Quality Management in Academic Libraries

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Quality management has been extensively applied within the manufacturing industry over a decade. later, the service industry has increasingly emphasized this area. Quality management is increasingly integrated into library services, following their perceived success in manufacturing industries with particular emphasis on improving service quality. Since manufacturing industries differ in terms of the characteristic quality, different criteria must be used for measuring these industries. Quality management approach should be different in service sector in comparison with manufacturing industry. The most distinguishing characteristic between service and manufacturing industries is that in the former there is usually a direct interaction between customer and the service. Libraries have intensive direct interaction with the customers. Because of this libraries must develop their own framework when integrating quality management approaches into libraries. The practice of quality management in library service sector existed since its conception, however the terminology used was different. Performance indicators, evaluation of reference sources using check-list criteria, evaluation of information retrieval system using recall and precision ratios, cost effectiveness studies, user survey on library services etc are all part of quality measurement studies using different mechanisms of assessment and methodologies. A review of literature shows that quality studies in library and information sectors are mostly isolated and are made on different aspects of library management, services, user studies etc. The library being a service sector, its prime objective is to provide the information and services to its users at the right time in the... ... middle of paper ... ...e of finding out the loopholes in the system and its services. Feedback from students and faculty is essential for continuous improvement in quality of library services. Conclusion The increasing expectations of users have challenged libraries to improve their quality of services.The academic libraries wanting to continuously improve their service quality and completely satisfy users must create a customer-oriented culture in their organization. The quality management in the academic library being a service sector is very important. An academic library with huge collection, but unutilized Measurement of quality of acquisition, technical processing and circulation are main areas of an academic library where the quality measures can be incorporated. These areas have a lot of scope for further improvements and thus the quality of academic libraries can be improved.

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