Efficiency Criteria for the Operation of Large Libraries

IT is rather surprising that behavioral scientists have not discovered libraries much sooner in their search for institutional environments suited for the testing of theoretical hypotheses. Librarians and their assistants respect research and scholarship and are inclined to go far beyond the call of duty in helping the investigator, even when they are skeptical (rightfully, in most instances) of the usefulness of such research for the improvement of their own organizations. Data and related information are necessarily treated with greater precision and discipline in libraries than in factories and most bureaucratic offices; therefore, significant results can often be obtained with smaller samples and in shorter periods of observation. People working in libraries do not feel they should curtail disclosures about basic processes. Elsewhere professional employees are obligated to preserve trade secrets from competitors or to suppress facts which might be considered scandalous by legislative committees. At least as important to an investigator is the fact that one or more libraries almost always lie close at hand -there could hardly be any more convenient institution. Perhaps the only reason libraries have been neglected until now as the setting for social studies is that the dramatic changes in society seldom take place there. Librarians do not wield power, nor do they get involved in the long, violent controversies that can only be settled by research. However, book collections are readily admitted to have an important influence on social, cultural, and political affairs, even though that influence is exerted in an exceedingly indirect fashion. Thus the library cannot be dispensed with as a trivial institution; most people would attribute greater influence to it than to county governments, garden clubs, lodges, or consumer co-operatives, for example, all of which have been subjected to study. Library staffs may expect to see more sociologists, administrative scientists, economists, and industrial engineers who, in attempting to understand the fundamental relationships in organized human activity, wish to collect data on the operation of libraries as it is related to various underlying influences for order and for change. This inquiry, for example, sought a contemporary institution that was representative in many respects of the patterns of communication in the metropolitan environment of the future. It had already been recognized that the processes of automation and ordinary instrumentation tended to save time, energy, and scarce materials, but they require substantial increases in the transfer of messages, reports, statistics, etc.' Thus the investigation required an environment that was handling messages of varying degrees of complexity at a more rapid rate than presently exists in