ABSTRACT
The relationship between the provision of library and similar information services with the productivity of the organizations or functions that they support is a topic of great importance—that is after all why libraries and information services exist, to make those organizations or functions more productive—but it is a relationship about which relatively little is known. The principal reason for that is the elastic and amorphous nature of information and information services and the difficulty of quantifying them and in turn measuring their impact. There is in fact more research done than is often recognized, in part because the literature is so scattered among a number of disciplines. However when pulled together, the literature is impressively consistent in showing that library and similar information services have a substantial positive impact.
