[Publib] Cost per Reference Transaction

[George Bergstrom]

Bill,

     What a fascinating question.  Lets take a look at it, not knowing the
particulars of your library, who is asking the question or what they may
want to know/how it will be used...  you will get very different numbers
depending on what you use.

If you use salary:

Say the total salary of the department is $600,000 (not counting benefits)
and the total transactions is 200,000/yr then you get $3 per transaction

Say the total materials budget is only $400,000 then you get $2 per
transaction

But the transaction is never completed by just the new books from 2008 (or
for that mater the entire yearly materials budget...)  so my initial gut
would be something like using the value of the entire reference collection,
the value of the salaries of the entire reference staff, and possibly adding
some value for the internet and infrastructure...

So if salary is $600,000 and new materials is $400,000 and the rest of the
collection is $1,000,000 (depreciation) then you have $10 per transaction.
Now if you then added in the value of the staff benefits, and the other
infrastructure I could see this easily doubling to $20 or more per
transaction.

Now we come to the who wants the numbers and for what purpose.  If admin
wants the numbers for budgeting purposes, then maybe the smaller numbers are
better (look we can answer each question for $1 each!)  but if they are
trying to find a number for promotion of the service/possible bond measures
then the bigger numbers seem to look better (look if we charged for our
service per transaction it would be $20 each, but you get it for the bargain
price of  $x per $1000 of property value...)

Thinking about it in these terms should help you identify what components to
use in your equation, and hopefully help justify your choices.

-George

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Lockhart, William S. <
lockhartws at elpasotexas.gov> wrote:

>  Hi,
>
> Please excuse the cross posting.  I have been asked to find a formula for
> the average cost of a reference transaction for our system.  We are
> establishing a series of benchmarks to represent patron use and cost of our
> system.  Has any public library used this statistic for this purpose and if
> so what variables did you use to accurately depict the cost of the
> transaction?  We have a count of all of our reference transactions but I do
> not know what monetary values to use; staff salary, reference materials
> budget, total budget etc.  I have been researching this for awhile now and
> have not had much luck.  Any help you can provide me would be appreciated.
> Thank You,
>
> Bill Lockhart
>
> * *
>
> *Bill Lockhart*
>
> *Head of Reference*
>
> *El Paso** Public Library*
>
> *(915)543-5451*
>
> *lockhartws at elpasotexas.gov*
>
-- 
George C. A. Bergstrom
Business Reference Librarian
Management & Economics Library
Purdue University
Lafayette, IN 47907

(765) 494 - 2918
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/publib/attachments/20081231/eb9a4f5d/attachment.htm