QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES TO LIBRARY-MANAGE MENT - A CRITICAL-REVIEW

Many quantitative studies have been made to solve some problems of lib rary management, which includes selection of periodicals, weeding of o ld materials, purchasing of added copies and etc. Also, bibliometric s tudies of which application area is intended to be the library managem ent are considered to be included into such quantitative studies. This paper reviews their research results, and discusses limits or drawbac ks of quantitative methods proposed by them. In particular, we focus o n several topics as follows: 1) ranking of periodicals by citation or use data, 2) Bradoford's law, 3) deselecting periodicals, 4) obsolesce nce of monographs and volumes of periodicals, 5) method for weeding of monographs proposed by R. W. Trueswell, 6) stochastic model of librar y circulation, such as one based on a theory of Poisson process.