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There are three major cost areas to consider when selecting an automated system for cataloging: purchase/one‐time costs; ongoing costs; and staff resource costs. Staff resource costs are affected by such issues as hit rate, quality of records, ease of original cataloging input, the ease of transferring new records into the library's catalog, ease of ongoing catalog maintenance, system response time, and the related amount of downtime. Model worksheets are presented for calculating these costs for various bibliographic utilities and CD‐ROM‐based cataloging systems.

Faced with a relentless upsurge in the number of online searches from 1981 to 1982, the Head of Reference, Morisset Library and the Coordinator of Online Searching for the University of Ottawa ran, in June, 1982, a limited survey of staff allocation practices for online searching in 10 Canadian university libraries. The results of this survey and its implications for specific remedies to online staffing problems at the University of Ottawa are detailed. Recommendations for personnel allocation for online searching may find application in other university library systems in North America and elsewhere.

Information literacy (IL) is increasingly becoming an explicit learning outcome for college graduates, and some libraries are playing a role in planning and teaching IL instruction to students. Amidst the overall trend of shrinking budgets that libraries are experiencing, what strategies can be employed by libraries that support large universities to plan IL instruction? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Inspired by curriculum mapping, staff in the library assessment department created teaching maps which match the curriculum from seven colleges with the library’s teaching efforts. To create them, they combined information about: first, courses that librarians have instructed over the last three years with; second, required courses for majors within the colleges; and third, typical enrollment for each course.

Easily accessible information was combined to create the teaching maps, which enable the library to realign efforts to maximize IL instruction and best utilize library staff resources.

Teaching maps serve as a portal to quickly understand majors, courses and course enrollment, and provide baseline information on past library instruction activity to inform future IL instruction strategy. Library directors and teaching staff are utilizing them to realign instruction efforts.

Assessment strategies, such as curriculum mapping, serve not only the institution’s teaching mission, but also help strategize for effective and efficient stewardship of staff resources. These methods will be useful for library directors, assessment and instruction librarians at large research universities.

The practical issues associated with digitisation in the hybrid library context are discussed, based on work undertaken by the BUILDER Project in delivering two products: a pilot Electronic Key Texts service and a digital back‐run of the scholarly journal Midland History from 1971‐1998. In analysing document attributes, digitisation options, archival and delivery formats and detailing specific costs, there are two key lessons identified. Firstly, that scanning is only one stage in a complex workflow of inter‐related activities involved in delivering a digital resource; and secondly that costs need to be monitored as these can accrue very quickly due to the intensive use of staff resource involved in developing digitisation products. It rests with library managers to define where digitisation fits into their institutions, if at all, based on local needs and the collections they manage.

To show that despite libraries' tendencies to focus all their efforts – even in the online environment – on developing tools, resources, and finding aids for their patrons, some have also used the web to develop resources for staff needs.

Surveys a number of library web sites and highlights online resources that have been developed to assist library staff in areas of training, organization, and professional development.

Ranging from online instruction for new staff, listings of library policies and passwords, and resources for staff development, many libraries have begun to use their web sites to provide valuable information for staff too.

The examples presented in this column can provide guidance for any library beginning to use their web site to provide information resources for their staff. Several types of information are presented showing both the range of information of use to staff and a variety of methods to convey that information.

United Kingdom employers in recently privatized and public sector organizations are relying heavily on management training as an intervention mechanism to increase employee productivity. A survey of south‐west organizations confirmed this increase in training activity. Managers, however, did not feel participation in training had contributed towards improving their performance. Respondents felt their organizations should give higher priority to other actions such as increased staff resources and better internal communication systems. Presents an Organizational Performance Policy Matrix which permits employers to determine whether restructuring of managerial roles or training has the potential to increase productivity.

An established manufacturing company may have small foreign subsidiaries. But if the parent company has management problems, the problems of subsidiaries are usually worse. They may have all the problems of their parent magnified and added to by lower‐quality management, an absence of staff resources, foreign government regulations, and cultural differences.

Uses the experience of Western Michigan University to consider ways of eliminating deliberate misuse of public library systems. Outlines the use of Fortes 101, an Integrity Kiosk, WinBatch and WinU covering both cost and staff resources. Covers the changes made as the university introduces Windows 95 to its network.

The environmentally controlled library warehouse stores ten million collection items and its team of staff provides a delivery service to the students and researchers. Statistics show that the demand for the service was much higher than the forecast at the design stage and, as a result, the operationally intensive environment had bottlenecks and backlogs, which were affecting the service-level agreements. It was clear that the staffing levels were inadequate to meet the demand, so there was a need to capture data to enable evidence-based decision making to restructure and supplement staffing. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Each of the activities undertaken by staff were observed and timed over extended periods, which resulted in detailed measurements for each elemental task. On the basis of known demand for services, the author was able to extrapolate these measurements to model the demand on services and, therefore, the staffing requirement for a whole year.

The author was able to provide evidence to show that the levels of staffing were inadequate and two further full-time equivalent staff were required. The data also highlighted specific areas that required higher and lower levels of resourcing than those were currently provided.

The research was motivated by operational need in an environment where meeting service-level agreements is a key performance indicator. The methods can be applied to many library activities and are especially applicable to repetitive or high-intensity tasks. It is equally valuable in library operations where there is a perception that staffing levels are inadequate but it is not clear how additional staffing should be deployed.

Despite the many modern labour‐saving devices in use today, personnel costs remain the largest single item for most companies. The severe world economic recession has therefore focused attention on the need to make the most of qualified personnel; this is particularly important if maximum value is to be won from new market opportunities.