In 1996, within a program funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to encourage research on the economics of information, the Council on Library and Information Resources made a grant to Rutgers University for a project in the School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies that would apply new economic theories to measuring how well research libraries fulfill their service roles. The following summary draws on the original proposal and the final report from the project's directors, Wonsik Shim and Paul B. Kantor. Regrettably, it cannot reproduce the full array of figures and charts through which they present the details of their argument. The evaluation of library performance is problematic, in part because the principal products of a library are services that lead to an intangible result, the acquisition of knowledge. It's possible to study the service activities of libraries as service activities and assess how well they are performed, but even this narrow focus encounters a major difficulty.
Libraries deliver a complex mix of services and consume a complex mix of resources.
Some resources may be more expensive for some libraries than for others, and some services may be more important than others. The mix varies from library to library, giving precise meaning to the observation that each library is different from every other library. These measures are limited in two ways, explain Shim and Kantor. First, almost all the ratios look only to the input side of library operations. There is no attempt to contrast the inputs with the outputs, such as reference transactions, the circulation of materials, and interlibrary loans.