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Photo by Reed Hutchinson UCLA Photographic Services
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help is on the way
Library service assessed
BY WENDY SODERBURG
UCLA Today Staff
UCLA Library administrators are making improvements and re-educating
users after launching a survey on service quality to ensure that
the library is serving its core clientele — faculty and students.
The UCLA Library participated in the 2003 Association of Research
Libraries LibQUAL+ Survey, which measured library users’ perceptions
of service quality.
UCLA was one of 308 libraries in North America that took part
in the Web-based survey, which contained 25 questions grouped into
four key dimensions of service: access to information, affect of
service (customer service), library as place (building amenities)
and personal control (ability to find information independently
and remotely).
A random sample of 3,957 students, faculty and staff was selected,
of which 570 responded. Examination of the results focused on the
“adequacy gap” between the minimum acceptable service
expected and the current perception of that service. The greater
the negative adequacy gap, the larger the discrepancy is between
the minimum acceptable level and the current perception of the service.
UCLA’s overall rating was positive by a factor of +0.31.
Despite UCLA’s generally healthy score, library administrators
are using the survey as a tool in their ongoing pursuit of service
quality. They found that two areas — access to information
and personal control — needed to be addressed immediately.
For example, in regard to access to information, many users echoed
this female faculty member’s remarks: “My biggest complaint
is that books just are not on the shelf when the ORION system says
they should be. Fully half of my trips to the Young Research Library
are unsuccessful.”
Don Sloane, head of YRL’s access services, responded by
implementing a small survey in the Winter Quarter. He positioned
library staff by the elevators in YRL and had them approach people
as they were leaving. Of the more than 250 users who were approached,
32% said they were not able to find all the materials they were
looking for. In those cases, the library staff assisted them in
looking for the missing items.
“What we found was that 83% of the items that people said
they couldn’t find were either on the shelf, or people were
not correctly reading the online public access catalog (OPAC), which
would have told them whether the items were checked out, were at
another library location, were shelved in an oversized section or
had a status of ‘missing’ or ‘billed for replacement,’
” Sloane said. “Clearly, we need to help users read
the OPAC better and show them how to find call numbers in the stacks,
because that seemed to be a larger problem than the items not being
where they should be.”
Graduate students and faculty expressed dissatisfaction concerning
personal control, an area in which the library has already begun
to implement specific initiatives, said Robert Bellanti, interim
assistant university librarian for research and instructional services.
These initiatives include making the UCLA Library Web site more
intuitive and usable, and developing more online bibliographic and
reference aids for remote users.
“The beauty of participating in a survey like this is that
you have data that’s not just from your own institution, so
you’ve got things you can measure against,” Bellanti
said. “Something on this scale gives you a lot more to work
with — it’s a little more eye-opening and gives you
more of a focus in terms of looking at which issues you want to
tackle first.”
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