Guest editorial

Citation

Town, J.S. (2014), "Guest editorial", Performance Measurement and Metrics, Vol. 15 No. 1/2. https://doi.org/10.1108/PMM-05-2014-0020

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Performance Measurement and Metrics, Volume 15, Issue 1/2

The Tenth Conference of the Northumbria Performance Measurement series took place in York between 22 and 25 July 2013. This anniversary event 18 years on from the first conference was the largest and most successful to date, with 189 attendees, 69 papers, plenaries and workshops delivered and more than 20 countries represented. The conference review in the first proceedings placed a question mark on whether a second meeting in this discipline was warranted (Winkworth, 1995). The answer would appear to have been a resounding affirmative, and although the conference ploughed a lone furrow for more than a decade, the recent past has seen other conferences and meetings in this field springing up, particularly in North America.

The Northumbria Conference has a particular historic relationship with this journal, and it is pleasing to continue the association with this special issue. This edition celebrates both the international and local dimensions of the conference. One of the features of the Tenth Conference was a resurgence of submissions from the UK and Ireland, and this is also reflected in the selection of papers here.

Roswitha Poll's keynote addresses a significant performance measurement question of our time: how do libraries prove their influence on individual lives and society? This is considered in the context of both public and academic libraries, and covers surveys conducted in Europe, the USA and South Africa, neatly reflecting the breadth of interest and participation in the Northumbria conferences. Roswitha is the longest serving conference Editorial Board member and the sole continuous member from the first conference. Her contributions over the years have included several keynotes, and this paper demonstrates that her intellect, humour and enthusiasm are undiminished.

Another track within value and impact measurement development is the use of big data to demonstrate the correlations between library services and the educational or other societal outcomes which libraries generate. Showers and Stone continue the series of publications arising from work at the University of Huddersfield, and introduce the Library Analytics and Metrics Project (LAMP) supported by JISC, which aims to create a shared library analytics service for UK academic libraries. The authors suggest this will serve to answer Elliot Shore's keynote at the conference to move beyond activity measurement to the impact on what really matters to students and researchers.

Service quality measurement through satisfaction surveys has been a constant interest of the conference since the beginning, and the 2013 event continues the strong record of reporting developments in this area of measurement. LibQUAL+ has been the subject of papers in the conference since its origins, and Killick and the van Weerdens’ paper exemplifies how LibQUAL+ has become an international enterprise, and how both the survey and relationships developed through the Northumbria conference encourage and promote working beyond national boundaries. The paper reveals some important commonalities in results present across UK and the Netherlands academic libraries.

The success of LibQUAL+ has also led to the development of related instruments based on the same principles. The TechQUAL+ survey now provides a service similar to LibQUAL+ for assessing IT service quality in higher education institutions. The paper by Hall, Kennedy and Stephens reflects upon the first use of this tool in the UK, and the practicalities of assessing user satisfaction with technology services.

Working together is both the theme and title of the paper by Creaser and colleagues. The connection between University academic departments and their libraries based on eight case studies across the UK, USA and Scandinavia were joined up with a parallel project at the University of Nottingham to elaborate the value of libraries to both teaching and research.

Grieves and Halpin's paper concentrates on a single academic library case, demonstrating the importance of a continuous long-term commitment to quality and how this can generate an appropriate culture for excellent service. The distinctive marketing conceptual framework provides a model at Sunderland for ensuring positive engagement with customers and users, so important in the current climate, but also an enduring concern for the conference.

The final paper from the Conference by Hart and Amos again demonstrates the international nature of the conference, and also reflects back to papers on benchmarking in the earliest Northumbria conferences. A benchmarking project managed from New Zealand is described, focusing on efficiency and involving libraries in North America, Europe and Australasia.

This edition also contains a paper by the Guest Editor, proposing a framework for human capital measurement within academic and research libraries. The framework provides library leaders with a method for assessing the link between staff and their experience, and the broader impact and value of libraries. This work follows on from a paper at the Ninth Northumbria Conference, subsequently published in a previous edition of this journal, which laid out a value scorecard for libraries (Town and Kyrillidou, 2013).

The full proceedings of the Tenth Northumbria Conference will be published in due course, and the journal Library Management will publish its own special edition of further papers from the conference later this year, in which the focus will be on the broader management dimension of measurement.

The First Northumbria Conference proposed that we should carry on researching. These papers demonstrate that the performance measurement community of library researchers and practitioners has followed that injunction, offering the fruits of their work through ten conferences. We look forward to the next conference to be held in Edinburgh in 2015.

J. Stephen Town
University of York

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Stephen Thornton and Ian Hall for their support in producing this issue.

References

Town, J.S. and Kyrillidou, M. (2013), “Developing a values scorecard”, Performance Measurement and Metrics, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 7-16

Winkworth, I. (1995), “Conference review”, in Wressell, P. (Ed.), Proceedings of the 1st Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services, Information North, Newcastle Upon Tyne, p. 307