The research guide is a common tool librarians use to communicate with and instruct their audiences. Despite their prevalence and value to users, research guides remain underused. There are many examples of efforts encouraging guide use, but few studies have measured the effectiveness of that promotion. Academic Outreach librarians at Virginia…

Professionally, school librarians are faced with an explosion of choices--search engines, online catalogs, media types, subscription databases, and Web tools--all requiring scrutiny, evaluation, and selection. In turn, this support "stuff" forms a basis for making additional choices about how and what they teach and what they assess. Whereas once…

Two measures of effectiveness for university libraries are constructed. The Primary Measure of Effectiveness, defined over the total population of users, considers the number of material and information items desired by the users, the number of satisfactorily answered inquiries, and the number of users. For the Secondary Measure of Effectiveness…

Broome Community College demonstrates how user satisfaction surveys contribute quality and accountability assessment data to their learning resources program review process and ultimately, to educational effectiveness. Appended in this article are the Library/Learning Resource Center Faculty and Staff Survey and the Student Use Survey. (VWC)

The library instruction program conducted at the University of Colorado consisted of classroom contact with students in the history and economics departments, and production of a slide tape. Evaluation instruments were developed for discovering present student and faculty library use and faculty attitudes toward the library, with the idea of…

The DIALIB Project was a 3-year experiment that investigated the potential of the public library as a "linking agent" between the public and the many machine-readable data bases currently accessible via the telephone using online terminals. The study investigated the following questions: (1) Is online search of use to the patrons of a…

This is the final report of the evaluation of the DIALIB project--an investigation of the public library as a linking agent to major scientific, educational, social, and environmental data bases. The report is presented in seven sections and four appendices as follows: Section I provides an introduction to the study and a brief summary of the…

A thorough understanding of the uses and applications of statistical techniques is integral in gaining support for library funding or new initiatives. This resource is designed to help practitioners develop and manipulate descriptive statistical information in evaluating library services, tracking and controlling limited resources, and analyzing…

Materials which relate to the activities of the Philadelphia Student Library Resources Project for the period July 1, 1972-June 30, 1973 are presented. The Project, which began with research into student library needs, use patterns, attitudes and resources has now moved to the stage of interagency planning, operation, and evaluation of programs…