ABSTRACT
In 1943, Clarence Ridley and Herbert Simon praised the advances being made in measuring the “intangibles” of library service. 1 They encouraged the leaders of other municipal functions to take similar strides. Now, seven decades later, library services continue to maintain an edge over many other municipal services in the scope and sophistication of widely reported performance measures and the availability of detailed statistics identifying national performance norms. A citizen or municipal official wishing to assess the adequacy of the local public library has a reasonably rich array of benchmarks on which to draw.
