A View from Elsewhere

This report provides an overview of activities carried out during Michaelmas Term, Autumn 2009, as part of a Cambridge University Library Arcadia Project Fellowship on "Rapid Innovation in the Library". The approach taken during the project was to look for opportunities for "quick wins" in the current library setting that could be used to illustrate potential (and tangible) benefits from engaging with current and emerging technologies and changing trends in user behaviour. Where possible, the work built on work undertaken as part of the previous Arcadia projects.The Arcadia Programme has been funded by a generous grant from the Arcadia Fund. http://www.arcadiafund.org.uk

USERS' EMOTIONAL AND MATERIAL SATISFACTION AT THE MICRO/MACRO LEVELS IN AN ACADEMIC LIBRARY

In late 1990s, Gap theories and the LibQual model began to be widely accepted by research libraries in the U.S. Since then, library service evaluation and user satisfaction issues have been discussed in various aspects of both the research and professional literatures of library and information science. Although the research presented herein is concerned with the evaluation of library services from users' perspectives -- like LibQual, for example -- it integrated other perspectives proposed in recent years by library researchers, including emotional and material satisfaction, service encounter and overall service satisfaction, and user satisfaction at the micro and macro levels. Specifically, the interrelationship of material and emotional satisfaction with the satisfactions at the micro and macro levels was investigated. In addition, this study sought to clarify factors or attributes of library services that contribute to user satisfaction at the micro and macro levels. Finally, the study examined how users' emotional and material satisfaction contribute to overall user satisfaction and user behavior, including user library use behavior in the short term (immediate next time information seeking) and the long term (library use loyalty).In order to gather data on these user satisfaction issues, a Web survey of college students, a major academic library user group, was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh. Each participant completed a five section HTML survey questionnaire designed to collect information about their perception and attitude towards library resources and services.Specifically, the findings provide library professionals greater understanding of how users perceive their library use and how user satisfaction is formed and influenced, in terms of its formation, antecedent, and consequent impact. The research also provides librarians with what is hoped will be practical advice on what else they can or should do to improve library use. For instance, it is important to recognize users' emotional experience in their library use because it determines their immediate next time library use behavior and service use loyalty; it is easier to achieve service use loyalty for repeat users in some specific services than to achieve general library use loyalty for them or occasional users

Optimal loan periods for undergraduate recommended reading

A model is developed for the total expected utility to borrowers of an undergraduate text book recommended by a lecturer. It takes account of the peaked demand for a book following a recommendation, measures of borrower satisfaction which involve both waiting time and reading time (loan period), and the persistence of would-be borrowers in requesting books not found on the shelves. Some parameters of the model were estimated by a method which elicited preferences of students in various choice situations; other parameters were estimated by librarians. Some specific conclusions are drawn regarding the optimal loan period of books in terms of their type and the number of copies held.