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Business case

What is a central library worth in euros?

The cost of a plan is visible straight away. What a central library saves stays invisible until someone works it out. This calculator counts only what Librario saves in research time, as a conservative lower bound. Everything else comes on top.

Savings per year (avg over 3 years)

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≈ — research time − — Librario − — in-house migration (avg/year)

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Indicative and deliberately conservative. You can adjust the assumptions below.

Research time alone already carries the investment. Avoided duplicate purchases, faster onboarding and always working from the current version come on top.

Adjust the assumptions: run it with your own numbers

Every value is adjustable, and the figure above recomputes live. Ordered from “you know this for sure” to “already included by default”.

Average across all employees: find the current version centrally instead of searching scattered drives or asking colleagues. Deliberately low: verify against your own data.

Fully loaded cost per hour incl. labour overhead. Source: German Federal Statistical Office, labour costs. Manufacturing and services.

260 working days minus annual leave, sickness and public holidays.

The share of saved time that actually returns as productive work. Such a haircut is standard business-case practice (Forrester TEI counts about half); we use 65%, a deliberate 35% discount. Already included by default.

One-time, customer-side effort (about one week), not a Librario fee. Already included by default.

Benefit (research time, 3 years)
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Librario (3 years)
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In-house migration (one-time)
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Total over 3 years
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÷ 3 years = avg
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Matching plan: —

All amounts exclude VAT.

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Further benefits, not counted

The figure above is the lower bound. These effects are real, but deliberately left out of the sum:

  • No more duplicate purchases of the same publication.
  • Everyone finds and works from the current version of a publication, not an outdated copy in some folder.
  • Faster onboarding of new employees through shared Collections.
  • Takes work off your librarian or office administrator through automated cataloguing.
  • No loss of knowledge when people leave: the catalogue and where to find things stay documented in the system, not in one employee’s head.
  • Reproducible literature searches for scientific work.
  • No duplicated effort when several people research the same topic.
  • Less vendor lock-in: you can export your entire catalogue at any time as BibTeX, EndNote or CSV.

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