Library and Information Science

The objectives of this paper are to analyze the concept of academic library effectiveness commonly held by Japanese librarians and to compare it with its equivalents revealed by precedent studies in the U.S. and New Zealand. Questionnaires were mailed to Japanese academic librarians in September 1996. In the first phase of this mail survey, called ‘preference survey’, respondents were asked to indicate how important each of 100 indicators was for evaluating academic libraries in general. In the second phase, so-called ‘performance survey’, they were requested to assess how well their own libraries performed in terms of scope each indicator dealt with.

It was found that the most important criterion for Japanese librarians was whether or not a library sufficiently supported its users’ research and educational activities and that the most highly valued indicator was how well a library maintained the document delivery system to supply its users with materials not owned by the library. According to the orthogonal factor analysis of the responses obtained by the survey thirteen factors were extracted in the preference survey and eleven in the performance survey. Those factors are regarded to constitute the dimensions of Japanese academic library effectiveness.