MEASURING READERS' FAILURE AT THE SHELF IN THREE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

This paper continues the reporting of the Unit's work on a method of investigating how often readers fail to find what they are looking for on the shelves, why they fail, and what particular books they fail to find. The method used is a slight modification of the earlier one—readers were asked to record on a slip provided the details of the book or periodical they were looking for, or subject area they were looking in, their academic status, and the date, and then to place the slip in an adjoining box. From analysis of these ‘failure’ slips it was possible to determine the cause of the reader's failure, the individual book the reader was looking for, and the pattern of failure for different groups of volumes. A new development was surveys of samples of readers, carried out during the fortnight of peak demand. Answers to these surveys provided information on the effect of failure on a reader's work, what action he took after failing, whether he found adequate substitutes, how many books he found by browsing, and what proportion of the books he consulted he borrowed. Some of these answers could be checked by a direct count of the books used in, and borrowed from, the library. The investigations were carried out in three University libraries, each with its own characteristic library structure and teaching patterns. These differences were reflected in the results obtained. It is hoped that the methods of investigation used can be employed by librarians to investigate the effectiveness of some of the services in their own libraries.