Development of a Conceptual Framework to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Library Services

Abstract

It is important to have a method to continuously assess library services' effectiveness for an insightful planning towards a reliable service to the community. Building on this need, this paper first discusses the identification of criteria and their measuring indicators which are useful in assessing the effectiveness of library services and then development of a conceptual framework to evaluate the effectiveness of library services by reviewing related existing literature. Thus, the study includes a comprehensive literature review related to library services’ effectiveness in which it identifies, determines and suggests criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of library services. After analyzing the names and definitions of identified key criteria, the study identifies ten significant key criteria that diverse authors use to evaluate the effectiveness of library-related services. Further, the formal and informal discussions were conducted with ten subject experts, including librarians and library science academics, to ensure that the content validity fulfills the identified criteria and its measurement items. The study identified top five evaluation criteria used or cited in the related works, namely, user satisfaction, management and staff contributions, service efficiency, accessibility, and collection development. Additionally, three or more indicator categories for each criterion have been identified, and the measurable indicators consisted of Likert-type questions on a five-point rating scale that can be used to measure indicator categories. Finally, the conceptual framework for assessing library services’ effectiveness has been built up based on these criteria and their measurement indicators. The next phase of this research is to build a multi-criteria decision-making model based on the findings to scientifically measure and evaluate the quality of library services.