increasingly important; Shared storage facilities are a necessity; Duplicate serials based on bundling is a huge problem for research libraries since quality control issues vary from product to product; Special collections are not reflected in our current statistics; and ARL Membership Committee does not use the Membership Index exclusively like it used to in the past; it also takes into account qualitative indicators now. Many directors recognized the historical significance of the long standing ARL Statistics5 dataset to show trends, as a way of accounting for university investments, and its importance for comparison and benchmarking. But the voices expressing serious concerns with the ARL Membership Criteria Index were clear in that the Index was misunderstood, misleading, and unhelpful. During the second year of the investigation, Bruce Thompson was engaged and did an exhaustive and thorough analysis of the ARL Statistics data set, attempting to identify additional patterns in the data though factor analysis. In his analysis, he confirmed the statistical validity of the ARL Membership Criteria Index and suggested an improved alternative, what came to be known as the Library Investment Index (or ExpendituresFocused Index). Task Force Recommendations In February 2007, the result of the two year investigation of the Task Force resulted in the formation of an action agenda approved by the ARL Board of Directors, the ARL Task Force on New Ways of Measuring Collections, and the ARL Statistics and Assessment Committee. The action agenda has a number of R&D components but it stands as a practical approach to support research libraries as they are transforming their operations from what has been a 20th century approach into a 21st century approach. The practical and political readiness of different research libraries to adopt new ways of describing their operations varies and is presented in Figure 1. The action agenda offered a wise compromise that keeps what is valuable from the past and also helps libraries move boldly into new territory. A conscious decision was made to maintain the ARL Membership Criteria Index for institutional purposes but not publish it in the Chronicle of Higher Education (The Chronicle) as it contains variables like volumes held, volumes added gross and current serial subscriptions that are undergoing transformative changes. For a stable way of describing libraries, the Task Force relied on the expenditures variables, and promoted and published it in the Chronicle of Higher Education the Library Investment Index. Figure 1. New Ways of Measuring Collections: An Action Agenda Adopted February 2007 1. Reserve use of the current membership criteria index for those occasions when it is needed for consideration of membership issues. 2. Implement an expenditure-focused index. 3. Use the new expenditure-focused index for any public reports, such as in the Chronicle of Higher Education. 4. Begin to develop a services-based index that combines the following three factors: collections, services, and collaborative relationships. 5. Revise definitions for collections-related data categories currently collected and experiment with a variety of new measures, including usage data, strength of collections, and service quality measures to develop a richer set of variables for potential inclusion in the three-factor alternative index (see above). 6. Collect qualitative data to develop a profile of ARL member libraries.