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This paper describes a 19‐week project which sought to examine and evaluate the library‐information service at Syntex Research Centre, Riccarton, Edinburgh, a pharmaceutical R and D centre. The project was unusual in attempting to evaluate the full range of the Library's stock, activities, and services, rather than dealing with only a single aspect. The remits of the Library and of the evaluation project are noted. The evaluation design is described in detail, and summary results are provided. Activities so treated include: library stock‐use records, inter‐library loan requests, use of library staff time, current awareness bulletin. 36 library users, research scientists, were interviewed, and their demand for library‐information services is described, using as a framework the categorisation of library service devised by Orr. Finally, there is some discussion of the validity of individual library‐information service evaluation tests, and of the problems and attractions of evaluating a complete library‐information service ‘in the round’.

It is contended that knowledge management is directed towards finding out how and why information users think, what they know about what they know, the knowledge and attitudes they have and the decisions they make when they interact with others. At the heart lies the mutation of information into knowledge, a process best understood through seeing, knowing and information retrieval as features common to cognitive psychology and information management. The knowledge we have of knowledge, and changes to knowledge, can be monitored in negotiations like knowledge interviews for trainees. Such knowledge and belief systems can also be translated into managerial strategies, both qualitative, as when we emphasise value and benefit in the marketing approach to information, and quantitative, as when we devise ways of assessing probabilities with which desired outcomes will occur. Knowledge management is as much the management of meaning as management of entities and people, for in meaning lies the key to our understanding of what we decide to do as information managers. It is a multi‐disciplinary field offering a semantics and pragmatics for the evaluating and self‐evaluating manager.

The literature of the last few decades reflects a steadily increasing concern with quantitative assessment of libraries and their services. This concern is both the result of, and a reaction to, growing pressures from within and without the library profession to adopt the tools of the management sciences. The pressures are generated by many factors including the success of these tools in other fields and their adoption by the organizations supporting libraries, the increasingly explicit character of competition for funds at all levels, and the complexity and critical nature of decisions on the host of new options being created by technology and by formalization of library networks.

The thesis of this book is that library measurement needs to move on and away from the idea that it is a process of counting and comparing the resources deployed by our libraries. The current emphasis on output measurement is an improvement but not the answer, refreshing as it is to judge a library by the quantity of what comes out instead of by the quantity of what is put in. The author believes that the nature of the library service is that of a “broad aim” social programme, best judged (evaluated) by gathering “politically significant information on the consequences of political acts”. “Political” here implies that the aims and intentions of those funding, organising and using libraries arise from more than one set of social values and from more than one definition of what the library is, and that they differ in priorities even when they do not directly conflict. Information about the library service will be in the form of a spectrum of measures reflecting the inputs, the processes, the outputs and the impact of the library, relating the various values in various ways. The difficulty in measuring library services, it is argued here, arises from the conflicts and lack of clarity about the aims of the service, and from uncertainty about how the process affects the outcomes. The technical problems of measurement are secondary. Chapter One aims to survey the range of measures available, whilst the rest of the book discusses how they might be used.

Reviews the literature on quality. Defines quality in management terms, gives examples of the advantages of quality appraisal, and describes how its assessment has been attempted by self‐evaluation, surveys of user satisfaction, and failure analysis. Discusses examples of how quality appraisal schemes have been set up from scratch, and of approaches to quality standards setting. Gives, for four aspects of library service, a detailed analysis of quality criteria and standards and methods used in appraisal: enquiry answering, document provision, computerized reference retrieval, and current awareness service.

Being able to show a benefit for information services to balance against their cost, and knowing what criteria to use for choice among the options for their provision—these are needs which loom large for information people. This paper reviews what techniques have been found useful, and tries to show how valuations from the clients of information services can be brought into the equation.

Some libraries and information services are quite definitely user‐centred; some think they are but are not always; some seem to be designed for librarians rather than users. The purpose of this monograph is to encourage the development of libraries to meet the perceived needs of users — I hope it will be found useful by librarians and information workers as well as by students.

Operational research was born during the 1939–45 war as an aid to military decision making. After the war it was rapidly applied to industrial production, and many new techniques were developed. It has since spread to all spheres of policy making.