The Relation between Costs and Services at Academic Libraries
Paul B. Kantor
Academic libraries play a vital role in preparing the leaders of tomorrow. Technologies for storing and retrieving information are changing rapidly, and libraries undergo important changes while maintaining the same basic function. Thus it is important to develop and document a functional view of the academic library.
The functional view (or systems approach) to an operating system describes that system in terms of its goals, environment, inputs, and outputs. 1 For a library, the fundamental goal is to provide access to information. Subsidiary operating goals flow from that major goal. The environment is the college or university. The principal input is budget, while other dynamic inputs (such as materials, staff, and heat) are secondary. It is sometimes helpful to view the physical plant and book stock as a kind of static input.
The outputs of the library are services rendered to the population; library objectives and economic analyses should be expressed in terms of these services. The principal public services are: item lending, in-house use, and staff supported access to information. These output services are supported by a