Managing academic information provision with the balanced scorecard: a project of the German Research Association

Cost‐efficient, up‐to‐date information provision to meet demand is a prerequisite to the achievement of qualitative teaching and research. Academic libraries are the leading providers in this field. The controlling of their service provision can be effectively supported by the balanced scorecard performance indicator system. The balancedscorecard contains exclusive evaluations significant to strategy, integrated in a set of perspectives of equal value users, finance, business processes, potentials to produce a balanced overall assessment of the library. The efficiency of academic information provision becomes transparent with the help of the balanced scorecard and also open to regulation, which focuses on strategy.