A small town with a population of 35,000 has a community library. The nearest alternative library is 15 miles away. A further 20,000 people live within a ten mile radius of the town. Of these, 5,000 people live nearer to the alternative library.
The library has 25,000 registered users and on average each of the registered users borrows two books and one DVD every week. The library has 125,000 books and 50,000 DVDs on its inventory lists, though this is constantly changing as old items are removed and new items are added.
The library offers a variety of types of book and DVD in order to attract interest from a large range of potential users, and for some of the more popular items it has more than one copy.
The library does not charge a fee to its users; it is funded by donations and by government. However it does need to measure its performance and is considering the use of a Balanced Scorecard.
Required: (a) Explain the key features of the Balanced Scorecard approach to performance measurement.
(b) State TWO perspectives of the Balanced Scorecard and for EACH of these, recommend with reasons, ONE performance measure that could be used to measure the performance of the library.