Towards quality culture in the digital environ: Management and optimization of services in research libraries of India

Abstract

National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) has been established in India for ensuring quality and excellence in higher education and has developed a set of objective indicators for the library, as it is the fulcrum of support for the community of academic and research pursuits. This resulted a general consensus for rising demands of evaluation and accountability of academic and research libraries to develop performance evaluation and measure service quality and thereby build quality culture. Advancements in Information and Communication technology, transforming the world into the global village, contributed significant scope for development of electronic information resources and Internet resources in the Library for continuous quality improvement. Library and information centers needs to map the information needs of the customers; well-defined quality policy and Quality Circle and translating into quality information services, by making use of various Information Technology based information retrieval tools. The quality gurus especially Parasuraman, Barry, and Zeithaml have developed the SERVQUAL to measure the quality dimension in the academic and research environ to measure the perceptions of service quality. In view of the emerging challenges for building quality culture in the techno-environ, a total of 1200 questionnaires were distributed to the user community in Indian research libraries to go deeper into the realm of Quality Assessment and Use Techniques with a sincere effort to assess the performance of academic and research libraries in rendering their quality services to the users both from Librarians and users perceptions. Further, attempts were made to develop an instrument of acceptance of Internet technology known as Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) among faculty and Research scholars in India using the original constructs i.e. Perceived and Perceived Ease of Use. In this paper, efforts were also made to examine the relationship between the variables Use of Internet (UOI) and Level of Satisfaction (LOS), that resulted in coming out with a mathematical - regression model in which the results of Regression analysis shows that, the four variables age, teaching and research experience and level of satisfaction put together explains 39 per cent of variance in variable Use of Internet (UOI). The paper concludes based on research findings, valuable suggestions to develop a National Information Policy for quality control as a mandatory to provide due importance in establishing Library and Information Centers as Centers of Learning and research. Of necessity, the strategies must be situation specific, but some possible strategies for libraries to use are identified for planned organizational change to quality improvement.