From Librarianship to Management: Subordinating Management to Mission

Librarianship no longer inclines towards stable technical indicators nor to established values for reference. Innovations developed or proposed pose more problems than they solve. The renewal of library management proceeds from the mission to serve that is the public policy of libraries, to retain first, all of their goals and explicit objectives, then to define a strategy of social efficiency and to search for the best relationship between cost and efficiency. This wide-ranging vision assumes a recourse to political science, to sociology and public management. The progress of library management does not necessitate the « re-establishment » of librarianship so much as its integration with the reality of library management as a public service.
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