Measuring service quality in the networked environment: Approaches and considerations

THE NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT OFFERS LIBRARIES Challenges and opportunities in a number of areas including management, service provision, and collection development. A particular challenge that libraries face in the networked environment is that of measuring and evaluating network-based services. This article offers a number of statistics and performance measures that libraries may find useful in determining the overall quality of their network-based services; identifies a number of service quality criteria; and provides a framework to assist librarians in selecting statistics and performance measures based on service quality criteria. The statistics and performance measures, criteria, and framework are the result of a number of current and past research projects conducted by the author and others across library types.