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Higher education reform in Vietnam has recently required university libraries to improve their quality, to evaluate their performance, and to be accountable for the purpose of quality assessment and accreditation. Systematic performance measurement is an integral part of this process. The aims of this paper are: to provide an overview of the current state of performance development in Vietnamese university libraries; to address issues related to the measurement of library performance; and to propose an approach to evaluation for university libraries in Vietnam.

The paper reviews the literature on library performance measurement, with particular focus on university libraries in Vietnam. Relevant documents relating to performance measurement were examined, and two case studies of performance measurement in university libraries in Vietnam were carried out.

It is critical that university libraries in Vietnam develop systematic performance measures and apply different methods and tools for performance measurement. To succeed, cooperation between the administering authority, university administration and library management is essential.

This paper reports on the first phase of a doctoral research project at Monash University. Further research is being undertaken to develop a framework for quality assurance and performance measurement for Vietnamese university libraries. The efficacy if this framework is yet to be tested through its deployment in practice.

While performance measurement is well established in Western countries, it is less so in Vietnam. The current research is seeking to develop a performance measurement framework for university libraries that is attuned to the Vietnamese context. The paper stresses the urgent need for the development of effective performance measures and systematic performance measurement systems amongst this sector.

This paper has been updated from the article that appeared in the ‘Proceedings of the 2nd Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services 1997’. It questions whether current UK systems of performance measurement and associated data collection activities are appropriate and suggests some hypotheses from which an improved framework might be developed.

There have been many challenges and uncertainties in determining the future direction(s) for performance measurement (PM) in Florida public libraries over the years. Social pressures for establishing increased accountability and community needs combined with the library administrators need to respond to these pressures served as the catalysts for the need to evolve PM processes in Florida public libraries.

The Hybrid Library of the Future (HyLiFe) project was funded by the Joint Information Services Council (JISC) for higher education in the UK and it focused on the users of the hybrid library. This article outlines the user‐centred approach used in evaluating the project. While the evaluation of HyLiFe diverged from much standard practice in performance measurement, the work of researchers into performance measures for the electronic library proved invaluable to the HyLiFe evaluation officer.

Stephen Town has been a thought leader and change agent in the academic library world for more than 20 years, who has produced a very large body of work in the areas of quality management and performance measurement that has been disseminated internationally. Town’s retirement from full-time employment at the University of York provides a timely opportunity to review his contribution to the field. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this issue.

The review outlines Town’s career path and professional interests and then appraises his published output, concentrating on his contributions to thinking and practice in the areas of benchmarking, information literacy, service quality, and measuring the value and impact of academic libraries and information services. The discussion is organized thematically to illustrate the evolution and development of his interests and ideas over the review period and also references-related work by other authors to set his work in context.

The study found many examples of innovative and creative work that had influenced thinking and practice in the library profession, including the development of models, frameworks, and tools with the potential to improve the effectiveness of service benchmarking, information literacy education, library advocacy, relationship management, staff evaluation, and impact measurement.

The volume of published work necessitated some selectivity in the material covered, but the review provides sufficiently comprehensive coverage of the areas specified to represent the work effectively.

Town has produced a substantial number of publications as a practitioner-researcher that have not previously been reviewed independently as a coherent body of work.

Management information for decision making is an essential tool for library managers. This paper outlines the European Commission Libraries Programme decision support projects that were brought together under the CAMILE concerted action. The three common themes to emerge from the CAMILE projects are then discussed. The themes are: information for decision making, systems for decision support, and the future challenges of measuring impact and developing performance measures for the elec‐tronic library. To conclude, recommendations for future research in the field of decision support in European libraries are considered.

The aim of the current article is to clarify how the staff of Estonian university libraries define the concepts of performance and efficiency in the context of libraries, what is the general conception of performance measurement and evaluation, what impact it is believed to have on the personal future career, and how one's own efficiency and performance is evaluated in comparison with one's colleagues.

The data used in this paper are based on reviewing and summarizing of relevant literature to provide an overview of the concepts of performance and efficiency in general and in the context of the library as well as on results of the study, held in 2011/2012 in Estonian university libraries to determine the attitude of the libraries' staff towards work organisation and performance appraisal.

Although a number of Estonian university librarians highly evaluated performance measurement and appraisal as a possible source of information and feedback for improving their work performance and seeking out their further training and education needs, they unfortunately do not see any relation between performance improvement and their salary increase and career. As for the library as a whole, performance appraisal is profitable, although it is assumed that it might raise some problems. Efficiency and performance in the library context are rather associated with service and user satisfaction. Performance measurement and appraisal system in Estonia university libraries is almost non‐existent and definitely needs to be developed.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, no research has been previously carried out in the library context to determine library employees' attitudes towards their work organisation and coordination as well as measurement and appraisal of their work performance.

The thesis of this book is that library measurement needs to move on and away from the idea that it is a process of counting and comparing the resources deployed by our libraries. The current emphasis on output measurement is an improvement but not the answer, refreshing as it is to judge a library by the quantity of what comes out instead of by the quantity of what is put in. The author believes that the nature of the library service is that of a “broad aim” social programme, best judged (evaluated) by gathering “politically significant information on the consequences of political acts”. “Political” here implies that the aims and intentions of those funding, organising and using libraries arise from more than one set of social values and from more than one definition of what the library is, and that they differ in priorities even when they do not directly conflict. Information about the library service will be in the form of a spectrum of measures reflecting the inputs, the processes, the outputs and the impact of the library, relating the various values in various ways. The difficulty in measuring library services, it is argued here, arises from the conflicts and lack of clarity about the aims of the service, and from uncertainty about how the process affects the outcomes. The technical problems of measurement are secondary. Chapter One aims to survey the range of measures available, whilst the rest of the book discusses how they might be used.

In the modern “student focused” university setting, quality assurance and continual service improvement have become more and more important in the delivery of academic library services. Working in partnership with their students, academic libraries can enable meaningful engagement, through qualitative methods which allow individual students to contribute to performance measurement activities and service development. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how qualitative methods can be used to engage students in the performance measurement activities of academic libraries.

Through a review of relevant literature, discussion around the main themes and some case study examples, this paper illustrates how effective student engagement through qualitative methods can contribute to the quality assurance, performance measurement and ultimate service improvement of academic libraries.

The paper focuses specifically on focus group and reflective methods and also details some elements of user experience (UX) which brings together different qualitative techniques available for academic libraries. The paper concludes with a feature case study which discusses how meaningful student engagement was achieved through a large-scale UX project at the University of the Arts, London.

The paper brings together many different discussions around qualitative methods in performance measurement and is original in its discussions around such activity as student engagement initiatives.

The paper discusses theoretical and practical approaches to the problems of assessing library performance and especially of measuring outcomes in the developing world, i.e. the impact and value of the library services for their users and society as a whole. The importance of a systematic evaluation of a library’s activities and the use of modern management methods and tools is emphasized. The need for an appropriate management information system as one of the key elements for the library decision‐making process is demonstrated. The need to enable libraries in developing countries to implement national systems of library statistics is demonstrated. To do this it is important to educate the librarians to collect and use data effectively, to enable them to be able to make the transition from measuring inputs to measuring outputs, and to understand the possible methods and importance of measuring library outcomes.