The evaluation of library services: a concise review of the existing literature

A bibliographical review of the most outstanding studies regarding the assessment of library services, establishing their origin and development since the decade of the sixties. Chronologically, the contributors which the author considers to be classics, or more significant regarding the features included in the assessment of library services, some of which address the assessment, as well as other features recently included, among which emphasis is made on the range and scope of the services, operation of resources and studies concerning the fulfillment of the information needs of the users. A select bibliography pertaining to these matters is included. Profesor Emeritus University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 501 East Daniel Street Champaign, Il 61820-6212 fax 952 172 44 33020 supposed to be important items in that area. For most subject fields, no standard list of “best” literature will exist. Therefore, the librarian who wants to apply this approach must compile a list for evaluation purposes. The most obvious sources to draw upon are the lists of materials cited by scholars writing recently in the field —in monographs, journal articles or other publication forms. The underlying assumption is that the sources cited are those needed by the scholars to support their research and that these sources should appear in a strong collection in this subject area. When a librarian applies such a list to evaluate his own collection in this subject field, he is really asking the question “Could this research have been supported here?” The classic study of this kind was performed by Coale (1965), using sources cited in scholarly monographs. Lopez (1983) proposed a similar approach, which would actually give a numerical score to reflect the strength of the collection in this subject, but this method is unnecessarily complicated and cannot really be recommended. Others have drawn references form the bibliographies of scholarly journal articles, from dissertations, or other publication forms. Nisonger (1992) has prepared a useful survey of this and other approaches to collection evaluation. The advantages and disadvantages of using different types of publications as sources for bibliographic checking are discussed in detail in Chapter 2 of Lancaster (1993). A related and potentially valuable approach, although it has been little used, is to tale the references retrieved in database searches as a set of items appropriate to evaluate the collection of the library in which the searches were performed. The justification is obvious; the subjects of the searches reflect the interests of at least some library users and the items retrieved should be the ones that these users will be looking for in the library. A rare example of this approach, which seems particularly appropriate to the evaluation of special libraries can be found in Lancaster et al. (1991c).