Editorial

Citation

Thornton, S. (2007), "Editorial", Performance Measurement and Metrics, Vol. 8 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/pmm.2007.27908aaa.001

Editorial

It is great pleasure, mixed with sadness that I take over the role of Editor from my friend and colleague Linda Banwell. Sadness, obviously, that Linda has retired from the performance measurement community, but pleasure in that I can now increase my own involvement with the Journal.

This is a time of great change for performance measurement statistics in the UK. The Research Assessment Exercise, a quinquennial assessment of university quality and performance is undergoing a drastic restructuring at the direction of the Treasury. What had been a comprehensive and comprehensible tool was to be swept away altogether and replaced with financial metrics alone based on the amount of private finance each university could draw in. Those criteria have been modified – almost reverted to what they were – for the humanities, as the fallacies in such an argument were obvious even to the bean-counters upon reflection, but the changes for non-humanities courses remain. Bahram Bekhradnia, the head of the Higher Education Policy Institute describes these changes as inconceived and ill-thought through. Although the RAE has flaws and its critics, it was consistent and allowed for meaningful comparisons. As he put it:

A body [the Treasury] that used to have the reputation of containing some of the finest minds in the government has spawned the most ill thought-out piece of policy, with the potential to do serious damage to one of the country’s great areas of strength (Bekhradnia, 2007).

Sadly this doesn’t appear to be the only area that the Treasury has interfered or influenced. The Museums Library and Archives Council has scrapped funding for LISU’s annual library statistics. This comprehensive publication, together with its companion volume the “Survey of library services to schools and children in the UK” have been running for 21 and 17 years respectively, and provide an essential tool for measuring services, with competent and coherent data sets maintained and analysed year on year. This cancellation is part of the MLA’s current review of its research and evidence strategy, the aim of which “is to transform the MLA Partnership into an evidence-based organisation”, which efficiently and effectively collects and uses the evidence it needs to:

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  Underpin the creation and implementation of the Corporate Plan.

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  Support policy and strategy development.

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  Enable effective advocacy.

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  Help demonstrate and monitor performance.

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  Help provide leadership, co-ordination and integration across the Partnership.

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  Support development of the sector (The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, 2006).

Fine words, but fine words butter no parsnips. If you don’t know how you are performing in the first place, how can you show if you are improving? Sadly, in my opinion, the MLA appear also to have spawned another “ill thought-out piece of policy, with the potential to do serious damage to one of the country’s great areas of strength”. I hope that their attempt to create an evidence-based organisation succeeds, but I fear they have gone for a cheap option without really understanding the consequences of such short-termist approaches.

This issue contains a diverse range of practical and research papers. We start with a study by Jill Beard, Penny Dale and Jonathan Hutchings at Bournemouth University. Using Action Research as their methodology, they provide solid data rather than solely anecdotal evidence about take up and acceptance of e-resources.

This is followed by a research paper from Mohammad Nasir Uddin and Paul Janecek in Bangladesh and Thailand on a novel application of faceted classification to improve information retrieval from web sites. As a student I requested to study Ranganathan as I found his concepts had a strange, if unfathomable beauty. Uddin and Janacek’s application shows considerable promise over conventional approaches, with greater hits rates and reduced searching times.

Margaret Markland, Geoff Butters and Peter Brophy provide us with another research paper on a novel technique – the History of The Future. Having been involved with research projects over the last 30 years, I have seen the downside of participants pulling in different direction to meet what they thought were common goals. This technique offers a sensible way of saving time, trouble, effort and angst from the outset by ensuring that everybody aims at an agreed target.

And finally, Roswitha Poll has given us another comprehensive overview paper, comparing (nay, benchmarking) the world’s major national library benchmarking projects. As usual, Roswitha’s paper is informative and allows one to learn from what has been done before, although “The search for an ultimate measure of benefit may be illusory” (Revill, 1990, p. 319).

I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Steve Thornton