Evaluating the relative efficiency and productivity growth of university libraries

The purpose of this paper is to analyze efficiency and productivity growth of university libraries so that deficiencies can be highlighted and possible strategies can be evolved to improve the performances. The study applies data envelopment analysis and Malmquist productivity index to explore the operation performances of decision making units. Data envelopment analysis has been widely employed in a variety of disciplines as efficiency or performance measurement tool for comparing a set of entities such as firms, banks, hospitals, nations and organizations. The method, however, doesn’t provide the grouping information on the efficient units or inefficient units. To solve the problem we propose a new approach based on super-efficient data envelopment analysis and clustering model, and present the results of an empirical analysis using the data of 29 Korea university libraries from 2008 to 2012. The results show that about 45% of the libraries are efficient and about 28% have the productivity growth improvement during the period of 2008/2012. In addition, the results show that the proposed approach solves the problem of conventional data envelopment analysis method and makes it possible to categorize the libraries having similar performance.