Quality management in special libraries

摘要

Special libraries have been faced increasingly with decisions about performance and quality. Such concepts are being considered across organisations, involving all departments and functions. Quality Management System (QMS)!provides a management framework!that gives libraries the necessary controls to address risks and monitor and measure performance in their business. It can also help libraries to enhance their image and reputation inside their parent organisations. "Quality Management" is considered more formally as part of organisational and departmental policy and planning. This has required the setting up of a variety of quality-related procedures and performance measures. However, quality management is not a simple but a complex process. Any public organisation is willing to apply quality management system to reach excellence need to continually evolve quality management processes at different levels. Librarians at special libraries should seek to balance the tension between processes, measures and activities that promote quality enhancement, at the same time as responding to expectations of users and parents organisations too. In this paper, a number of different approaches to the introduction of quality management in special libraries are reviewed. Literature review showed that though most quality studies were reported from academic libraries, but TQM and EFQM are two quality models which are used in some special libraries around the world and librarians found enough positive results to justify their application. Two most used quality instruments to measure library performance are SERVQUAL and LibQUAL. The SERVQUAL instrument measures the gap between customer's expectations for excellence and their perceptions of actual service delivered, so service providers can understand both customer expectations and their perceptions of specific services. LibQUAL measures library users' evaluations of service quality. In spite of some criticisms, these two instruments have been vastly used in library studies for measuring quality.