A single Stirling branch supplies the evidence base for a new library social value toolkit

The 440 events and more than 4,400 attendances at St Ninians work out at ten people an event on average, and about eight or nine events a week across the year ^[1][2]. Set that attendance against more than 27,000 recorded visits and scheduled programming accounts for about one visit in six at most ^[3]. The other five in six were people coming in for something else, and what the counted data says about them is loans: just under 1.2 for every recorded visit ^[4].

Champion and McKrell built the study around those visits, combining the library's own data with observation in the building and interviews with users and staff ^[3]. A door count registers that someone came in, not that a member of staff talked them through an online form or pointed them toward a service somewhere else. Observation catches the second kind of event. The library reports providing digital resources and support for people carrying out everyday online tasks ^[7], and the study credits staff with informal conversations, guidance and referrals to other services and activities ^[11].

"Much of this value is created through everyday interactions with library staff, whose work is often unseen but hugely important. The Social Value Toolkit will help libraries tell that story more effectively," Champion said ^[13].

St Ninians is a single branch in a single council area ^[4], and the design does not produce a figure for the share of its value that visits and loans miss. Users told the researchers that regular visits helped them meet people, develop new skills, feel part of their community and keep a sense of routine and purpose ^[10]. Those are reports from people who chose to keep coming back, and the design cannot separate what the library did for them from who walks in to begin with. The release does not say how many people were interviewed, and it says nothing about whether any council sets library budgets from visit and loan counts ^[17].

Champion, a senior lecturer in creative industries and cultural policy at Glasgow, said: "What we've found is that the true value of libraries cannot be measured by numbers alone" ^[12]. The project's stated finding was that libraries need better ways to document their full value, and it set out to close that gap ^[16]; the researchers kept visits and loans as indicators of activity while holding that the two counts do not fully capture how libraries contribute to people's lives ^[9]. Brian Hambly, convener of Stirling Council's Community Well-being Committee, said the study "also provides a framework for measuring their full value, which will support efforts to keep them relevant and continue to meet the changing needs of communities" ^[14]. Alison Nolan, chief executive of the Scottish Library and Information Council, which paid for the work through its Public Library Improvement Fund, said the research "provides compelling evidence of the significant social value created by public libraries" ^[15].