Measuring Library Performance: Principles and Techniques

Citation

Calvert, P. (2007), "Measuring Library Performance: Principles and Techniques", The Electronic Library, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 480-481. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470710779907

Performance measurement in libraries has become a mainstream topic for research over the past decade or so, largely due to the influence of some scholars such as Childers and van House in the USA, Crawford in the UK, and the collected thinking of speakers at the Northumbria Conferences. There is now sufficient knowledge about measuring the performance of libraries for monographs to be devoted to the subject, that are not just aimed at scholars but approachable enough for the busy practitioner, too. Brophy's book is exactly that; thorough enough in its summation of the literature to satisfy scholars in search of a comprehensive text on the topic, and clear enough for library managers to use as a guide on the what and the how of performance measurement.

He takes a rather unexpected way of dealing with the component parts of performance measurement in libraries. Most writers would start with inputs and deal with measures in a sort of chronological order through processes and outputs to finish to outcomes and impacts. Brophy turns this traditional order on its head and starts with impacts on the customer. This, he argues reasonably, is the most important part of what a library does, so it is right to start with impacts and then work backwards to outputs and finally inputs. It makes for an interesting flow. In any case, should the reader be particularly interested in measuring outputs or inputs, each chapter is sufficient in itself.

Brophy is extremely well‐read about all aspects of measurement and so all the various attempts at formulating sets of measures gets at least a mention. The People's Network in the UK is often used as an example, presumably because Brophy has been closely associated with its evaluation, and this provides several useful insights into measuring the value of information technology in a library. References to library ICTs and using electronic resources are spread evenly throughout the text rather than being placed in a separate chapter.

The only other books that I know of which deal with this subject so thoroughly are both by Joseph Matthews: The Bottom Line: Determining and Communicating the Value of the Special Library (Libraries Unlimited, 2002) and Measuring for Results: The Dimensions of Public Library (Libraries Unlimited, 2004). After adding Brophy's book to Matthews' pair, the reader now has a short and comprehensive collection on library evaluation.