TWO SHORT FORMS OF THE LIBQUAL + SURVEY: ASSESSING USERS' PERCEPTIONS OF LIBRARY SERVICE QUALITY.

LibQUAL+ is a Web-delivered ’total market survey,’ a term used in the marketing literature for evaluations across an industry of customer expectations and perceptions of service quality. Because the number of items on surveys affects response rates, one goal of instrument development is to create short forms that maintain the reliability and validity of scores on the longer, original protocol. Using data from 20,416 randomly selected users from forty-three academic libraries gathered during the spring 2001 LibQUAL+ run, we examined two methods for developing thirteen-item LibQUAL+ short forms. Both short forms appear to yield scores with sufficient reliability (α1 = .95, α2 = .90) and comparability (ϒLong Form with Short Form #1 = .923, ϒLong Form with Short Form #2 = .981) to long-form scores that either short form may be useful in expeditiously assessing user perceptions. These scores may then be consulted as part of service improvement endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]