Assessing return on investment in health libraries requires lateral thinking

Abstract

This study considers the status of trends in value and impact research in health libraries and discusses how return on investment approaches such as social value analysis could be used. It uses an example, based on the Health Education England evaluation framework for health library and knowledge services, to outline how a theory of change can be developed. Health libraries now work more closely with health care staff and researchers in co‐creating value and impact for improving patient care. Therefore, collection of data to assess social value should be drawn not only from performance data already collected by libraries, but also data collection by and for the health care organisation on evaluation of care quality and professional competence.

A five-year department-based electronic usage data analysis on electronic journal access, library training courses, and scholarly publications

“…To meet the needs of medical academics, it can be undeniably said that libraries must continue to develop digital resource services to ensure the delivery of task-compatible electronic journals to medical scholars in increasingly mobile environments (Shimizu Wilson et al , 2014). Consequently, hospital administrators are eager to evaluate the efficacy of medical libraries (Urquhart, 2020).…”