A way of looking at things

COLLECTION IS GOVERNED by the infinitely varied character- EVALUATION istics of the reader, and, strictly speaking, the attitudes of librarians. The administrator is eager to show the maximum use of resources at min-imum costs. The professional librarian shows a stage preference for either playing the role of the arbiter of taste, or claiming to outperform popular televison stars. Somewhere in among management, librarians, and the collection is the user, underfoot and always on the verge of being missed. The difficulty is to discover an evaluative process which will satisfy all attitudes and, if only by inference, the expressed and unex-pressed needs of the elusive reader. How then does one evaluate a collection based upon past, present and probable future use; as well as the fidgeting of the public, adminis-trators and the librarians? One need not despair that there are no ever present or monotonous answers. The limitations of the whole evalua-tive process are such that, since there are somany variables, evaluation is only effective as long as there is a clear understanding both of the public and of library materials. The whole process of matching collections with users requires continued galloping toward understanding. Despite the quick-witted, the slow, or the downright stupid user study, which normally obeys the propriety of painful prose, the collection-user evaluative process is not only a glint of research reflected in a single, or series of articles, i t is a daily-usually informal-method of trying to discover the link between the collection and the user. The results are speculative, albeit often practical