Performance measurement and information management

Evaluation is a term which crops up with increasing regularity in the professional literature of our field. The term is easy to understand, but it does have a wide variety of applications. Evaluation studies can range from full‐blown assessments of international information systems and referral services (e.g. AGRIS and INFOTERRA, respectively) to the evaluation of a particular service (e.g. a current awareness bulletin) in a specific organization. In this paper we shall be talking about in situ evaluation of services or systems which are ‘up and running’. Evaluations of an experimental kind (e.g. the Cranfield indexing studies) or the evaluation of innovative developments (e.g. Prestel as a carrier of community information) will not be considered.