From the Executive Director of GALILEO

 From Lucy Harrison, Executive Director of GALILEO:

It’s been a busy couple of months!  We’ve been working with the public library service on a shared RFP for a new delivery service to replace (or extend) the contract for the current courier. We’re also hard at work bringing up the new HathiTrust service for participating USG libraries. And we’re also excited about the potential for a new authentication service using OpenAthens...more about that in next month’s newsletter.

One of the goals in the GALILEO strategic plan that I’ve been working on is to “Demonstrate GALILEO’s value/return on investment (ROI) to various stakeholders.”  We got some excellent feedback in the annual GALILEO survey (full results here) and have also been talking with the GALILEO Steering Committee about what is most important to them. We’re planning to take an approach that looks at each GALILEO program/service through 3 lenses:

• Usage: Overall statistics relevant to program/service

• Savings: Financial and effort. Direct cost savings, cost avoidance, cost per use, return on investment, lower annual increases, time/effort saved, staff provided centrally, shared workflows, etc.

• Impact: Satisfaction with services, impact on users (patrons, students, faculty, staff), metrics that show overall success, answer “why do we do this?”

We’ve already identified some potential metrics to include in each of these 3 lenses, and will be having some further discussion with both RACL and GALSTEER soon to narrow down what we want to report. Once we have a template in place, we’ll start populating it after the end of the fiscal year. If you have any suggestions on metrics/statistics that are especially useful to your institution, please send them along!

From the GALILEO March Newsletter