The authors apply a survey technique known as the contingent valuation (CV) method to estimate the economic value that patrons attach to reference desk service in an academic library. The CV method has been used in environmental economics for the past thirty years to estimate the value of environmental amenities. The authors argue that the appropriate measure of patron benefit from reference service includes use value (the usual benefit concept in the library literature) and option value (the benefit to potential users of knowing they have the option of using the services). The survey population consisted of the students and faculty of the academic campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. The authors surveyed 382 students and faculty eliciting willingness to pay (WTP) for reference desk services: WTP to maintain existing hours, WTP to keep the desk open an additional eighteen hours per week; and WTP to add 18.5 more hours (all hours the library is open). The 10 percent trimmed mean (a robust measure of central tendency) indicates that, on average, students are willing to pay $5.59 per semester to maintain current hours of the reference desk; instructional faculty indicate they are willing to pay $45.76 per year to maintain current hours. Given reasonable assumptions about the cost of service, students and faculty place a value on the current hours of reference desk service that exceeds the cost by a ratio of 3.5 to 1.
This study tests the hypothesis that a positive relationship exists between academic library funding (dependent variable) and selected institutional variables taken as indicators of the demand for library services at the university (enrollment, number of doctoral programs, doctoral degrees awarded, number of faculty, select other institutional characteristics). The research employs 11 years of longitudinal data from 113 members of the Association of Research Libraries to create a multiple regression model. Empirical results indicate that operational indicators of the demand for library services are positively associated with funding, and most of the associations are statistically significant at the five percent level or less in two tail tests. In a corollary finding, libraries associated with private universities in the United States spend 21 percent more than their public counterparts, while Canadian university libraries spend 21 percent less than U.S. public university libraries. The presence of a medical school is associated with an 8.6 percent greater expenditure, and the presence of a law school is associated with a 12.3 percent greater expenditure. The study suggests that this formula may be useful as a tool for library funding and assessment of adequacy of library budgets.
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