The Research Of Univercity Librarie’s Return On Investment

In the era of knowledge economy, today’s education is tomorrow’s science and technology, and also the economy of the day after tomorrow. University is an important base for training talents. As an indivisible and important part of university, university library works for universities’ teaching and research activities. However, with the development of internet, university library’s resource utilization has been reduced, services has been ignored, and its value has not reflected. Fewer teachers and students use university library, so that school administrators’degree of emphasis on library has reduced, and university library’s status has been questioned. Recently, university libraries have began to focus on their performance management, whose goal is to improve the utilization of library’s resource and also the satisfaction of readers. Performance assessment is one of its important parts. Measuring university library’s return on investment with the methods introduced from economics can help university library’s managers find the advantages and disadvantages of their library, so that they can allocate the investment rationally, improve the quality of library’s services, and also heighten its service levels. On the other hand, it can upgrade library’s status by proving library’s worth to universities’administrators and users.On the basis of searching foreign and domestic researches of library’s return on investment, this paper analyzes the methods of return on investment, such as the method of consumer surplus, CVM and also time and cost, summaries the researches’ shortcomings, and proposes this paper’s research ideas as follows:Firstly, this paper introduces the concept of library’s return on investment and also the major two methods:the consumer surplus method and CVM method in detail, which this paper chooses to calculate university library’s indirect value.Secondly, this paper chooses three different university libraries in Nanjing to take a empirical research. During the research, this paper collects the data of university library’s investment and also its direct value; classifies the three university libraries’services, and determines the methods to estimate their value; determines the market alternatives of the relevant services when using the method of the consumer surplus, and uses the way of survey when using the method of CVM to estimate the value of the relevant services; and also gets the number of the three university libraries’ return on investment by calculating. Finally, this paper takes a comparative analysis on the different styles of university libraries’ return on investment in our country and also abroad, summarizes the factors that affect university library’s return on investment, and also makes some suggestions to improve the return on investment with the hope of giving some guidance on the management philosophy and ideas of university library in order to promote university library’s development healthily and sustainably.The conclusions are as follows:1. The data of the three university libraries’ return on investment are all greater than one, that is to say, the reciprocation is greater than the investment. It fully affirms the value of university library.2. This paper takes a comparative analysis on the three university libraries’ return on investment, using the method of SWOT, and gets to the points that the usage amount of library’s services has a decisive impact on university library’s return on investment; in addition, the two main factors that affect university library’s return on investment are the investment that university invested to its library and also the investment that library’s administrators invested to library’s resources and services.The total investment that university invested to its library has a negative correlation with university library’s return on investment. Therefore, university should achieve the state of high output with low input as much as possible, and put an end to the state of high input with low output when it invests to its library.The investment that university library’s administrators invests to library’s resources and services has a positive correlation with university library’s return on investment. Therefore, university library administrators should allocate the investment rationally after considering all aspects in order to improve university library’s return on investment.The usage amount of library’s services, which is closely related to university library users’ satisfaction, has a positive correlation with university library’s return on investment and has a decisive impact on it. According to this, this paper puts forward three suggestions to improve university library’s return on investment.(1). Being "People-oriented", changing the passive way to an active one when providing services, and creating a "people-oriented" reading environment;(2). Finding out users’ requirements, enhancing the personalized services and focusing on bringing up users’ preference to the library;(3). Providing services with advanced technology in order to improve users’ loyalty to university library.