Ensuring the effectiveness of Reader Service in an Academic Library by adopting Quality Function Deployment.

Abstract

Library is one of the main service organizations in any university. The assessment of service quality through user perspective is very important. Researchers have been conducted related to how reader services can evaluate and improve, but there has been considerably less studies on how to improve the quality of reader services. In this research the use of quality function deployment (QFD) as a tool for improving reader service quality is explored and an adopted framework as service quality function deployment is proposed. As an initial step, 22 different reader’s requirements were identified from previous studies. They have been translated into service requirement then related with reader service activities and finally develop quality management activities to fulfill the reader’s needs. The most important reader’s requirements were good staff, factual reply and pleasant environment. To fulfill these need we identified important quality management activities such as, employee skill development, software selection, service standardization, employee selection and process planning with the absolute score of 456, 375, 344,330 and 322respectively. Finally the paper revealed that the quality function deployment is a systematic tool to improve the effectiveness of reader service