Guest editorial

Citation

Town, S. (2016), "Guest editorial", Performance Measurement and Metrics, Vol. 17 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/PMM-06-2016-0027

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Performance Measurement and Metrics, Volume 17, Issue 2.

The 11th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services was held at Our Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh, UK between 20 and 22 July, 2015. The conference was the last of three run under the auspices of the University of York, on this occasion in partnership with the National Library of Scotland. The event was the largest in the overall series so far, attracting 200 delegates from 24 countries to experience 90 papers, short papers, presentations and workshops. The National Library of Scotland hosted a reception, and delegates also enjoyed a dinner in the elegant surroundings of the Signet Library in the centre of historic Edinburgh. The National Librarian, Dr John Scally, provided a stimulating opening keynote for the conference, reflecting on the role, performance and future plans of the National Library at a significant point in Scotland’s history. The second keynote was delivered by Dr Nancy Fried Foster, on the whys, hows and results of participatory design in libraries, drawing on her substantial record of the application of anthropological methods to our field. Together these presentations provided both inspiration and insight to delegates, setting an excellent tone for the subsequent sessions.

I am grateful to Emerald, and to the Editor of this journal, Joan Stein, for once again providing a platform for the dissemination of some of the best and most interesting papers from the submissions to the conference. I have chosen papers for this issue to reflect the range and depth of the conference, with a mixture of short and long papers that reflects the balance at the event. I have sought to highlight recent research using innovative techniques or ideas in our field, and in the short papers with perhaps a personal bias towards some of the collaborative work undertaken in the UK involving the University of York, to celebrate our tenure of conference leadership and organization.

Foster’s keynote reinforced the view that deep appreciation and understanding of the user is key to any service, and that inclusion is likely to provide appropriate foresight in service design. In the first paper, Zaugg and Rackham describe the identification of patron personas for an academic library, involving collaboration with students, and subsequently informing service delivery and refinement at the Brigham Young University. Relationships seem to me to be critical to this type of initiative, and the theme of the value of relationships has been a feature of recent Northumbria conferences. In the second selected paper, Bracke reviews ideas of relational capital in libraries, pointing up a historic lack of appropriate measurement for library liaison activity and proposes social network theory as a potential model for future assessment. In the following paper, Broughton also focuses on the increased recognition of the importance of relationship measurement at times of strategic organizational change, presenting a practical matrix developed in Ohio University libraries for measuring engagement with academic departments.

The academic library has been in the process of digital transformation for at least 40 years. In recent years the MINES project has attempted to understand this transition and the impact of digital content through the provision of investigatory tools and a succession of studies. The paper here by Lewellen and co-authors seeks a comparison of e- and print book usage at the University of Massachusetts Amherst using these tools, and in the process debunks some conventional assumptions and stereotypes about gender, ethnicity and discipline usage of different types of resource.

In the early stages of the digital transformation, library space was considered likely to become an irrelevance. The resurgence of the importance of this provision was reflected in the conference, with a strand of four sessions given over to the measurement and assessment of library space. Mandel’s paper is a practical illustration of the use of a geographic information system to visualize the use of physical facilities at a New England University Library. Burn and co-author’s paper employs a user experience approach in a collaborative and comparative (and occasionally competitive) project to assess and review the performance of recently refurbished libraries at the Universities of York and Loughborough.

Quality and collaboration in research libraries in the UK is also reflected in Stanley and Knowles’ contribution. This short paper describes the significant achievement of a set of shared service standards across the Research Libraries UK membership community. York involvement in a national research library collaboration is also a feature of Elder and Massam’s paper. The use of the COPAC (the UK national research library union catalogue database) collections management tools to investigate York’s collections against other research libraries provides data on comparative strengths, particularly in the area of unique and distinctive collections.

The use of large data sets is a theme followed through in the final paper. The University of Wollongong’s association with the Northumbria Conference has been longstanding, and the story of its library’s development in measurement appreciation can be traced through successive conferences. Jantti and Heath’s paper describes how the combination of "big" institutional data with library data to create learning analytics helps provide an enriched narrative of the student experience. It also begins to provide potential proof of library value and impact. This is an important development in our field, and our community is encouraged towards more research into learning analytics.

I am pleased to conclude my recent stewardship of the conference with this issue, and I thank past and present editorial board members for their support and help. Having attended the full series of conferences over the past 20 years, I believe Northumbria has made a major contribution to the development of better libraries through its focus on performance, measurement, evaluation and assessment. The sharing of ideas, approaches and techniques in the conferences has been an indispensable support to the diffusion of new methods, and to an increased understanding of what libraries are, what they do and how they may be best managed for excellent performance.