September 1998

THE STATE OF PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT IN LIBRARIES AND INFORMATION SERVICES: REFLECTIONS ON THE BASIS OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2ND NORTHUMBRIA INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE.

Niels Ole Pors, Library Link Regional Convenor - Europe

From 7 to 11 September 1997 the 2nd International Conference on Performance Measurement took place at the Department of Library and Information Management at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle. The 1st conference had been held in 1995. The proceedings of the 2nd have just arrived and it results in 460 tightly packed pages.

This conference has become a truly international event with contributors and participants from all over the world. It has also succeeded in attracting some of the really well-known professionals and academics from the field.

Nearly 50 papers appear in the publication. It is of course impossible to cover all of them, but it could be useful simply to ask the question: How far has we come in this field? What challenges will we meet in the coming years?

The 5 keynote papers were interesting. Rowena Cullen asked in her presentation the pertinent question: Does performance measurement improve organisational effectiveness? It is mainly a methodological paper that examines the past and present of PM. It also raises some important points concerning the use of research in libraries. Cullen describes the comprehensive work that has been done in developing performance indicators and relates them to a theoretical framework.

I guess the keynote paper by F.W.Lancaster - one of the wise old men in the field - raises high expectations also because of the title: Evaluating the Digital Library. Anyway that was one of the reasons I attended the conference. It would be an exaggeration to say that the paper gave new PI (performance indicators) for the digital library. The paper presents a very sound comparison of PI in traditional, and in digital libraries. Lancaster also put forward some provocative remarks about the human element versus the machine element in library services.

Roswitha Poll gives, in her keynote paper, a very amusing account of the introduction of the performance measurement process into a library system. The paper looks closely at the resources spent on measurement activities, and the outcome of all the measures in terms of reaching goals. This very elegant paper points out quite a lot of the problems involved in the management process. This paper could be seen as plea in relation to a sound and well- thought implementation of PM in libraries.

Overall and put together the keynote papers gave a - not exactly pessimistic - but cautious view of the overall benefits of the PM efforts during the last 3 decades. Overall there seemed to be a warning not to use too many resources when evaluating what we are doing. This implicit warning is of course important in a situation where resources and budgets are in a state we feel could be better.

Quite a lot of the very diversified papers reported on experiments, investigations and applications in library systems. Some presented methodological refinements and evaluations of methods. Let us look at some of the topics.

There were some new approaches. It looks as if the idea about the stakeholder's claim to performance data is now taken seriously. Also the idea about service-level agreements seems to have reached a certain refinement, even if it looks like quite a lot of tedious work. There are reports about these approaches. Both these approaches can be considered as taking some part of PM into the professional life of the information and library scene. The idea of stakeholder or multiple constituencies broadens the traditional user-oriented approach to management and PM, giving a more comprehensive view of the different aspects of reality. It is in this sense, in line or in accordance with the TQM movement. John Crawford formulates the advantage as being one that has the potential to integrate the library or the information unit into the broader aspect of the community or the mother institution.

But most of all these approaches are an adaptation of prevailing trends in the society and in the general management literature. Our field is still very open to imports from other academic disciplines. There is nothing wrong with that, but in some ways it simply looks like our academics and professionals are constantly shifting focus and approaches. The bleak side of this is, of course, that it is very difficult to get a real and profound testing of earlier approaches and their practical, methodological and scientific validity.

Another interesting report came from S. Larsen. He gave an account of the implementation of the new Danish performance-related-pay system.

Some papers took different methodologies a step further. There were reports of the application of the SERVQUAL model to reference services in research libraries. In the proceedings there are two papers on the SERVQUAL methods. Both papers gave interesting results that indicate the usefulness of the method.

The old question about comparability of PM between different libraries was also raised at the conference. Blagden and Barton presented a research project which aimed to develop a tool-box of PI, that should make it possible to compare the performance of different libraries.

I guess that many participants in the conference and readers of the proceedings had especially looked forward to evaluation techniques and methodologies that could be used in relation to the digital library and the various electronic services. It was the one area of the proceedings that disappointed me most. I am not talking about the quality of the papers in the this section, but of the paucity of papers and of the evident lack of adequate methods and techniques. Obviously there is a need for further methodological development in this area. In this section Amos Lakos presented two papers. I think his emphasis on more sophisticated log analysis is illuminating and sound. Wynne and Brophy presented in their paper a framework for evaluating electronic services and they also point to areas where further work has to be undertaken.

This review of course only covers a very small part of the conference and the volume. But still it points to some important observations.

In a way you could say, that we have come a rather long way with performance measurement. The pessimistic tone in some of the papers maybe reflects that performance measurement cannot solve all the problems it was intended to solve. I think the one most important feature of PM and PI is, that it certainly has shifted the focus of librarians and information officers to different areas of accountability. There have now been developed several toolboxes with instruments. What we need in the future is a careful work that takes these into the digital area.

Proceedings of the 2nd Northumbria Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services. Eds. Pat Wressel and associates. Newcastle upon Tyne. 1998. ISBN 0 906433 30 4. �55. The volume is available from Information North, Bolbec Hall, Westgate Road, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 1SE, England

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