Valuing your library services

Buried way down at the bottom of the 6/17/2009 ALA Direct e-Newsletter is a blurb and a link to a Retail Value Calculator (from the Nation Network of Libraries of Medicine, Mid-continental Region) which allows you to "Calculate what it would cost to buy library services - at a book store, through pay per view for articles, from an information broker - if you and your library weren't there."

I tested it a little bit with some Annual Report data for circulation statistics. It's pretty eye-popping on several levels!

1. What the heck does NYS actually do with the data it collects?? Looking at this calculator - admittedly designed for medical libraries, which house different types of (very expensive research oriented) materials - it's really difficult to slot our data into these categories. For example, we seem to track the number of participants, but not the number of programs held; we lump video, audiobook, eBook, and periodical loans together as "other materials" (??!!??) although we do count how many of these various things we have...; we track the number of "Users of Electronic Resources" but not the uses of the electronic resources, or even the type of electronic resources, themselves. Maybe (hopefully!) I'm missing some key info here, but, seriously...
2. How seriously are we undervaluing our services? As an example, say your library circulated 25,000 books in one year. At $35 per item per transaction (figuring most books at retail price are about $25 plus some extra for all the processing, handling, etc.) the cost of those transactions come to $875,000.00. That's just one service!