Engineering Commons^™

Improving Library Efficiency To Meet Patron's Needs: A Data Envelopment Analysis Benchmarking Model, Michael Clark

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Technological innovation and the information age have increased patrons’ expectations of the services and resources that academic libraries provide. Libraries are responding to patrons’ needs by providing digital resources and services, and collaborative spaces that invite communication and knowledge sharing. In order to effectively meet patrons’ needs, libraries are striving to efficiently manage their human, materials, and fiscal resources. Libraries have traditionally measured efficiency by developing single factor productivity indexes. However, these qualitative methods do not adequately address the efficiency aspect which measures the transformation of resources (inputs) into services (outputs). Data envelopment analysis (DEA) measures the relative efficiencies of …