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  • Essay / Quality Management in Academic Libraries - 1287

    Quality management has been widely applied within the manufacturing industry for a decade. later, the service sector increasingly emphasized this area. Quality management is increasingly integrated into library services, following their perceived success in manufacturing industries, with a particular emphasis on improving the quality of service. Since manufacturing industries differ in terms of characteristic quality, different criteria must be used to measure these industries. The quality management approach should be different in the service sector compared to the manufacturing industry. The most distinguishing characteristic between service industries and manufacturing industries is that, in the former, there is usually direct interaction between the customer and the service. Libraries have direct and intensive interaction with patrons. For this reason, libraries must develop their own framework when integrating quality management approaches in libraries. The practice of quality management in the library services sector has existed since its inception, but the terminology used was different. Performance indicators, evaluation of reference sources using checklist criteria, evaluation of the information retrieval system using recall and precision ratios, cost-effectiveness studies, user surveys on library services, etc. are all part of quality measurement studies using different evaluation mechanisms and methodologies. A review of the literature shows that quality studies in the library and information sectors are mostly isolated and focus on different aspects of library management, services, user studies, etc. Library being a service sector, its primary objective is to provide information and services to its users at the right time middle of paper ......e to discover the flaws in the system and its services. Feedback from students and faculty is essential for continuous improvement in the quality of library services. Conclusion Increasing user expectations have challenged libraries to improve the quality of their services. University libraries wishing to continually improve the quality of their services and fully satisfy users must create a customer-culture oriented relationship in their organization. Quality management in the university library being a service sector is very important. A university library with a huge, but unused, collection. Measuring the quality of acquisition, technical processing and circulation are the main areas of an academic library in which quality measures can be integrated. These areas have many opportunities for further improvement and the quality of academic libraries can thus be improved..