MIEL: Management Information for the Electronic Library
a JISC funded project
Final Report available in PDF format at:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/supporting/pdf/mis.pdf
NOTE: This project was completed while the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) was based at the University of Central Lancashire during 1993-98. On 1 April 1998, CERLIM moved to a new base at Manchester Metropolitan University.
As part of the FIGIT Supporting Activities and Initiatives, a short 'scoping' study of management information requirements and provision for the electronic library was commissioned. The aim of the study was to examine the scope for a detailed investigation of the management of information and performance measurement needs of library managers in an era of electronic libraries. Traditional measures of library performance - such as visits per capita, issues per capita, number of books in stock, and so on - are no longer relevant when much information is held and delivered electronically. Indeed it can be argued that some measures have been turned on their heads - so a library which attracts a large number of personal visits may simply be failing to meet its users' needs for information to be delivered to their personal workstations.
Among possible approaches to the development of a suitable set of measures for the electronic library are:
- - use of automatic logs of activity, of the kind produced by each institution by JISC services such as BIDS;
- - examining the approaches taken by commercial suppliers of document delivery systems, who require watertight usage measures to enable accurate billing of customers;
- - building on research-based systems, such as De Montfort University's ELINOR system, which is able to record usage down to individual page level;
- - co-operating with American researchers working in this field, prominent among them Charles McClure of Syracuse University;
- - developing further specific studies of electronic services, such as Harry East's work on BIDS-ISI (see East, H., Sheppard, E., and Jeal, Y. A Huge Leap Forward: a quantitative and qualitative examination of the development to access to database services by British Universities, 1988-1994. (Centre for Communication and Information Studies Policy Paper No. 5; British Library Research and Development Report 6202). London: The British Library, 1995)
It is intended to build on the work of MIEL by researching the above and other approaches with the aim of building a manual of techniques to enable library managers to gather, analyse and use suitable management of information and performance measures within the context of electronic libraries.
Final Report available in PDF format at:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/supporting/pdf/mis.pdf
For further information about MIEL, please contact:
Peter Brophy
Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM)
Manchester Metropolitan University
Department of Information and Communications
Geoffrey Manton Building
Rosamond Street West
Manchester
M15 6LL UK
Tel: +44 (0)161 247 6142
Fax:+44 (0)161 247 6979
cerlim@mmu.ac.uk