"Prove your value."

It is probably the most overused phrase in hospital librarianship. One cannot pick up a journal or attend a conference without hearing the phrase. All hospital librarians are aware that one day the library could be closed to make room for a new piece of imaging equipment or they could be out of a job due to a merger.

Hospital librarians know they must prove the value of the library or risk having budgets slashed, staff cut, or worse, having the doors shut forever. Advice and best practices for demonstrating value abound. The library literature is full of studies showing the value of hospital libraries. Even better, studies in the medical literature cite similar results. Hospital librarians know to get out of the library, join hospital committees, and make connections with valuable stakeholders like administrators and important physicians. We know what to do to prove our value. But the question is, is it working?

The most vital aspect of proving the hospital library's value is to know the audience. Find out who is making the decisions regarding money and, in times of crisis, who controls whether the doors stay open or not. Tailor the approach to that specific person. Proving value to the CFO is a lot different than proving value to the head of graduate medical education. Gann and Pratt said in their value study that by putting the information and the library in a context applicable to a specific person, the library's value becomes more meaningful. For the CFO, that means putting the value of the library in numbers and dollar amounts. For GME administrators, data and examples of the library's benefits to residents and fellows are key.

But how do you identify this data? How do you put the library into numbers and dollars? The Valuing Library Services Calculator from the Mid-Continental region of NN/LM is a good place to start. Once all the data has been entered, the calculator shows how much the institution or an individual user would be paying to get the same resources commercially and, more importantly, it calculates how much benefit the hospital realizes from every dollar budgeted for the library.

Return-on-investment, or ROI, and cost-benefit analysis are concepts familiar to budget-conscious administrators; they are used to determine if projects were successful or if estimated earnings were achieved. The Cost Benefit and Return-on-Investment Calculator from NN/LM's Mid-Continental region is another way to measure the returns and benefits the institution receives from money invested in the library.

Hard numbers are tremendously useful in conversations with stakeholders, but sometimes a librarian needs more than just dollars and cents. Attaching a survey to the results of a literature search is an excellent way to collect both qualitative and quantitative information on aspects such as the types of users, how information is used, and user satisfaction. The supplemental information from the updated Rochester study and a 2014 Canadian hospital library study provide examples of questions that can be used in a literature search evaluation survey.

Proving your value and elevator speeches go hand-in-hand. There are many pros and cons, but it is important to have some kind of quick pitch or simple, yet genuine, statement available for when time with an important stakeholder is at a minimum. Try these tips from Mind Tools on tailoring your pitch and ending on a question, or check out what these librarians had to say if you're short on ideas. Not comfortable with elevator speeches? The "taxi chat" is a similar concept that creates a dialog rather than a soliloquy.

Hospital librarians are well aware of their own value and their potential to benefit many aspects of healthcare. But even good librarians struggle to prove this to administrators who see expenditures, not income. Hospital librarians must find ways to use numbers, the language of business, to advocate on their own behalf.