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Title:
Solving Management Problems in Information Services
Review:
This book is aimed directly at the information services practitioner
and addresses a subject that is becoming increasingly important:
methods that library and information managers can use to evaluate and
measure their services. In a world where we are under increasing
pressure to prove our worth, this is a timely resource.
The book provides an accessible introduction to some of the techniques
that can be used to review services and plan for the future. In this
it is largely successful. The book explores in each chapter a number
of techniques around a theme, which include: performance; standards;
electronic information; impact and value information.
Christine Urquhart argues that libraries traditionally collect large
amounts of data, such as numbers of loans, numbers of visitors, etc.,
but this data needs to be analysed and presented in order to be
meaningful as performance measures. She makes useful suggestions for
the less than highly numerate library manager in presenting the date,
for example drawing charts so that the correlation patterns can be
easily seen.
I was particularly interested in the chapter on co-operation and
collaboration, which discusses the application of game theory and
social network analysis to the problem of people not sharing
information in knowledge management systems. We all know that the
culture of knowledge management is more important than the software
used to capture the data, but finding ways to encourage that culture
of knowledge sharing can be difficult to achieve.
The author examines network models, using the rise of Google as an
example and then attempts to apply the lessons learned from this work
to planning and developing library and information services. She gives
examples of where they have been successfully applied. She also sets
out to model the value of information, explains how to use probability
matrices and conduct risk analysis. The book concludes with a section
on forecasting and simulation.
I found the section on impact evaluation very useful as this is a
problem I am currently grappling with. The author emphasises the
relationship between costing and impact evaluation, as there is little
point in assessing the impact of a service that cannot be justified
economically in the first place. After a short section on costing, the
book moves on to conducting an impact study as an aid to planning, and
techniques to help in the allocation of finite resources; these
include: cost benefit analysis, immediate impact assessment, and time
saved analysis.
You need to understand a certain level of mathematics to use this book
to the full. The author explains well why you might correlate two sets
of data and the importance of picking the appropriate data to compare,
but she does assume that the reader understands how to use the
correlation function in Microsoft Excel. While the book rarely goes
into enough detail about a particular technique to immediately apply
it, it does provide some useful examples from libraries and
information units, and it provides references to further reading on
each one. It has certainly provided me with food for thought in
structuring my reporting, planning and preparation of business cases.
Whether or not the techniques are fun to use, as the author hopes, is
a matter of one's personal inclination and engagement with numbers.
They are certainly useful and gave me some useful tools to take
forward.
Free Pint Reviewer:
Diana Nutting is Head of Information Strategy and Development at
Business Link for London, responsible for market intelligence, website
content, customer research and knowledge management. She specialises
in company and market information and runs an almost completely
paperless information unit. Diana started her career as an academic
librarian, before moving into market intelligence at, among others,
Unilever and Parcelforce, where she started the first market
intelligence function. For six years before joining Business Link For
London in July 2003 she ran her own market intelligence consultancy.
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