Management in College and University Libraries

A N A G E M E N T , as a field in itself, is generally identified with the last four decades, beginning with F. \Y.Taylor and time-and-motion study and ending-for the momcnt-with "operations research.""nlanagement is a broad area with a vague configuration; no attempt is made in this paper to define it with any precision.Information at hand shows that management in college and university libraries gathers around the focuses of personnel, work measurement, costs, machines, and plant."Orgaulzation," often considered a part of management, and a popular subject in library administration, is the topic of another article in this journal.For the most part, the evidence of interest in management areas is drawn from articles in the library press and a few books, and is limited to the period following World War 11.The management of libraries has never benefited from the wealth of attention devoted to such areas of librarianship as the development of book collections, classification, cataloging, bibliography, and the like.For a long time this inattention was not important; the small size of collections, staff, buildings, and clienteles made for simplicity of operation and demanded no very sophisticated approach to the ways of doing things.Librarians were clirccted to new methods of management as early as 1911 by thc then Librarian of C ~r n e l l .~ The Williamson report,' in 1923, spelled out the advantages of training in the techniques of management.In one of the most recent treatments of library management, Leigh sets the stage again for the need of management-though he speaks of public libraries, his views are as true for those of learned institutions: Like other institutions-especially those not under the constant spur of profit seeking-we might expect public library operations to be com-