Library KPIs Template

These nineteen KPIs cover the three questions a library service has to answer every year: how much it gets used, what it costs to run, and whether the people using it are satisfied. Usage comes first. Total Visitors, Unique Visitors and Items Loaned give the raw volume, while Items loaned per visitor turns them into a ratio that still means something in a quiet month. EBooks, Electronic Journal Downloads and Number of Searches cover the use that never walks through the door.

Cost is the second half of the set. Library expenditure per Visitor, Information Expenditure, Electronic Expenditure and Staffing Expenditure break the budget into the parts a funder actually asks about, and Cost Per Search does the same job for discovery. Two ratios sit on top of them: Electronic resources expenditure % and Info Expenditure expenditure % show how the balance between digital and print is shifting, usually the most political number in the report.

Satisfaction stops the other two from being read on their own. Customer Satisfaction average tells you what users think of the service. Customer satisfaction completions tells you how many of them bothered to say so, which decides whether the average is worth quoting. Busy and cheap is not the same as good.

Library managers read it monthly: are visits and loans holding up, and is the money going where the demand is. Acquisitions and collection staff live in the digital half, watching EBooks, Electronic Journal Downloads and Electronic resources expenditure % to decide what to renew and what to let go. Finance officers and the funding body want Library expenditure per Visitor and Staffing Expenditure, because those are the figures that turn up in a budget review.

Academic and public libraries weight the same set differently. In a university library, Number of Searches and Cost Per Search matter more than borrowing, and Occupancy is about study space rather than footfall. A public service usually leads with Total Visitors and Items loaned per visitor, since those are what the annual report is built around.

Set nearly all of these from your baseline. Library use swings with term dates, opening hours and the weather, so a figure lifted from another service's annual report will be wrong in both directions. Pull twelve months of history where you have it, compare against the same month last year, and target direction rather than an absolute: Items loaned per visitor holding or rising, Cost Per Search falling, Customer Satisfaction average steady and above a level you would be happy to publish.

The expenditure KPIs work the other way, because Staffing Expenditure and Information Expenditure are usually fixed by a budget you have already been handed. Target the split instead of the total. Kip, the built-in AI, can suggest targets and show indicative benchmarks as your history builds; those are AI estimates rather than real peer data, so use them as a starting point and not as evidence.