Information Services Assessment Council Meeting Minutes

March 27, 2007

Present: Sherry Umscheid, Ryan Papesh, Darrell McNamara, Bill Myers, Thelma Simons, Jill Glaser, Holly Mercer, John Stratton, Mandy Swygart-Hobuagh, Rhonda Sharp (guest)

Absent: Jim Tumlinson

Rhonda Sharp, Interim Service Quality Coordinator for the KU Libraries, briefed ISAC on her attending the ARL Service Quality Evaluation Academy (http://www.arl.org/stats/statsevents/sqacademy/) to inform her assessing service quality in the KU Libraries. She is in the process of ordering a software for anaylzing qualititative data called ATLAS.ti to explore its utility for analyzing data, e.g. LibQual+ comments, or focus group transcripts. She also learned about quantitative analysis and has been experimenting with using SPSS to analyze recently collected reference data. She found the academy useful and recommends it to others interested in learning more about quantitative/qualititative data analysis.

ISAC then discussed the service quality mission and feedback survey to be implemented soon. The discussion focused on how best to promote the feedback opportunity to patrons, when/how to implement the survey, and whether this duplicated the existing "comments and suggestions" form on the KU Libraries' web pages. Possible promotional activities include: Rebecca Smith, the Director of Public Relations and Advancement, running an article re: service quality in the KU Libraries and promoting the feedback opportunity; posters/flyers/bookmarks promoting the feedback opportunity. At this point, the feedback survey will be made available widely for an indefinite period, with plans to implement more focused/detailed assessments re: service quality during specific time frames similar to the reference assessment recently implemented. ISAC concluded that this feedback survey was more specifically geared at assessing the service quality of patron-staff interactions and thus did not specifically duplicate the "comments and suggestions" form currently available.

Subsequent discussion focused on whether this feedback survey as well as the service quality mission might serve as a model for similar missions/assessments in the IT areas of IS. It seemed that this assessment would work well for customer service interactions in IT as well, but that capturing service satisfaction for activities outside of the traditional interaction situation might be difficult. Likewise, the mission seemed applicable across IS when focusing on service quality aspects.