Methodology for measuring the quantity of in-library material use is discussed in order to introduce such methods as suggested in this study into the public library context as a part of management tools. User observation surveys, in which a survey-staff member counts the number of in-library material users every fifteen minutes during library operating hours, were conducted in a city library and a prefectural library in Japan. Results of these surveys reveal that the total time of in-library material use was approximately the same as obtained from user self-administered questionnaire survey implemented at the same time and that every two or three hours observation is sufficiently enough to estimate the whole in-library material use time. Thus the possibility of measuring the quantity of in-library use is validated in terms of time devoted to reading by users, neither of the number of materials used nor the number of users.

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Although information retrieval of music materials has been studied so far, e.g., enhancement of authority control, thesauri and OPAC systems, further exploration is required for providing effectively and efficiently bibliographic information relevant to users' needs. In this study, functional requirements of music library OPAC systems are derived based on users' search requests. In order to identify users' search requests, this study attempts to examine transactional records of reference services obtained from National Diet Library and Library of Showa University of Music. By content analysis of the records, actual users' needs for music materials were empirically specified, and a set of typical search topics representing the needs were artificially created. After that, the set of topics was used for evaluating search functions of operational five music library OPAC systems in Japan. Consequently, the evaluation led to 12 features as functional requirements for OPAC searches of music materials. It was difficult for the present OPAC systems to perform "searching for specific lyrics and pitch" and "searching for each item contained in a package", and the functions enabling them have to be developed in future.

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