A Study On Efficiency Evaluation Of University Libraries

University libraries are a center of archives and information as well as an important academic aid to education and scientific research. However, as a public service institution rather than a profit-seeking business, they have long suffered from inefficiency in the use of resources. This has greatly crippled the maxim utilization of the information resources and prevented them from rendering effective service for education and scientific research.One of the major reasons for such problems is that university libraries lag far behind in assessment, which hinders appropriate guidance for their construction and development. In the traditional university library evaluation system, emphasis is put on input and scale rather than output and efficiency. Under this evaluation system, university libraries have long adopted an expansion policy by continually increasing the input instead of improving the quality of input elements and making the most out of the existing resources. In some universities, priority is laid on collection over utilization by blindly enlarging the book collection and information resources with the mere aim to meet the assessment criteria, which results in the low efficiency of university libraries.So it is crucial to establish an up-to-date and scientific evaluation system by using proper methods, following the inherent law of development and making an objective and realistic evaluation. Since its birth, data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been widely applied and developed throughout the world and has been generally accepted as an effective method of evaluation of the relative efficiency in many productive and nonproductive sections, superior to other evaluation systems of the same kind. For educational systems with complicated inputs and multiple outputs, DEA is undoubtedly a better tool for analysis and evaluation. Hence it is feasible to use this method in evaluating university library efficiency.In this thesis, the evaluation index system of university libraries is constructed based on an analysis of the input and output; the method of stratification analysis is used to designate the weight of each second-level indices. By investigating the efficiency of input and output in the library of the North Campus of Southwest University between 2002 and 2005, we can objectively and scientifically calculate the efficiency of each year, the ratio of input redundancy and output insufficiency in lower efficiency. Policy-makers can utilize DEA to supervise the input and output efficiency of a certain year and then analyze the possible reasons for lower efficiency. The efficiency evaluation of university libraries can help the policy-makers and administrators to lay more emphasis on efficiency, improve the facility, and ensure a benign development for university libraries and thus ensure an effective exertion of the functions of university libraries as an essential aid to college education and scientific research.