Presents a summary of results from a study which developed a taxonomy for studying value-in-use of library and information services in corporations; 218 users from 10 corporations were interviewed after using a service from the special library. Provides suggestions for application of the taxonomy. (Author/AEF)

Describes a model of information seeking/retrieval in which the user's quest is seen as a generalized abstract "response function" representing the user's response to the information delivered by the system. The concept of an information quest, "Q," is illustrated with data collected in the Ant World Project at Rutgers…

Describes the development of a taxonomy of the value of library services based on users' assessments from five large research libraries. Highlights include empirical and derived taxonomy, replicability of the study, reasons for using the library, how library services are related to time and money, and a theory of value. (LRW)

Results of a study that evaluated 21 diverse services at 5 major academic research libraries demonstrate that a cross-functional approach to library services is feasible. Findings also highlight a new measure of impact, which is a weighted logarithmic combination of the amount of time that users spend interacting with the service, combined with a…

This is the final technical report (in three parts) of a 15-month long project to study the costs and value of library functions at five major research libraries. Twenty-one services or service aspects were studied, and numerous measures of the importance or benefit of the service to the users were made. These measures were studied together to lay…

Illustrates how various key abstractions of information finding, such as document relevance, a desired number of relevant documents, discouragement, exhaustion, and satisfaction can be modeled using the Petri Net framework. Shows that this model leads naturally to a new approach to collection of user data, and to analysis of transaction logs.…