Evaluation of Central library in Sabzevar University of Medical Sciences based on Iranian Standards of academic libraries

Libraries are the main levers of supporting educational programs in any university. A university without a good library cannot be successful in fulfilling its educational and research programs. The current condition of a library should be studied to find out whether it plays its part well as one of the main components of the university. In the present research, the condition of the central library of the Medical University in Sabzevar was studied based on four quantitative indices of budget, human resources, collection, building and equipments. The library condition in 2012 was investigated in this study and descriptive statistics (the mean, standard deviation, percentage and frequency) was used to obtain the required information. The findings showed that the library has observed 71.42 and 38.5 percent of the required standards of human resources and the collection, respectively. On the other hand, the budget index has been reported to be 3.2 times higher than the standard amount (320%). The standard index of building and equipments has been observed up to 51.48 percent. In general from among the four quantitative standards (budget, human resources, collection, building and equipments), only the budget standard has been completely observed by the central library of the Medical University of Sabzevar and other aspects are far from the standards.