IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamest/v49y1998i13p1169-1176.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Optimizing a library's loan policy: An integer programming approach

Author

Listed:
  • Hesham K. Al‐Fares

Abstract

Providing the best service in order to satisfy users is the main objective of any library. The loan policy is a major tool available to achieve this objective. Previous studies have all focused on the loan period, ignoring the loan policy's other equally important aspect, which is the maximum number of books a user can borrow. Moreover, only book availability has been used as a measure of user satisfaction. User satisfaction with either the length of the loan period or the number of books allowed to be borrowed has been largely overlooked. This article combines those relevant components into a more complete model. An easy‐to‐solve integer programming model is formulated, whose solution yields the optimum loan period and optimal limit on the number of books that can be borrowed to maximize user satisfaction. A case study of an actual university library is presented.

Suggested Citation

  • Hesham K. Al‐Fares, 1998. "Optimizing a library's loan policy: An integer programming approach," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 49(13), pages 1169-1176.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamest:v:49:y:1998:i:13:p:1169-1176
    DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1998)49:133.0.CO;2-C
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1998)49:133.0.CO;2-C
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1998)49:133.0.CO;2-C?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamest:v:49:y:1998:i:13:p:1169-1176. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.