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WHITHER OUR ACADEMIC LIBRARIES? A PARTIAL VIEW OF MANAGEMENT RESEARCH

A. GRAHAM MACKENZIE (University of Lancaster)

Journal of Documentation

ISSN: 0022-0418

Article publication date: 1 February 1976

40

Abstract

Given the current situation of the world's developed nations, it is hardly surprising that the economical organization of libraries is an area of study which has aroused considerable interest over the past few years; a large amount of work has been done in both America and Britain, and a number of bibliographies and literature reviews have appeared (e.g. 1–4). No attempt will be made here to be similarly exhaustive, since the object of the Progress in Documentation series is to highlight only the most significant contributions to the current state‐of‐the‐art; a further self‐imposed limitation is that every item quoted should be, in the reviewer's opinion, either actually or potentially useful to the librarian‐at‐the‐shelf, who has to turn his mind to the practicalities of operating a real system. It is all very well to treat library management as an academic exercise, a way‐station in the career development of a management scientist, as we see in all too many published examples—one, which shall remain anonymous, produces some elegant models and manipulations, but openly admits that the data required to make them operable do not exist, and moreover could never be collected; but if the librarian cannot follow what the researcher is saying, or see any benefit from applying his results or methods, then from the practical point of view the research might as well not have been carried out or published. It is unfortunately true that there is a great gulf fixed between the two sides: the librarian neither understands, nor wishes to bother with, the detailed mathematical treatment of models, while the theorist is not interested in any problem which is conceptually simple, even though in practical terms it may be difficult to solve. What is needed in this area is common sense, the ability to think at large, untrammelled by received professional wisdom, and to relate the converging products of many separate disciplines to the problem in hand; this is why the research teams which have achieved the most significant results are those which contain a mixture of librarians and management scientists.

Citation

GRAHAM MACKENZIE, A. (1976), "WHITHER OUR ACADEMIC LIBRARIES? A PARTIAL VIEW OF MANAGEMENT RESEARCH", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 32 No. 2, pp. 126-133. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026620

Publisher

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MCB UP Ltd

Copyright © 1976, MCB UP Limited

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