Editorial

Citation

Banwell, L. (2004), "Editorial", Performance Measurement and Metrics, Vol. 5 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/pmm.2004.27905caa.001

Editorial

I am delighted to be taking over the editorship of Performance Measurement and Metrics with effect from this issue. Delighted, and daunted to be following in the footsteps of Sandra Parker, colleague and friend to many of us and who retired from our staff at Northumbria University (for the second time!) at the end of July. Over some 30 years of teaching, researching and advocating on behalf of public libraries nationally and internationally, Sandra has been instrumental in taking forward the debate surrounding performance management and measurement in libraries. This journal, and also the Northumbria International Conference Series on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services are tangible and well regarded outcomes from her work. I shall endeavour to do my bit, with the continued support of the editorial boards for the journal and conference, to continue, and build on, Sandra’s work. I know we all wish her well as she departs the UK for six months as a visiting professor at the University of Tsukuba in Japan where she will be adding a new dimension to her performance measures work. She has promised at least one future article for this journal, and hopefully a paper too at our Performance Measures (6) Conference next year.

A few facts to contextualise me as your new editor. I have a professional library background from earlier in my career, and subsequently moved to research and teaching. I have been at Northumbria University for 12 years, first as a contract researcher and then as a lecturer specialising in research methods. My research background started with a PhD in Computer Science, on service design to support user information needs in a multidisciplinary field, which is where my early contract research work also focused. I later became interested too in the process, products and outcomes of evaluation of both services and systems, and in evaluation per se as a method applied to information behaviour in a range of organisational contexts. It is my hope and intention to encourage submission of material to the journal, which will cover a broad range of perspectives on performance measurement and metrics, which will enrich our core focus area of Library and Information Services. I hope, for example, that we will be seeing articles in forthcoming issues on topics such as benchmarking ICTs in both local authorities and the private sector, both in the UK and elsewhere.

For this current issue, I have taken the opportunity to publish together five articles, which were presented at the 5th Northumbria Performance Measures conference, held in Durham, UK, in July 2003. The theme bringing them together is methods and outcomes, seen in a public sector context. The papers by Curtis and Self are both about frameworks and methodologies. Curtis is the director for District Council Continuous Performance Assessment (CPA) at the UK Audit Commission, which sets the measurement framework to which the UK public sector libraries must adhere. Self provides a case study of the use of the balanced scorecard – applied in a university library in the USA, but with lessons and transferability to other contexts. The remaining three papers all describe public sector based examples of application of methodologies. Macnaught, head of Cultural Development at Gateshead and responsible for its libraries, responds to Curtis’s keynote paper, describing Gateshead’s experience of the use of CPA. Craven and Brophy write about the Longitude II project’s web-based toolkit designed for adoption by all UK public library authorities to evaluate the longitudinal impact of their IT-based services to end users. Greenwood and Davies have developed and applied a novel set of performance evaluation instruments for a program of reading promotion activities in UK public libraries.

May I also take this opportunity to remind you that next year will again be conference year. The 6th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services will again be held in Durham, UK, from 20-23 August. So please be planning your abstracts and look out for the call for papers later in the year. In the meantime, I look forward to receiving your articles for the journal, and hope you will enjoy the current issue.

Linda Banwell