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It has been so many years since I have been involved with coordinating & reporting. In the early 70s I was a management trainee at Chevrolet Spring & Bumper (gone with OSHA), learning all that could be packed into our heads at GMs Technical Institute’ Cooperative Education program. Hearing about it, learning about it, and using are it are 3 different animals. And now—37 years on—the ghosts of professors longgone come back to haunt me in this chapter.

It was like—yeah, I remember a lot of this from the classroom, the production floor, and the Engineering offices. As I read on, keeping in mind both practical & learning experiences from the last 4 decades, I put together in my mind’ eye, what might be, could be, may be happening, or could be developed, now that computers have, and continue to evolve. The movie “TRON” comes to mind, where “Central Controller” orders around “electron personnel” to do its dirty deeds. Much like goes on today, with all the control, requirements, techniques, standards, blahblahblah, etc, then TOOLS (cost benefit analysis, benchmarking, program evaluation & review techniques, information systems, time & motion studies—I’m about there), and OPERATIONS RESEARCH.

I never caught on to this area—it was too advanced, with several techniques available for study—just never got it. But here on page 433 of text was a pert, concise, up to date definition: “Operations Research is an ‘experimental and applied science devoted to observing, understanding and predicting the behavior of purposeful [worker-machine] systems, and operations researchers are actiavely engaged I applying this knowledge to practical problems.’” (Stueart & Moran. (2002).). Another thing that grabbed me was on p. 434: “. . . this method demands some knowledge of mathematics and statistical concepts, and these are areas where librarians are thought to be at their weakest; we have realied heavily on nonlibrarians to provide this expertise.” Who might these nonlibrarians be that are so interested in how we check out a book. Is there so much to it?

Then I bounce back to the chapter 8 reading list (p. 208) at the beginning of that chapter, and notice a title: “Crawford, Walt, and Michael Gorman. Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness,and Reality. Chicago: American Library Association, 1995.” and everything fell into place—where exactly I don’t know, but I feel much better now. Oh—the book will be back on P-K shelf shortly.