04 February 2007

LIBRARY USE VALUE CALCULATOR

Jackson County (Oregon) Library Services has a wonderful marketing tool on its website. What is your library worth to you? Allows you to calculate the value you receive from using various library services. If you want to use it, you’d better hurry, because the county government is closing all of the libraries in the county due to budget constraints. In case you miss it, the values used are:
Books borrowed, $15 each; magazines borrowed, $2; movies borrowed, $4; audio books borrowed, $10; magazine use in library, $2; interlibrary loan, $25; meeting room use per hour, $50; auditorium use per hour, $250; adult programs and classes attended, $10; children’s programs attended, $6; hours of computer use (i.e., Internet, MS Word, etc.), $12; newspapers viewed online, $1; use of other database searching (like EBSCO), $20; and reference questions asked, $7.

I have a few quibbles with the above. The cost for adult programs seems low and the cost for reference questions should is very low (and should be phrased as “reference questions answered,” anyway. However, creating a calculator like this for your library would be a great marketing tool.

URL: http://www.jcls.org/caculator.html (you have to misspell “calculator” to find the site—not great PR)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you! I agree what a great marketing tool.

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

Another useful estimator for the value of each website is www.estimix.com . The estimation provided is the result of a complex analysis based on factors like: the age of the website, the demographic structure of the traffic, the countries where the website is popular and sources of the traffic. It provides trusted information, helpful for an objective human analysis.