With the economic downturn libraries need to show a return on investment on each dollar they receive, especially within the collection development budget. Library's collection development decisions for e-journal and e-book purchases need to be based on detailed analytics, e.g., review of usage statistics reports and cost-per-use calculations. The process of gathering statistics from dozens of supplier platforms and then creating custom cost-per-use reports is manual and time consuming. Additionally, in a corporate library settings, ad-hoc reporting, historical trending bears significance. At the end of 2010, the Library acquired a product, called SwetsWise Selection Support, to be implemented in 2011. The benefit of the new product was that it could "gather stats" automatically. Additionally, the Library staff did its own customization and imported historical data for creating trending reports for budget analysis and uploaded cost and usage data for ebooks.
The presenters will discuss the importance of libraries showing ROI and how the library creatively put together a product they needed in order to proves it value to its financial and upper management teams. The presenters would also like to open a discussion of how other libraries are showing their return on investments.
