Matheson N W, Grefsheim S F
Bull Med Libr Assoc. 1981 Jul;69(3):294-300.
A comparative study was undertaken to assess the reasons for the low rankings received by George Washington University Medical Center library in the Annual Statistics for Medical School Libraries in the United States and Canada. Although internal studies showed the library was successfully satisfying user needs and meeting its primary objectives, the rankings, which include the traditional measures of quality used by accrediting bodies, indicated the contrary. Three hypotheses were postulated to account for the discrepancy. In a matched group of similar libraries: (1) the rankings of an individual library would differ from the national rankings; (2) clustering the variables would change the rankings; and (3) libraries with similar staff size would tend to rank in the same quartile in service and resource variables. All hypotheses were invalidated. Further tests led to the conclusion that the Annual Statistics and other traditional measures of quality are inappropriate and inaccurate methods for evaluating library programs, since they only measure resource allocations and not the effectiveness of those allocations. Alternative evaluation methods are suggested.
进行了一项比较研究，以评估乔治·华盛顿大学医学中心图书馆在美国和加拿大医学院图书馆年度统计中排名较低的原因。尽管内部研究表明该图书馆成功满足了用户需求并实现了其主要目标，但包括认证机构使用的传统质量衡量标准在内的排名却显示出相反的结果。提出了三个假设来解释这种差异。在一组匹配的类似图书馆中：（1）单个图书馆的排名将与全国排名不同；（2）对变量进行聚类会改变排名；（3）员工规模相似的图书馆在服务和资源变量方面往往会排在同一四分位数。所有假设均被推翻。进一步的测试得出结论，年度统计和其他传统质量衡量标准是评估图书馆项目的不适当和不准确的方法，因为它们只衡量资源分配，而不衡量这些分配的有效性。建议采用替代评估方法。
