"One of the main reasons for writing this book was to explain some of the more interesting and more useful methods that library and information service managers could use to evaluate their services and plan for the future. In my role as an academic, I read the research literature and I realised that the literature was becoming more difficult for the practising library manager to assimilate, for several reasons. First, much of the literature that could be useful is buried within the management literature, and it takes some imagination and time to translate this into methods useful for library and information services. Second, and probably more important, the growth of what might be termed library and information science has been sporadic, but also highly specialised. The language used in many of the articles demands an excellent background in mathematics and statistics to understand the meaning fully, and few library and information service managers, in my experience, have that...