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Dissertation Information for Wonsik Shim

NAME:
- Wonsik Shim

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science

SCHOOL:
- Rutgers University (USA) (1999)

ADVISORS:
- Paul B. Kantor

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- [Indecipherable1]
- [Indecipherable2]
- Daniel O'Connor

MPACT Status: Complete - Except Indecipherables

Title: A novel approach to the evaluation of research libraries in the United States

Abstract: The research applies a complex analytical tool, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) (Charnes, Cooper & Rhodes, 1978), to determine whether it can improve our understanding of the relative efficiencies of academic research libraries. Instead of telling the average performance among libraries examined, this method, with a proper model of library inputs and outputs, can be used as a means of identifying the best practices in some peer group and provides an efficiency score for each library, with a specific recommendation for efficiency improvement. DEA incorporates the idea of benchmarking and extends it to situations with many resources and services, called "inputs" and "outputs" respectively.

The study uses the annual statistics from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) for the population of 95 academic research libraries in the U.S. For the purpose of valid peer comparison, the libraries are grouped by the main funding source of the parent institutions (publicly funded vs. privately funded).

The results show that the DEA technique can be applied to the evaluation of academic research libraries, yielding a reasonable discriminating power among libraries when external information based on existing cost studies is added to the basic DEA model, in the form of constraints. DEA also provides quite consistent results over the two-year period (1995-1996) that I tested. I examined the effect of individual variables on the efficiency scores to seek a good set of variables for further application. The results show that the technique is robust against tests including the presence of random noise in the data.

The study is based on secondary, statistical data. Thus, the results of this study should be regarded as documentary evidence on the problem of technical efficiencies in the libraries examined. I believe that complete assessment of the efficiencies at the academic libraries will require understanding the local context of individual libraries.

MPACT Scores for Wonsik Shim

A = 0
C = 4
A+C = 4
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:05:40

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