Valuing General Library Collections for Insurance Purposes: A Practitioner’s Guide

The valuation of general collections for insurance purposes is a niche yet crucially important administrative responsibility of libraries. Accurate valuations ensure libraries can recover from disasters without overpaying for coverage. Guidance on completing valuation procedures is dated and scattered. An extractive literature review was analyzed alongside online surveys and interviews of 11 North American libraries who shared advice and practical takeaways from field-based experiences generating valuations and/or working on insurance claims post-disaster. Literature findings and field-based experiences are summarized and combined to provide a practitioner’s primer covering valuation techniques, common procedures, and important organizational considerations when establishing policies and procedures.