Quantitative approaches to library management: A critical review

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