Non-quantitative Measures

According to the work Unseen Measures: the need to account for intangibles, libraries have been attempting to assess intangibles such as “library goodness” and account for intangible assets or resources (i.e., the information and knowledge obtained and used by libraries to create and deliver products and services) for many years with no consensus or results. Libraries are currently being asked to provide more tangible strategic responses to their customers and stakeholders; are being required to more effectively account and compete for their resources; and are being asked to create, manage and deliver more intangible values and services to customers and stakeholders.

Library services can be difficult to measure because many of their benefits are often intangible. There is often no way to quantitatively measure how important a piece of information is to a particular individual; even if participants agree the information was important, they cannot necessarily put a dollar value on how important it was. There are methods, however, for evaluating services that attempt to put a dollar value on the tangible and intangible benefits of services. Business methods used for evaluating customer service and service quality that can be applied to library services include measuring money saved or productivity gains in using libraries, or by using cost-benefit analysis. This study utilizes some of these, but it is beyond the scope of the study to look at the value of Florida public libraries in other than financial or economic terms. See Figure 1.

Figure 1- Potential Economic Benefits from Public Libraries