Costing reference: Issues, approaches, and directions for research

The Assessing Quality in Digital Reference project is a first step toward understanding the cost of digital reference services in libraries. This article presents three measures isolated by project participants as being most useful for their immediate needs: Total cost of providing digital reference service, the cost of digital reference service as a percent of the total reference budget, and the cost of reference as a percent of the total library or organizational budget. In addi-tion, it reviews selected outstanding issues in the ongoing question of how to determine the cost of reference services in libraries and offers direction for further study toward a general cost model for information services