Recovery of significant achievements by exemplary individuals and institutions in public education and librarianship informs our present understanding and motivates future efforts. This narrative history recounts some of the struggles and successes of a great city library when the very conception of a free, public library was still being defined.…

A cost-benefit analysis of the 43-library, 260,000-title Midwest Medical Union Catalog (MMUC) of books, conducted from June, 1973, through May, 1975, under a grant from the National Library of Medicine, studied the 49-year-old catalog in the context of the interlibrary loan activity of the Midwest Health Science Library Network. The study tested…

This discussion of the measurement of performance criteria and desired or acceptable level of achievement focuses on the performance criteria used for the evaluation of interlibrary services (success rate, turnaround time, cost, and impact of service). Document delivery, communication, and interlibrary loan research are covered. Fifty references…

A survey was conducted to determine if California public libraries and systems serving 150,000 or greater populations met certain audiovisual standards established by the American Library Association (ALA). Fourteen public libraries and 11 systems responded to questions covering the criteria. Half the public libraries and the majority of systems…

A task force was appointed to insure that New York State's health information service programs were operating optimally. The task force was charged to review: (1) the effectiveness of the guidelines and assessment form as published in the "Manual for Assessing the Quality of Health Sciences Libraries in Hospitals"; (2) the present…

Special libraries can be expected to accept and approve the National Program for Library and Information Services although certain aspects of the program are antithetical to the nature of the special library. Traditionally independent, special libraries tend to have a local rather than national orientation and to resist standardization. Although…

In the United States there are 15 to 20 independent research libraries designed to provide the corpus of records necessary to intellectual inquiry in one or more disciplines, in dimensions as complete as possible, and with the optimum provision of scholarly apparatus and physical convenience. The rare nature of much of the collections of these…

Examines the roles and structures of several European national lending systems to find useful models for guiding future developments at home and abroad. Highlights include the current scene, growth of union catalogs, patterns of collection use, new bases for measuring performance, and charting a future course. (18 references) (EJS)