In this study, firstly, three major production function models are fitted to Japanese public libraries statistical data from 1991 to 1993, and the results of each model are mutually compared. It was found that Cobb-Douglas model is fitted best, and that there exists economies of scale. Next, the stochastic frontier production function analysis is employed for measuring technical efficiency levels of public libraries. In result, the mean efficiency through three years is 58.3 %. The figure confirms that Japanese public libraries are inefficient industries not only as private sector but also as public sector.

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Both facet analysis and relational analysis are methods of subject analysis in the European tradition. The former is based on categorization of the terms themselves and the latter analyzes the meaning of the spaces between terms in syntactic structures in indexing. The purpose of this paper is to find a satisfactory solution to the problem of how many relations are, in principle, necessary for information retrieval. Nine relational systems (Farradane's Relational Indexing, Perry/Kent's WRU system, Kervegant's supplementary system for UDC, Leroy/Braffort's system for CEA, Gardin's SYNTOL, Coates' BTI, Lynch's ASI, Austin's PRECIS, and Coates' BSO) were surveyed and an inventory was made of the relations used in these nine systems, which amounted to 170 in all. Based upon the assumption that the nine systems as a whole cover the necessary relations, the author proposes that a comparison of these relations should be made at the concept level by making use of a fully faceted general classification, and expects that the most suitable scheme for the comparison will be BSO whose structure lays stress on facet relations rather than facet categories.

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[in Japanese]

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