The Canadian Index of Wellbeing: A Better Way to Assess and Communicate the Value of Libraries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historically libraries have struggled to communicate their value in ways meaningful to both policy-makers and the general public. Traditional measures like collection and circulation counts, while useful, fail to capture libraries’ full impact on the lives of their users. The recent dominance of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the prevailing metric for policy and decision-making frames library value in exclusively economic terms. However, it is overreliance on economic measures like GDP in library assessment that leads to their undue underfunding. Meanwhile a tool like the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) is a credible alternative metric that shifts the focus from the purely economic toward additional facets of life. Developed through a broad cross-Canada consultation process, the CIW uses eight domains affecting wellbeing: community vitality, democratic engagement, education, environment, healthy populations, leisure and culture, living standards, and time use. Compared with the narrow economic focus of GDP, the CIW is a powerful tool to communicate the true value of public libraries and the impact they have on their users.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.020 | 0.025 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".