Models for Library Management, Decision-Making and Planning

Librarians are faced with many challenges, including a decline in usage, tight budgets, staff cuts, limited space for growing collections, the Internet, and the demand for online books and reference materials, as well as how to remain relevant to their patrons in an electronic world. Library management today requires knowledge of staffing, workloads, inventory, overhead, storage, and materials processing, in order to fulfill the demands imposed by reader services, technical processing, and even library-based publishing. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of these variables in conjunction are vital to the survival of modern libraries. Models for Library Management, Decision-Making, and Planning provides library managers with quantitative, qualitative, and descriptive models for critical tasks. The book consists of three major components: the application of standard "workload factors," which provide the means for estimating staffing requirements to handle identified workloads; the estimation of workloads, for both library services and technical processing, based on data about the populations of users and about materials acquired; and the assessment of the impact of environments external to the library (in the institution it serves, in publishing, in the national information economy), especially as determinants of the workloads. The book is packaged with a CD-ROM, which contains the latest version of Dr. Hayes' Library Planning Model (LPM)-a theoretical and practical model for library management, including mathematics, accounting structures, and problem-solving strategies. It operates in Microsoft Excel and includes Visual Basic macros that provide a high level of menu-driven operation; it includes extensive documentation in the form of context-sensitive help screens, which provide guidance to the user at every stage of operation. The LPM can be used together with several files of sample data which allow users to compare their own results with those from other libraries. Data sets are from ARL, ACRL, academic, medical, and business libraries.Hayes, Robert M. is the author of 'Models for Library Management, Decision-Making and Planning' with ISBN 9780123341518 and ISBN 0123341515.