Page 15 - DLIS104_MANAGEMENT OF LIBRARIES AND INFORMATION CENTRES

Management of Libraries and Information Centres

Notes University of California, Los Angeles. The purpose of the book is to provide library managers
with quantitative, qualitative, and descriptive models for effective planning and decision-making.
The emphasis, however, is largely on quantitative models that consist of mathematical equations
that measure the workloads that drive library operations. Hayes incorporates most of these
quantitative models into his Library Planning Model (LPM), an Excel spreadsheet on CD-ROM
that accompanies the book.

Hayes sets the tone for the book with an introductory chapter that discusses the nature of scientific
management, operations research, and systems analysis and the application of game theory to
decision-making. The next chapter lays the groundwork for how scientific management may be
applicable in library decision-making contexts. Hayes focuses on tactical operations such as assessing
“what-if” situations, setting fee structures, making outsourcing decisions, assigning staff, and
managing collection growth as well as strategic planning for institutional and national information
policy effects.
The Hayes’s LPM, its conceptual and operational structure as the tool for bringing together several
of the scientific management models to use on the decision problems. LPM is an Excel spreadsheet
that provides a means for estimating staff, materials, facilities, and associated costs needed to
handle workloads for typical services and internal operations in an academic library. The purpose
of LPM is to provide a means for assessing alternatives and “what-if” situations represented by
changes in some elements of data while keeping others unchanged. It is a menu-driven tool that
allows library managers to enter data about their user population, holdings, acquisitions and
cataloging activity, and use of library services. The model also allows for the input of data associated
with publishing, an increasing activity among academic libraries. Results are then presented that
may be used to generate estimates of staff and associated costs, determine distributions of staff
among various operations and services, and determine needs for facilities to serve users, store
materials, and accommodate staff. It is possible to modify any of the factors by which LPM determines
staff, facilities, or costs. The program also offers the ability to load data from the Association of
Research Libraries (ARL) or Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) annual
statistics as a means for calibrating the values used in LPM or as the basis for comparing one’s
library with similar values.
The study material deals with operational and tactical issues in library internal management
including a framework for estimating staff, materials, facilities, and associated costs needed to
handle workloads for typical services and internal operations in a library. Attention is given to
models for representing data about users and their uses of libraries in a form that permits generation
of estimates of workloads on user services and the impact on facilities. Similarly, Hayes presents
models for representing the acquisition of materials and the related technical processing, for
estimating the associated staffing, and for determining storage requirements. Finally it focuses on
strategic issues that are external to the library. Hayes presents models of institutional requirements
as determined by the institution’s own objectives and discusses models for representing the past,
present, and future status of means for information production and distribution. He touches on the
role of libraries as publishers and the impact of information economics on libraries. The book
includes a thorough index and detailed bibliographies with each chapter.
Formally trained as a mathematician, Hayes brings considerable expertise in systems analysis to
his examination of library management. He presents a thorough introduction to the potential of
operations research and quantitative management techniques in library decision-making and a
well-documented explanation of the rationale behind his LPM. Readers must, however, digest a
dense concentration of scientific management theory and statistical analysis to benefit the students.
Library managers with minimal knowledge of statistics may find it a challenge to grasp some of
the material.

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