A cost‐benefit study of a manually‐produced current awareness bulletin

In the current atmosphere of concern with costs, both of need to reduce expenditure and also to justify that which is being spent, it would seem to be a good idea to try to determine the cost‐benefits of some of the services offered by an information unit, a view expressed by Mr C. G. Giles at the 1972 Aslib Annual Conference. Kramer covered one aspect by estimating how much time non‐library staff spent on searching and comparing this with that spent by library staff. Unfortunately he was forced to rely on pure estimates, no actual tests being carried out. If, however, one looks at the current awareness bulletin aspect of a service it would seem possible to obtain a more exact measure by determining how many journals the staff themselves would need to scan if no current awareness bulletin were available. Accordingly, it was decided to try to obtain this information by means of a questionnaire survey of the readers of one of British Petroleum's technical information bulletins.