Your Library Matters, Written November 2025, Published October 2026
Bruce Newell, Helena

How do librarians know if they’re helping people live full, happy, and healthy lives? How can we tell if we’re improving the communities we serve? If we are measuring what really matters, we’re looking at user outcomes, that is, we’re evaluating our actual contributions to our users’ lives and to our community’s vibrancy. [1,2] This is easier to say than do, and often outside the scope of libraries’ evaluation strategies.

Historically libraries have been good at counting what we do, but we’ve had difficulty describing our work’s outcomes. We’re unpracticed at evaluating the essential outcomes of our efforts — that is, our contribution to individuals’ happiness and a safe, vibrant, healthy community. To measure what matters, to understand how well we’re really doing helping our users and communities flourish, we would do well to work with our community partners and describe our efforts using both numbers and stories. For example:

Libraries are key players in helping kids learn to read. How can we measure our effectiveness? Storytime attendance counts are essential for marketing and for planning, but tell us little about if our community’s kids are learning to read. If we want to measure our library’s effect on childhood literacy, we’d be smart to work with our schools and use their measures of (e.g.) third-grade reading scores. [3]

If we want to measure our library’s contribution to public health, for example if we decided to focus to reducing teen suicide rates, we could cooperate with our local public health department and evaluate our work using generally accepted community-wide mortality, morbidity, and mental health measures.

To measure our impact on our local economy, for example, we could work with local businesses and our local Chamber of Commerce on ready-to-work programs. In the process we’d assist job seekers and collaborate with K-12 schools and community colleges towards shared goals. Our evaluation would likely include a mixture of governmental statistics and anecdotes gathered over a cup of coffee with community opinion leaders.

By piggybacking on our community partners’ existing evaluation efforts, we can measure real user and community outcomes, that is, our actual effectiveness. These meaningful measures will help us direct resources to where they’ll do the most good for the people and the communities we serve.

[1] Aristotle on happiness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia; Individual ethics and community politics https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/ and https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/ancient-political/#AriPol

[2] Happiness economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Brooks, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/opinion/happiness-community-wealth.html

[3] Annie E. Casey Foundation, Lifelong Success Starts with Reading, https://www.aecf.org/blog/success-starts-with-reading