University Park, PA -- Are Penn State faculty and students satisfied with the quality of services at their campus libraries? Beginning April 7, 2002, thousands of randomly selected individuals at Penn State will receive e-mail invitations to answer a series of questions on a Web survey regarding perceptions about their library's services. The survey should take about ten minutes to complete, and participants may enter a drawing to win Penn State T-shirts as well as a larger national drawing, offering a Palm Pilot.

Penn State's University Libraries are participating with more than 160 other institutions nationwide in LibQUAL+tm, a large-scale user-based library service assessment tool developed by Texas A&M University in conjunction with the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) New Measures Initiative with the support of the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education.

The LibQUAL+ survey tool asks university library patrons to evaluate four dimensions of their campus library's service: affect of service, the library as "place," personal control, and access to information. For each survey item, patrons are asked to identify their "minimum service level," "desired service level," and "perception of the library's service performance" on a scale of 1–9. LibQUAL+ is adapted from the widely tested and accepted SERVQUAL survey, a service and quality survey tool used by for-profit companies.

The national study, which began in the spring of 2000 and will continue through September 2003, will define and measure the quality of library service and will create useful quality-assessment tools for libraries, including a formal assessment program at ARL, the development of Web-based assessment tools and other mechanisms and protocols of evaluation, and the identification of best practices in providing library service. It is another example of the leadership role of ARL, a not-for-profit membership organization comprising the leading research libraries in North America, in shaping and influencing the forces affecting the future of research libraries in the process of scholarly communication.

Penn State's participation in LibQUAL+ will help the University Libraries create a culture of assessment based on outcomes measures and will provide a set of new measures to evaluate the effectiveness of services in meeting the needs of students and faculty.

To find out more about LibQUAL+, visit the Web site: www.arl.org/libqual/index.html or contact Laurie Probst, head of Libraries' Public Services, at lkp5@psulias.psu.edu or 814-865-5524.