Costing Reference: Issues, Approaches, and Directions for Research

The Assessing Quality in Digital Reference project is a first step toward understanding the cost of digital reference services in libraries. This article presents three measures isolated by project participants as being most useful for their immediate needs: total cost of providing digital reference service, the cost of digital reference service as a percent of the total reference budget, and the cost of reference as a percent of the total library or organizational budget. In addition, it reviews selected outstanding issues in the ongoing question of how to determine the cost of reference services in libraries and offers direction for further study toward a general cost model for information services