College and Research Libraries V E R N M . P I N G S Development of Quantitative Assessment of Medical Libraries Assessments of library services can be used for a variety of purposes, including improvement of services, management justification, and budget preparation. The Institute for the Advancement of Medical Communication has developed methods for testing an academic re- search medical library's ability to provide specific services. These in- clude the ability to deliver books and journals to primary clientele, to supply answers of simple fact, to deliver documents through inter- library lending, and to verify and correct citations. Other methods were tested for evaluation and comparison of library service policies and utilization of services by a library's primary clientele. A random alarm device was developed. The use of this device has been tested and has demonstrated that many library "statistics" can be collected randomly and provide the same information that can be acquired by maintaining "total" counts of such services as circulation and library use. O N C E M A N L E A R N E D to record his ex- periences, the invention of libraries was inevitable. Libraries, in an abstract sense, are man-made institutions, and one reason for their existence is to sup- port the social organizations man de- fines. The object of study of natural sci- entists assumes that there is a regularity in nature; this regularity is "given" and Dr. Pings is Medical Librarian in Wayne State University. Preparation of this paper was supported in part by USPHS Contract PH 43-66-540 from the National Library of Medicine. The data and many of the concepts in the paper were developed by project members supported by this con- tract. The principal investigator was Rich- ard H. Orr, M.D., Director, Institute for the Advancement of Medical Communica- tion. The principal collaborators were Ed- win Olson, Ph.D., Senior Research Associ- ate, Institute for the Advancement of Med- ical Communication; Irwin H. Pizer, Di- rector of the Library and Associate Profes- sor of Medical History, State University of New York, Upstate Medical Center; and the author. although scientists search for ways to control regularity, any investigation into the purpose of nature soon moves into the disputatious realm of philosophy and theology. Any investigation of a man-made institution, dn the other hand, must include in its methodology and approach the purpose of the institu- tion if it is to produce any results that can be used to alter, improve, or justify the institutional function. Libraries, as social entities, have only relatively recently come under the scru- tiny of systematic study. Certainly these studies have contributed to the improve- ment of library service, but the meth- odology of library surveys established by the turn of the century has changed lit- tle. Lyle, while criticizing this lack of in- novation, rationalizes that investigation of academic library functions has rested upon busy, practicing librarians who, for the sake of convenience perhaps, have usually taken "a greater interest in the measurable and organizational problems of finance, physical plant and equip- / 373 374 / College 6- Research Libraries • September 1968 ment, and operational problems than they do in some of the more intangible problems of policy, relationships, and li- brary use."1 Most of us can easily agree with Clapp's remark that the problems of the research library arise from the gap that exists between what its users require and what it can supply.2 We need to find out how to evaluate, or at least make decisions about, the function of the library in the research and related programs which society supports. This paper is a summary report of a project undertaken between July 1966 and June 1968, supported by a contract from the National Library of Medicine to the Institute for Advancement of Medical Communication "to develop methods for collecting objective data suitable for planning and guiding local, regional, and national programs to im- prove biomedical libraries and the bio- medical information complex." This suc- cinct statement requires amplification to make the nature of the project clear. Un- like most studies in which the purpose is to collect data and test hypotheses, where methods are only the means to these ends, the emphasis is completely reversed in this project—it is methods, rather than data, that are of primary interest.3 G E N E R A L A P P R O A C H Requirements In general, three considerations guid- ed the project throughout, which served not only as a perspective within which to work but also as a check on progress and purposes. First, any survey method developed had to be applicable to aca- demic biomedical libraries. As expansive as one might like to have been, the 1 Guy R. Lyle, "An Exploration into the Origins and Evaluation of the Library Survey," in Maurice F . Tauber and Irene R. Stephens, Library Surveys (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 9 6 7 ) , p. 3 - 2 2 . 2 Verner W . Clapp, The Future of the Research Library (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1 9 6 4 ) . 3 A series of articles is being prepared describing what methods were tested and how they were selected and developed. The first two articles in this series have been accepted for publication in the July 1968 issue of the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. work could not be made applicable to all biomedical libraries, at least without some modification. It had to be recog- nized from the outset that attitudes of librarians and their supervisors to stand- ardization of all kinds have too often been ambivalent. They have argued in their writings for uniform standards and practices; they have set up committees to design standard codes; and at the same time nearly every library is non- standard to a greater or lesser degree in many of its operations and records.4 The efforts of the project were therefore di- rected primarily to developing instru- ments that could be applied to the med- ical school library. Any instrument that was useful for this diverse, although cir- cumscribed, group of libraries should be adaptable for use in other libraries. The second general requirement was that any method of data collecting should be one that could be applied in an operat- ing library by the staff. Finally, as a cor- ollary to the last requirement, the meth- ods used and the resultant analysis of data must have meaning to librarians as well as to nonlibrarians, users, and ad- ministrators. Perspective The concept and the desirability for interlibrary dependence since its pro- mulgation at the turn of the century, has all but become part of the ethic of librarianship. Yet nearly all the investi- gative work on libraries involves but one library or, at most, the relationship of a main library to a group of subunits with the effort to determine whether the ad- ministrative unit with its external con- straints of space and finances is func- tioning efficiently. Rather than trying to refine old and search for new ap- proaches to studying individual libraries, it was decided to try to define methods that would be applicable in evaluating *Cf. J. W . Jolliffe, M. B. Line, and F . Robinson, "Why Libraries Differ—and Need They?" in Nigel S. M. Cox and M. W . Grosse, Organization and Han- dling of Bibliographic Records by Computer (Hamden, Conn.: Anchor Books, 1 9 6 7 ) , p. 6 2 - 6 8 . Quantitative Assessment of Medical Libraries / 375 « w >> o s « rS fc 2 5