ANN CHAPMAN

Biography: Ann Chapman is part of the Policy and Advice Team at UKOLN, and is primarily concerned with collection description and bibliographic management.  Her research interests cover the quality, standards and format of bibliographic records for all types of materials in both current and retrospective cataloguing, and performance measurement for bibliographic databases.  She is a member of the BIC Bibliographic Standards Technical Sub-group (whose role includes UK responses to proposed changes in MARC 21), the CILIP/BL Committee on AACR, and the Revealweb Policy Advisory Group.

Title: Pitfalls and blind alleys: perspectives on quality measures

Summary: In recent years libraries have increasingly been required to carry out performance measurement, benchmarking and evaluation on their services.  However the value of the results of such monitoring can be affected by the design of surveys and other monitoring methods; these need to be constructed with care to produce valid and usable data.  This paper looks at key issues in designing such studies, with reference to work carried out by UKOLN over a number of years.