Book

Reviews
EDITED BY GLORIA WERNER, Associate Editor

LANCASTER, F. W. The Measurement and Evaluation of Library Services. Washington, D.C., Information Resources Press, 1977. 395 p. $27.50. Libraries, as well as other institutions in the public sector, are under increasing pressures from funding agencies to control costs, to justify the importance of services, and to improve effectiveness, often with relatively stable budgets. How can a library identify its strengths and weaknesses, or measure its progress in reaching established goals? How can it determine the probable impact of proposed changes, or what should be changed, or dropped, or added? No book can provide specific answers to these questions, but this one provides a good beginning. Professor Lancaster has produced the first comprehensive survey of the methods which have been used to measure and evaluate library services. He has attempted to include all important or interesting approaches to evaluation, with primary emphasis on techniques which can be used to evaluate public services of a library. The book is concerned with how well a library satisfies the immediate needs of users; it does not attempt to cover the evaluation of libraries in terms of their broader, largely unmeasurable, "benefits" to

society.
The book was developed primarily for a graduate level course to provide a survey and synthesis of the published literature in the field and to encourage students to adopt an "evaluative attitude" towards library activities, an objective which should apply equally well to today's practicing librarian. The book is written in a clear, concise, and well-organized manner. Lancaster introduces the reader to new procedures and concepts, reviews the methodologies and results of the studies (often using comparative tables, charts, and graphs) and evaluates their effectiveness, use, and limitations. Areas which have not been adequately studied, or have been studied very little, are identified, as are problems of collecting and analyzing data. Separating one aspect of a library from others for study and evaluation is difficult, as Lancaster clearly emphasizes. Multiple factors affect library service
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and costs, and viewing one operation independently of others in a dynamic, interactive library system can be a complex and difficult undertaking. The chapters on the evaluation of reference services, literature searching, collection, document delivery capabilities, and use of the card catalog are especially useful, and provide interesting, sometimes fascinating, insights into library operations. The chapter on document delivery capabilities, for example, reviews the factors which affect the availability of materials and identifies actions which studies have shown can improve availability of materials and thus, user satisfaction. The chapters on technical services, automated systems, surveys, and standards are equally well done, but are apt to have a more limited audience among medical librarians. Studies dealing with medical libraries and literature are well represented; a number of key studies, including those on literature searching by Lancaster, document delivery by Orr, and collection use by Kilgour, are drawn from the medical library field. By highlighting and summarizing the key studies, the book provides an introduction to current methodologies as well as a guide for the reader wishing to go into greater detail in the literature. Each chapter includes an excellent bibliography, with nearly 500 references in total, mostly from the years 1964 to 1974, drawn primarily from American and British sources. This book should become a standard work in the profession and a point of departure for anyone wishing to use performance measurements in library operations or to further investigate the field. The book should encourage librarians, students, and researchers to apply, improve, and advance the methods which have been successfully applied, and to develop new and better ones as well. Its wide use should lead to a better understanding of the importance of evaluation in library administration. An increased use of measures of performance in library research and administration should help to hasten the "tempo of change" in libraries and to enable the profession to more easily document the differences between good and poor

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library service. The book will provide some stimulating and thought-provoking approaches to librarians who are considering introducing evaluation techniques, but it will also present the sobering thought that the profession still does not have tools which can be routinely applied to measure library operations and services. The book, however, effectively documents that progress is being made and holds out the promise that systematic measurement and evaluation will become standard procedures in library administration. GLENN L. BRUDVIG Minneapolis, Minnesota
URATA, TAKEO, ed. Medical and Health Libraries in Southeast Asia. Selected Papers from the Last Four SEA MIC Workshops on Health Docum en tation. Tokyo, Southeast Asian Medical Information Center, 1977. 222 p. The variety of levels of development of countries in Southeast Asia can be appreciated by a mere roll-call of the major ones: Australia, Papua and New Guinea, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Khmer. To describe the medical library situation in so disparate a group of countries is to provide a kaleidoscope rather than a photograph. Yet this report of the first four meetings of SEAMIC (Southeast Asia Medical Information Center), an organization of medical librarians throughout the area, brings out similarities as well as fundamental differences. At one end of the sophistication of health sciences libraries one finds a few countries with a tradition of good libraries, either left over from their colonial overlords, as in Singapore, or by developing a tradition themselves, as in Japan. These countries present the same problems as those found in western libraries: how to obtain all the journals published, how to provide MEDLINE services, SDI products, library networks, computerization, photocopy restrictions, and the provision of good indexes to the local language literature. At the other end of the scale are countries with no tradition of libraries, no training for librarianship, no understanding of how libraries can help biomedical work, an absence of publishing and bookselling activities, no national bibliographic apparatus, and splintering of already small collections into departmental and professional "libraries." The majority of the countries described in this work fall somewhere in between these extremes, and reading the reports on them gives

one a fine feeling for the diversity of people and the selfless attempts of many librarians to provide the best help and service in spite of almost overwhelming odds. Other generalizations can be noted. Most Southeast Asian countries have languages which do not use Roman alphabets; moreover, most of the literature in medicine is printed in languages with Roman alphabets. Several problems emerge from this situation: exhaustive efforts must be made to locate publications in the local language for students and others not versed in foreign languages so that the local language can be interfiled in the catalog; and, since most of the journals in the vernacular languages are not indexed in internationally published indexes, the local bibliographic institute (usually the medical library) must produce an index to this literature. Another generalization which can be made is that the government apparatus in Southeast Asian countries by and large bears down much more heavily on the life of the individual medical library or librarian than is true in western countries. The ingenuity required to obtain foreign currency to purchase non-Asian journals, the frustrations of inefficient or venal postal services, and the paper work required to order or pay for anything requires of the librarian the patience of Job, the philosophy of Buddha, and the iron will of a religious zealot. ESTELLE BRODMAN, PH.D. St. Louis, Missouri DRANOV, PAULA. Microfilm: The Librarians' View, 1976-77. White Plains, New York, Knowledge Industry Publications, 1976. ii, 101 p. $24.50 (plus $1.00 for postage and handling). Paperback. This work is organized into five parts: summary, literature review, questionnaire, telephone survey, and conclusion, which because of their uneven quality must be criticized separately. The literature review is a first-rate piece of work. It is comprehensive and readable. In twenty-two pages it condenses the major objective work of librarians, researchers, and producers of microforms. For students of librarianship and those new to the field, it provides a fine overview of the subject. For those who have kept up with the field, it is a good refresher. The questionnaire is by far the weakest part of the work. It exhibits all that is wrong with the questionnaire methodology. The first problem relates to the sample. The population of librarians
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