This study of 50 pairs of popular (written for layman) and technical (designed for those having specialized knowledge in particular discipline) monographs matched by subject, date of publication, and date of acquisition indicates that although technical works circulated more than popular, difference was not statistically significant. Seven…

Presents Checkland's soft systems methodology, discusses it in terms of the systems approach, and illustrates how it was used to relate evidence of user survey to practical problems of library management. Difficulties in using methodology are described and implications for library management and information science research are presented. (8…

Reports intensive survey of medical library users in Oxford teaching hospitals and university science departments that employed six survey techniques (interview, questionnaire, feedback form, direct observation, reference-tracing experiment, library record analysis). Three distinct user types (practitioner, researcher, practitioner-researcher)…

The main purposes of this study were to ascertain something of the quality of in-house use of materials in a science library, and to test the use of interviews as a method of measuring such use. Brief interviews were held with 414 users of the University of Illinois Veterinary Medicine Library (VML) between March 2 and May 13, 1987, to obtain…

Reports results of study measuring stack capacity at seven University of California medical and science libraries. Data collection, size of library collections, sample shelf measurements and volume widths, overall results, differences among libraries, time differences between old and new materials, and stack capacity estimates are highlighted.…