The Olive Tree

It's About Quality: LibQual Survey comes to Maine

LibQUAL+ is a suite of services that libraries use to solicit, track, understand, and act upon users’ opinions of service quality. These services are offered to the library community by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). The program’s centerpiece is a rigorously tested Web-based survey bundled with training that helps libraries assess and improve library services, change organizational culture, and market the library. The goals of LibQUAL+ are to foster a culture of excellence in providing library service, help libraries better understand user perceptions of library service quality, collect and interpret library user feedback systematically over time, provide libraries with comparable assessment information from peer institutions, identify best practices in library service, and enhance library staff members' analytical skills for interpreting and acting on data.
More than 500 libraries have participated in LibQUAL+, including colleges and universities, community colleges, health sciences libraries, law libraries, and public libraries -- some through various consortia, others as independent participants. LibQUAL+ has expanded internationally, with participating institutions in Canada, the U.K., and Europe. The growing LibQUAL+ community of participants and its extensive dataset are rich resources for improving library services.
LibQUAL+ will give users a chance to tell us where services need improvement so we can respond to and better manage their expectations. We can develop services that better meet our users' expectations by comparing our library's data with that of peer institutions and examining the practices of those libraries that are evaluated highly by their users.

For more information about LibQUAL, visit: http://www.libqual.org/
For more information about the survey project here at Fogler, contact Gretchen Gfeller at 207.581.1696 or email gretchen.gfeller@umit.maine.edu


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