Jonathan D. Sousa
Technical Applications Development Manager for New Measures Initiative
Association of Research Libraries
Fred M. Heath
Dean and Director of University Libraries
Texas A & M University
LibQUAL+(tm) is a suite of scalable Web-survey tools developed to measure library service quality from the user’s perspective. The project is currently in its fourth year and, with more than 300 libraries participating in North America and Europe, LibQUAL+(tm) has become the largest evaluation project ever developed for libraries. The protocolís success and the increasing interest of a wide range of libraries have encouraged rapid scaling of the project to handle seven types of institutions, four languages, and 150,000 potential respondents this year. The technological issues involved include the hardware and software demands of a high-availability, high-load, online application; programming that necessitates efficiency, flexibility, and compatibility with virtually every Web browser in use; and data sharing between relational databases and flat-file statistical analysis packages. Additionally, the project is managed though a Web-based interface to which project administrators and institutional liaisons have varying degrees of access. LibQUAL+(tm) is a research partnership between the Association of Research Libraries and Texas A&M University Libraries and is based on an earlier implementation of the SERVQUAL survey at Texas A&M University and on rigorous qualitative and quantitative regrounding and analysis.
http://www.libqual.org/