The Culture of Evaluation in Library and Information Services

Citation

Calvert, P. (2006), "The Culture of Evaluation in Library and Information Services", The Electronic Library, Vol. 24 No. 5, pp. 715-715. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470610707312

The activity of evaluation has been the subject of considerable debate since about 1990. Whether there is actually more evaluation being done in libraries is another matter, but at least the topic is now a familiar one even if not always clearly understood. The pressures of customer expectations from one side and of budget pressures from the other have forced library managers to accept that they must do more to justify the existence of their organisations than simply provide circulation counts. The gradual progression in thinking from basic input measures through output measures to today's concern with impacts, quality and value shows that the topic has been the subject of some thought, and that librarians have been willing to engage with theory from management, accounting, and marketing. Crawford tracks these changes in his book, giving plenty of examples of theoretical and practical projects along the way. His claim is that a “culture” of evaluation is developing within library management as the subject slowly matures.

There are introductory chapters giving an overview, then reasons of evaluation. The real nitty‐gritty begins in chapter three which discusses the various methods that can be used to evaluate a library, including references to helpful software. While this is interesting material, there isn't really enough here for the practitioner to go ahead and conduct an evaluation, yet the material has been covered elsewhere in more detail. Chapter four describes various specific survey instruments such as LibQUAL and the SCONUL templates (the content is rather focussed on Britain in this chapter). Chapter five is about “parallel cultures of evaluation in higher education” and the purpose of this is to show that academic libraries are operating in a wider sphere that has engaged with evaluation, so the libraries had better move with it. Chapter six describes three cases of research into evaluating library services, including some examples from Poland. Chapter seven may be the most interesting for readers of TEL, for here Crawford describes the projects that have been conducted into evaluating electronic information services such as Equinox, the E‐Measures, and Jubilee (again, very British in focus and the omission of the work of Bertot and McClure is an illustration of this).

I am not sure who this book is aimed at. It isn't a manual for the practitioner, and it isn't a student text book. While I would like to think that the interested practitioner will want to read it, this may not be a realistic expectation. It will certainly be a useful resource in all library and information management programmes, especially those with specific courses on evaluation, though these are still rare (but maybe this book will plant the seed of the idea within some LIS schools). Nevertheless, I should say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and it is as well‐informed as one would expect from Crawford, who has been involved with evaluating library effectiveness for well over a decade and is a regular speaker at the Northumbria conferences. So, I recommend it to libraries with any interest in evaluation, and I hope rather than expect that library managers will read it.