LINKING A MEDICAL USER SURVEY TO MANAGEMENT FOR LIBRARY EFFECTIVENESS: II, A CHECKLAND SOFT SYSTEMS STUDY Available to Purchase

The soft systems methodology developed by Checkland was chosen as a way of relating the evidence of a user survey to the practical problems of library management. The user survey has been described in a previous paper. This paper presents the methodology and discusses it in terms of the systems approach, before showing how it was used in this case. The outcomes of the study were an indication of the content of a useful model of the users and guidelines for deriving criteria for effectiveness based on the model. Difficulties in using the methodology are described, and conclusions for library management and implications for library and information science research are presented.