Health Libraries - Worth Every Cent and More

Health Libraries Inc in Victoria and Health Libraries Australia commissioned  SGS Economics and Planning to investigate the return on investment of health library and information services in Australia, and their report has just been published. Worth every cent and more: an independent assessment of the return on investment of health libraries in Australia used surveys and case-studies to indicate that health libraries return $9 for every $1 invested.

This is considered to be a conservative estimate of  libraries' real worth as, for example, it takes into account the time saved by medical practitioners in searching for answers, but it does not take into account the improved quality of the results supplied by trained information specialists. It looks at how much it would cost users to have to buy the information they gain for free from the library, but it does not assess the savings achieved by library staff negotiating advantageous prices with information suppliers.