To improve customer service, some academic libraries have used a service philosophy statement to foster a shared understanding of service standards. The authors conducted semistructured interviews with heads of public services at academic libraries to understand how the service philosophy statement was used in practice and its impact on staff…

This article explores users' level of satisfaction with the information in the online space of a university library during the pandemic and the russian-Ukrainian war. The authors analyzed the services and activities that the library provided online and examined whether they satisfied users' information needs. Using a questionnaire, the study…

This study explored students' perceptions of the library's impact on their academic success based on open-ended responses from a 2018 survey assessing student use and satisfaction. The qualitative findings demonstrated differences in the library resources students perceived as contributing to their achievements, based on such demographics as race,…

This study reports on a survey of students in information sciences designed to test differences related to e-book formats and other factors. The results from 161 respondents suggest that strategic decision-making shapes use of different e-book and print format options for users who already have significant exposure to e-books. These format options…

This paper explores possibilities for marrying data visualization to online archival finding aids, which have continually suffered from usability issues in their long history. This paper describes a project in which two different data visualization models were built to replace sections of an archival finding aid. Users were then shown the models,…

As librarians increasingly support digital publication platforms, they must also understand the user experience of these tools. This case study assesses use of Scalar, a digital humanities publishing platform for media-rich projects, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Based on a survey, interviews, and content analysis, the study…

Federated searching was once touted as the library world's answer to Google, but ten years since federated searching technology's inception, how does it actually compare? This study focuses on undergraduate student preferences and perceptions when doing research using both Google and a federated search tool. Students were asked about their…

Assessment in United States higher education has become very important in recent years. Virtually all colleges and universities are now striving to prove through empirical evidence that they are committed to improving student learning. Created in late 2005, the US Department of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education was charged…

In the last two decades, fundamental changes in information distribution, in the general economy, and in the behaviors of faculty, students, and library staff have problematized the question of an academic library's value and how it can be measured. This article reviews those changes and, drawing on research linked to the Collegiate Learning…

Looking at 2003-2009 LibQUAL+ responses at research-oriented universities in the United States, faculty library users report a significant and consistent rise in desires and expectations for library-provided online tools and websites, even as student user groups show declining or leveling expectations. While faculty, like students, also report…

A customer contact center offers academic libraries the ability to consistently improve their telephone, e-mail, and IM services. This paper discusses the establishment of a contact center and the benefits of implementing the contact center model at this institution. It then introduces a practical methodology for developing a valid measurement…

This article details an open card sort study administered to undergraduate students, graduate students, and librarians at the University of Colorado at Boulder in order to reveal perceptions of library research guides. The study identifies user group preferences for organization and content of research guides, as well as themes emerging from the…

Research was undertaken to guide development of services for personal digital assistant (PDA) users at the University of Alberta Libraries. A variety of qualitative methods were used to assess user satisfaction with current PDA services and identify potential PDA services for the libraries and resources. The research and needs assessment results…

Should academic libraries seek to improve general satisfaction with their services, or are some services more important than others? This article asserts that faculty and students mainly want information resources. The research analyzes LibQUAL+[TM] data to determine which other library resources contribute to information satisfaction among users.…

The LibQUAL+[TM] protocol solicits open-ended comments from users with regard to library service quality, gathers data on 22 core items, and, at the option of individual libraries, also garners ratings on five items drawn from a pool of more than 100 choices selected by libraries. In this article, the relationship of scores on these locally…