Doctoral studies

Doctoral thesis helps to make the work of libraries more efficient

On March 14th, 2022, starting at 17:00, Kate-Riin Kont from the School of Digital Technologies will defend her doctoral dissertation "Possibilities to implement cost accounting in the evaluation of library work processes".

Kate-Riin Kont

Any manager of an organisation wants to make their company more efficient. In her daily work in libraries, Kate-Riin Kont often noticed that work was being done twice between different departments. This led her to research ways to make libraries more efficient.

In her doctoral dissertation, Kont focuses on a humanistic or employee-oriented perspective. She looks at the thoughts of library staff on efficiency and fair labour division, how the size of the library and the types of documents (books, sheet music, e-books, etc.) affect the costs of work processes. "The aim of the research is to find out how to get more information from the division of library work processes into activities, on how long these activities take, and how much it costs to perform these activities," says Kont about the objective of her thesis.

Kate-Riin Kont combined the information science and librarianship specialties with the fields of organisational management and culture, economic and management accounting, and public administration. "The interdisciplinary approach provided a detailed picture of the financial management, performance management, staff satisfaction and cost accounting in university libraries," explains Kont. The research also used the time-driven activity-based costing method (TDABC), which is new in the context of Estonia. This proved that detailed measuring and comparison of cataloguing and assembly activities is possible in and between libraries of different sizes.

The results of the doctoral thesis show that employees of Estonian university libraries are not afraid to study the efficient use of their work time and measure the effectiveness of their work. Quite the opposite, they assumed this would ensure a better and smoother workflow in the future. Using the TDABC method made it possible to identify duplication of work and the time and money spent on these activities. In addition, it helped understand how much (or how little) time and money libraries spend on e-book acquisition, lending and cataloguing, compared to that of physical documents.

The public defence will take place in auditorium M648 at Tallinn University.
The defence can also be viewed via Zoom.

The supervisor of the doctoral thesis is Sirje Virkus, a professor at Tallinn University.

The opponents are Elena Maceviciute, professor at the University of Borås, and Lorena Siguenza-Guzman, associate professor at the University of Cuenca.

The doctoral thesis is available in the ETERA digital environment of the Tallinn University Academic Library.