Abstract |
Facing a new century of highly competitiveness and challenges, libraries have to pursue distinguished service quality for meeting patron needs. Establishing a mechanism of performance measurement, libraries can continuously self-examine their service quality, and present their achievements to their patrons, parent institutions, and funding institutions. It is essential to have a standardized and universal guideline for the practical implementation of performance measurement. In view of this, this study aims at analyzing and developing a set of feasible performance indicators for academic libraries as well as comprehending performance measurement difficulties. Wang, Liu & Ke (2012) integrated existing library performance measurement standards (like ISO 11620:2008) and related projects (like BIX) to propose a total of 59 performance indicators. This study is a followup research of their study. Using a questionnaire survey, this study collected the opinions of academic libraries in Taiwan about the ideally important and practically feasible performance indicators. A total of 162 copies of questionnaire were distributed and 109 copies were returned. The research results are shown as follows. First, the performance indicators about library opening hours, the adequacy and availability of collections, librarian manpower allocation, collections usage, patron satisfaction, interlibrary loan speed, reference fill rate, and budget allocation were more important than others. Second, less feasible indicators possessed features such as high computation cost, difficulty to obtain data, and difficulty to accomplish good achievement. Third, time and budget were the primary reasons that academic libraries did not conduct performance measurement regularly. Suggestions for academic libraries were drawn, based on the conclusion of this study. First, the performance measurement for academic libraries should be promoted further. Second, more activities for librarians to learn about performance measurement could be conducted. Third, a nationwide performance measurement for all academic libraries should be implemented in the long run.
|