Library staff members should ultimately base their purchasing choices on the mission statements of their employing institutions. Fortunately, library mission statements have much in common. Undoubtedly, for example, all libraries have a goal that includes "serve the information needs of the community," because on some level, all libraries are information vendors. There are two parts to that goal: providing access to information services and serving the information needs of the community. Librarians are good at finding tech that provides information access. It is much more difficult to find pieces of technology that can serve the information needs of the community. Purchase decisions, particularly technological ones, need to serve the needs of the community. In this article, the author proposes a five-part metric on which technological purchases can be based.