INTRODUCTION
According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (p. 753), a library is “a repository for literary and artistic materials such as books, periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, and prints kept for reading or reference.” This rather classical notion of a library does not recognize the fact that libraries are now a subset of the broader field known as Information Systems (IS). Nevertheless, we shall delimit the scope of this article to institutions which can be defined as above, albeit with some leeway.
The history of the application of operations research/management science to libraries is not very distinguished. Contributions in the library field were constrained up to and through the decade of the 1970s by the fact that few operations researchers chose libraries as a field of interest. Moreover, librarians have not sought out operations researchers to help in their problem solving, nor did they offer a particularly fertile environment for doing OR...
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© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Reisman, A., Xu, X. (2001). Libraries . In: Gass, S.I., Harris, C.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-0611-X_534
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-0611-X_534
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