Duplication of texts in academic libraries: a behavioural model for library management

Abstract

in academic libraries is a contentious area of library management This article outlines previous work in this area and describes a model of specific use in developing a duplication policy for recommended texts for undergraduates. A concept of 'user utility' is described as the principal measure of library effectiveness. This concept is used as a basis for a behavioural model of student borrowing. The model may be used to allocate a budget set aside for duplication purposes so as to maximize the expected user utility gained per pound spent by the library.JON WARWICK (b. 1957) took his first degree m Mathematics and Computmg, graduatmg m 1979. His postgraduate research was m library Operational Research (sponsored partly by the British Library) with his doctorate awarded in 1985. He is currently a Semor

A Review of Some Modelling Approaches to the Loan and Duplication of Academic Texts

“…not using the library copies at all). These strategies in response to a book recommendation were established by an investigation of student borrowing behaviour (Warwick, 1986b), and the probabilities with which the users undertake these actions were modelled as functions of each other, i.e. functions of the utility that a user would expect to derive from attempting each of the actions.…”