Membership Value

At the conclusion of each fiscal year CARLI staff prepares a customized analysis of the monetary value realized by each CARLI Governing member library as a result of its CARLI membership. The analysis is sent to member library directors as an annual CARLI Value Letter. There are three components to the analysis: an itemization of the funds invested by the library, a calculation of the cost to the library to provide or replace the products and services received through CARLI, and a calculation of the library’s return on its investment.

Explanation of the Member Library Investment
Explanation of the Cost of Services Provided to the Member Library
Explanation of the Member Library Return on Investment (ROI)

Fiscal Year 2023 Visual Summary of CARLI's Annual Value to Libraries

Explanation of the Member Library Investment

The following list describes all of the charges and payments that a member library may have paid during the fiscal year. Only those actually paid appear on each library’s Value Letter.

1. Membership Fee: The figure would reflect the annual membership fee paid by all members. It is set by the Governance Board based on a library's membership category, type, and size.
2. Research & development, infrastructure and administration: The figure would include any funds the member contributed to a specific research project conducted or managed by CARLI. 
3. I-Share: Based on an analysis of use and costs, the Governance Board establishes annual assessments for all institutions participating in the shared integrated library system. Additional costs may be reflected for those libraries in the first two years of their participation. These reflect initial licensing, set-up and data conversion expenses borne by the library.
4. CARLI-Funded products and services: The sum of the member portions of all partially funded resources.
5. Brokered products and services: The sum of the discounted cost of all databases to which the library subscribed through CARLI in the fiscal year. It represents the last two selection cycles (Fiscal Year and Calendar Year) and any special offers made during the last year. 
6. Created content: Reflects any costs incurred for use of the CONTENTdm platform and the CARLI Digital Collections that run on it, as well as the Open Content Alliance digitization program.
7. Education, training and networking: Reflects any fees paid to CARLI by the library for staff to attend an event sponsored or organized by CARLI.
8. ILDS: The incremental cost paid to the commercial courier for additional delivery stops requested by the library.

Explanation of the Cost of Services Provided to the Member Library

For the services received and the programs in which a member library participated, CARLI provides a wide range of physical infrastructure, staff support, business services and direct subsidies. Following are the factors that we considered in determining what the member would have spent in the fiscal year to replace products and services or obtain resources directly from commercial vendors. These calculations are based on CARLI staff effort reports, on price information from vendors, and on the experience of CARLI staff.

1. Research & development, infrastructure, and administration: Includes activities, projects and initiatives undertaken on behalf of the entire consortium. It includes efforts to manage the 24 X 7 cloud-hosted enterprise systems; the design, creation and implementation of the Database Selection System, the ILDS Label/manifest System and the Membership database. Also included in the calculation is the cost of general administration of the consortium and coordination of member interactions and services. 
2. I-Share: The figure listed represents three components: (1) the annual cost of an ExLibris-hosted Alma Primo VE integrated library system; (2) a cost estimate for staff to manage the vendor-hosted system, based on the proportional CARLI staff costs to manage I-Share; and (3) the calculated cost to replace the library’s I-Share reciprocal borrowing (UB) with traditional interlibrary loan.
3. CARLI-funded electronic resources: Includes the annual subscription costs of online information resources and services funded by CARLI, plus an incremental staff cost to manage the subscriptions. Resources included in the calculation for all members are EBSCO Academic Search Complete, EBSCO Business Source Elite, and HarpWeek annual maintenance fees.
4. Brokered resources: Represents the aggregate amount of discount savings for the member's subscribed resources in the last fiscal year. It represents the last two selection cycles (Calendar Year and Fiscal Year) and any special offers made during the last year. It includes incremental staff costs to negotiate and manage licenses and provide technical and customer support functions.
5. Created Content: Includes awards made to members in the Open Content Alliance digitization program and the costs associated with institutional holdings in the CARLI Digital Collections. It includes incremental staff costs to negotiate and manage licenses and provide technical and customer support functions. Also included is a nominal value for access to the CARLI subsidized images in the Internet Archive and CARLI Digital Collections.
6. Education, training and networking: An estimate of the cost of programs and training for all of an institution's registrants in the fiscal year.
7. ILDS: The cost of commercial courier service five days per week, staff costs for technical support, contract management and customer support, and supplies are included.

Explanation of the Member Library Return on Investment (ROI)

What is a Return on Investment (ROI)?

For each dollar an organization spends, it expects a value to be received. This might be access to an electronic journal, a physical book on the shelves, or a librarian answering reference questions. Comparing dollars spent to the outcomes produced provides one measure of value, broadly referred to as ROI.

How should a library interpret its ROI?

If a library spends $100 with CARLI during the year and has an ROI of $4.00, the library received an additional $400 in support, training, content, services and programs as a result of its membership.

What factors influence a library’s ROI for CARLI programs, products and services?

Institutional size (student FTE) and the mix of products and services used have the largest impact on a Governing member’s institutional ROI.

Size determines CARLI membership fees and is used to determine the cost structure for most commercial products.

Using most available products and services--including participation in I-Share, brokering a substantial number of databases, using most available funded resources, and taking advantage of educational and training opportunities--will tend to give the most accurate and meaningful ROI. Because the discounts for brokered databases tend to be more modest than the potential cost of managing a standalone ILS or paying the full cost of the EBSCOhost databases, a member that does relatively more brokering than anything else will have a slightly lower ROI than one that uses a wide range of services and products.

What is a good ROI?

It should be clearly understood that participation in any consortium augments, enhances and extends the services and programs available to students, faculty and staff of member libraries and does not replace or substitute for each library’s responsibility to meet the primary information needs of its users. A library should expect a reasonable return on an investment in a consortium, but it should be skeptical of a report that appears to be exceptionally lavish. Either the consortium is inflating the value of its services or the member library is abdicating too much of its core responsibility to the consortium.

80% of CARLI Governing members have an institutional ROI between $1.00 and $9.00. Libraries at the lower end of the range tend to be doing relatively more database brokering than other programs, while those at the higher end tend to be smaller institutions that take advantage of a wide range of programs and services. Governing members with an ROI substantially more than $9.00 may find that the return on investment is not the best measure of CARLI’s value to them.

The ROI for each CARLI member is calculated using the following formula:

The sum of each member library’s calculated savings, funded e-resources, and costs avoided through its CARLI membership is divided by the sum of all amounts spent through CARLI by the member library for goods and services received.