[WEB4LIB] What is the value of a library web site?

[Joyce M. Latham]

Having managed a fairly large web site myself, I would simply look at
human hours for development and maintenance of the *site*. You would
have to begin with average weekly scheduled time, and then add
high-pressure development hours -- when a site has to be hastily
developed for some key political or economic event.  We never did any
outsourcing of anything so I can't speak to those kinds of costs.

Question: If you are using any subject specialist development, do you
include them in the cost?  For instance, if the Business, Science and
Technology librarian is helping to maintain the content for the BST
pages on the site, do you include the cost of their contribution?  Or,
if their contribution would not be outsourced, do you leave it off?

and then there are the hardware costs -- main server, backup server,
development server, development workstations -- and the costs of
maintaining those, along with periodic upgrades ( all servers must be
identical).

Joyce

Sunner wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm working on a ROI of the Information Centre for management and am trying
> to find out if there is a formula for valuing a web site. I've done return
> on investment evaluations on other aspects of information services before,
> but nothing I have is adaptable to a web site. To date I have failed to turn
> up anything useful.
> 
> If anyone has any leads, ideas etc it would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Many thanks.
> 
> Kati
> 
> "... knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being
> can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine."
> - Stephen King
> ___________________________________________
> 
> Kati Sunner
> 
> Federation of Education Unions Information Centre
> 120 Clarendon St. Southbank Victoria 3006 Australia
> Telephone: +61 3 9254 1800 Fax: +61 3 9254 1805
> Website: http://www.feuic.org.au
> E-mail: katis at feuic.org.au
> 
> Alternate e-mail: sunner at bigpond.net.au
> ___________________________________________

-- 
Joyce M. Latham
GSLIS -- University of Illinois

   "Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people; there is
only     enlightened activity."  Suzuki Roshi