Knowing the needs. A system for evaluating the university library.

Presented at QQML (Quanlitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries), 26.-29. May 2009.In the light of the digital library development and of the online communication development, the university education develops in its turn new educational instruments put at the students’ disposal in order to improve their professional skills and their individual studies. The University libraries, which have traditionally been focused on supporting the scholars’ needs in research, have begun to play a more active role in this changing educational system, as a result of the Bologna process. Incorporating the new technologies in the didactic process, accessing the electronic informational resources, using the web space for communication, all these imply qualitative research so as to determine and to optimize the students’ learning methods, and we see a movement in the library world of libraries actively pursuing this. However, to be able to play an active role in the students’ acquiring of scholarly skills, libraries need to implement systems for uncovering the gaps in students’ knowledge. We find that theories and practices from the fields of Market research and Marketing analysis provide a helpful perspective. In this paper we will present a system for an university library to gain knowedge about their student’s needs. This consists of several parts, and we will use examples of surveys, questionnaires and structured interviews. Also, we will present an analysis of data that have been acquired as part of our collaboration in European projects between the university libraries of Brasov, Romania and Bergen, Norwa