Service Quality Bench-marking on a National Scale

Sam Kalb, Library Assessment & IT Projects CoordinatorQueen’s University Library, Kingston, Ontario, Canada Email: kalbs@queensu.ca

2008 IFLA Satellite Conference on Global Statistics

LibQUAL+™ established survey instrument for academic libraries

Challenges & costs to build a better Canadian survey instrument & national support infrastructure

20 Canadian LibQUAL+™ participants to 2006 but never more than 10 in any given year

Need to develop relevant comparators reflecting the realities of Canadian education All Canadian universities publicly funded Education a provincial (state) jurisdiction

By 2006, LibQUAL+™ was the primary instrument used by Canadian academic libraries to assess library service quality

Est. & fundedEst. & funded by Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) in Jan. 2006

Goal:Goal: create a larger database of Canadian content that would offer more meaningful benchmarking of services for Canadian academic research libraries

Unique Opportunity: Unique Opportunity: to engage the broader Canadian academic and research library community in developing a national service quality assessment survey

Largest LibQUAL+Largest LibQUAL+™ ™ consortium:consortium: 46 universities, 7 community colleges and 3 federal government libraries from across Canada

66% of the libraries had never done the 66% of the libraries had never done the surveysurvey including some smaller institutions who would not have considered participating on their own

Bilingual Environment: Bilingual Environment: English language, French-language, and bilingual institutions

What factors went into establishing and conducting this large and successful consortial project?

Governance and Support Project Organization & Management Communication & Engagement Active recruitment of participants

Governing body: Governing body: CARL Committee on Effectiveness Measures and Statistics

Funding:Funding: annual budgets for 2006 &2007

Admin. Support: Admin. Support: CARL staff

Coordination:Coordination: Dedicated Project Leader working in consultation with participants (official contacts)

Underlying assumption: Underlying assumption: most members did not have dedicated assessment staff to manage the process successfully on their own

Project management objective: Project management objective: guide consortium members through the planning process, via discrete, manageable sets of actions; each stage with its own timelines and deliverables.

Moderated discussion/announcement list

Members encouraged to contribute in shaping each phase of the project

Timelines and action items were revised at each stage based on member input.

Highest priority: Highest priority: Every query answered in a timely fashion &, in most cases, exchange shared with the membership

Building critical mass (invitations to join via national & regional library councils)

Individual invitations to encourage maximum participation by leading Canadian institutions

Rapid response to queries from potential participants, incl. support documentation to help persuade reluctant or wary administrators

Major recruitment & project management tool

Goal:Goal: to provide an easy to use, one-stop resource for member libraries – with material, relevant to Canadian libraries, that could be readily adapted by individual libraries for their use.

Updated “look”Updated “look” throughout the project (from early focus on attracting participants to final focus on the survey results & their analysis

Helped consortium participants to analyze their LibQUAL+™ results effectively

1st Canadian library assessment conference

Provided 1st forum for Canadian librarians engaged/interested in assessment to meet & network

Attempted to encourage libraries to start building a “culture of assessment”

Standard LibQUAL™ consortial notebook, aggregated by user category, library type, and survey language

The Consortial, on behalf of CARL and regional councils in Ontario (OCUL) and Quebec (CREPUQ), contracted with ARL for custom consortial notebooks representing their member libraries

The councils all approved the posting of the aggregate notebooks on the consortial web site.

The Consortium received the complete data set representing the results for all 48,000 consortium respondents

Data set and subsets made available to all consortium participants in spreadsheet or SPSS format (with individual identifiable data, such as the institution name, names of campus libraries, local discipline groups, etc. replaced with masking codes)

93.6% of wanted to take the LibQUAL+™ survey again as members of the consortium

80% preferred LibQUAL+™ over developing a home-grown alternative; slight preference among respondents for a more abbreviated LibQUAL+ ™ Lite over the full survey

Members split evenly between 2 & 3 year options for preferred frequency of future consortial surveys

Ratings for consortial support and responsiveness were very high

Demands on staff time to plan the survey & to review, analyze & act on the results – greatest for libraries with fewer staff. Limited data analysis expertise.

Few community college participants in the 2007 survey & widely differing mandates among the Canadian provinces as to clientele served and types of academic and non-academic programs. Need for more web resources aimed at community colleges

Limited benchmarking value for federal government libraries who each have such widely different clientele and mandates

Alternative, briefer LibQUAL+™ surveysAlternative, briefer LibQUAL+™ surveys Alternative delivery mechanismsAlternative delivery mechanisms Customizable set of user types Customizable set of user types linkable to

a set of standard user categories (similar to discipline group mapping)

Customizable labels Customizable labels mapped to the same survey concepts for different cultures (e.g. “gender” instead of “sex”)

More effective mapping & management of More effective mapping & management of survey questions in different languagessurvey questions in different languages

Despite the challenges, the 48,000 consortial responses to the 2007 survey have provided a rich, unique resource of assessment data for Canadian academic and research libraries that can only grow more valuable each time the consortium runs the survey.

Thank You! Thank You!