Developing the Service Quality Assessment Indicators for Learning Commons at University Libraries

The Learning Commons representing their innovation and transition is important service in university libraries. The article mainly studies on developing the service quality assessment indicators for Learning Commons at university libraries ,there are main purposes including: (1)exploring the meaning and components of the Learning Commons in the Universities’ libraries;(2) understanding the method to evaluate the Learning Commons and constructing adequate indicators for evaluating service quality; (3) understanding the usage and users satisfaction of the Learning Commons in order to assess its service quality , analyzing and evaluating the Learning Commons of libraries. The study has formed the focus groups to better understand themeaning of Learning Commons in Taiwan, and the participants of the focus groups also agreed to conduct the evaluation by applying the assessment of service quality. They came up with three evaluation dimensions and 23 indicators of the Learning Commons. For testing the feasibility of the indicators, the questionnaire was constructed and sent to the users of the Learning Commonsof the N University Library. The research results are as follows: (1) the frequency of using internet affects the number of physically entering to the libraries in both universities; (2) the users recognize the learning value of the libraries; (3) the users used the technological facilities most; (4) the most important services of the Learning Common include a comfortable environment and sufficient resources; (5) the most satisfactory services are the attitudes and responses of the service providers;(6) the services need to be firstly improved include dividing the discussion space from the study space; (7) the overall satisfactory degree still requires more efforts to improve and the libraries should pay more attention on providing resources. Finally, some conclusion and suggestions were proposed by the article. pp. 101-12