This paper provides a historical literature review of the subject librarian position. The subject librarian position was originally created to support patrons in specific subjects. Since the position's creation, a subject librarian's foundational duties have consisted of collection development, reference, instruction, and liaison. Though liaison…

Download rates of academic journals have joined citation counts as commonly used indicators of the value of journal subscriptions. While citations reflect worldwide influence, the value of a journal subscription to a single library is more reliably measured by the rate at which it is downloaded by local users. If reported download rates accurately…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the dimensions of service quality in the context of Islamic higher education (IHE); explain the determinant dimensions of overall perceived service quality (PSQ) according to students; and explains the difference in the level of quality felt by students in each dimension based on gender, year of…

In a highly competitive academic environment, students are becoming more selective and demanding in their choice of University. Hence, it is essential for educational institutions, particularly privately-owned institutions, to be interested in getting feedback on the quality of their facilities and services. With a focus on four private…

The library environment has drastically changed since 1992 when Bostick's Library Anxiety Scale was developed. This project aimed to develop a scale specifically for undergraduate students. A three-stage study was conducted, using students of Kuwait University. A variety of statistical measures, including factor analysis, were used to process the…

In 2005, the authors reviewed citation help in databases and found an error rate of 4.4 errors per citation. This article describes a follow-up study that revealed a modest improvement in the error rate to 3.4 errors per citation, still unacceptably high. The most problematic area was retrieval statements. The authors conclude that librarians…

Student and faculty frustrations with traditional higher education textbook models continue to escalate. These frustrations present an opportunity for academic libraries to forge partnerships with teaching faculty and vendors to repurpose existing library resources. Library and teaching faculty at Southern New Hampshire University collaborated to…

It has been a decade since the first aggregator journal packages began to become available at academic and public libraries throughout the United States of America. During these 10 years, the library and information science community has published numerous articles on the pros and cons of this method of delivery and these collections, more than…

Research libraries are increasingly supplementing collection counts with perceptions of service quality as indices of status and productivity. The present study was undertaken to explore the reliability and validity of scores from the SERVQUAL measurement protocol (A. Parasuraman and others, 1991), which has previously been used in this type of…

Discussion of the Internet highlights its use in libraries and the need to teach patrons what it can and cannot be used for. Topics include the number and variety of existing sources, vendor organization and reliability issues, speed, quality control and regulation issues, and permanence of sources. (LRW)

Discussion of document delivery focuses on fee-based information services. Fee-based information services are defined; reasons for using such services are considered, including reliability, responsiveness, and individualized attention; future directions are discussed; and networking possibilities are explored. (LRW)

Conducted a reliability generalization meta-analysis of subscale and total scale scores on the Web-administered LibQUAL+ (tm) (Cook and others, 2002), a measure of library service quality. Data for 18,161 participants from 43 universities show that score reliabilities are remarkably invariant across campuses and different over groups. (SLD)

Used confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate the score integrity of LibQUALl+, an instrument to measure perceptions of library service quality. Results for 60,027 graduate and undergraduate students suggest that the model implied by LibQUAL is reasonable and invariant across independent samples and fits all three major subgroups of library users.…

Includes four articles that discuss LibQUAL+[TM], a collaborative effort of the Association of Research Libraries and Texas A&M University responding to the need for greater accountability in measuring the delivery of library services to research library users. Discusses the reliability of LibQUAL+[TM] scores in measuring perceived library…

Reports on a project which developed a measure of levels of difficulty of reference questions handled by the California Interlibrary Reference Referral Network, and identified indicative measures that would reliably stand for the concept of difficulty. Correlations of predictive difficulty and actual difficulty are discussed. (nine references)…