The cost of library services: Activity-based costing in an Australian academic library

Using Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing to Support Library Management Decisions: A Case Study for Lending and Returning Processes

“…In the case of libraries, ABC performs a more accurate and efficient treatment of activity costs compared to traditional costing due to its accuracy in allocating indirect costs to different activities (Ellis-Newman, Izan, and Robinson 1996;Ellis-Newman and Robinson 1998;Goddard and Ooi 1998;Ellis-Newman 2003;Ching et al 2008;Novak, Paulos, and Clair 2011).…”

Improving Library Management by Using Cost Analysis Tools: A Case Study for Cataloguing Processes

“…However, in an environment with a broad range of products and enhanced services, such as a library, indirect costs have become substantially more complex than direct costs (Siguenza-Guzman et al, 2013a). This situation renders traditional methods inadequate; not only for estimating the effect of strategic decisions, but also for providing crucial information to library managers (Ellis-Newman & Robinson, 1998;Kaplan & Cooper, 1998).…”

“…ABC, promoted by Cooper and Kaplan in the mid-1980s, first accumulates indirect costs for each activity and then assigns the activity costs to the services causing that activity (Cooper & Kaplan, 1988;Ellis-Newman & Robinson, 1998). ABC has proven to be a valuable tool for libraries through its implementation in several case studies.…”

Activity-Based Costing as a Design Science Artifact

“…In the method, it is clearly stated that instantiating an ABC system is a design activity as well (e.g., "Designing ABC systems" [14:342] or [12:98]). The fact that various scientific publications describe such ABC instantiations [15,36,39] means that the design of the instantiations is considered to be relevant to the research community as well. Consequently, a sufficiently detailed description of the artifact is available.…”

“…ABC was proposed as a more advanced and multi-staged method to better calculate and attribute costs in such environments where overhead costs are more important than direct (labor) costs. The method has been applied in its intended application domain for field testing, with reports available in the production and manufacturing [36], library [15] and IT [39] domain. Consequently, ABC can be considered as a method artifact based on a problem statement from the cost accounting context, which has been introduced in this environment to undergo field testing as well.…”