The New Library User in Sweden: a LibQUAL

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LibQUAL
The New Library User in Sweden a LibQUAL
study
Martha Kyrillidou Ann-Christin Persson
6th Northumbria International Conference on
Performance Measures in Libraries and
Information Services Durham 22 - 25 August 2005
old.libqual.org
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Focus of the Paper

• 1.how is the Information Control dimension
  depicted in the results of the Swedish
  participants
• 2.how does the Information Control dimension
  compare between the Swedish implementation and
  other libraries
• 3. the 'new user' as he emerges from the comments
  that support the notion of the self-sufficient,
  independent, and autonomous information seeker at
  Lund University and,
• 4. the new users as reflected in the linguistic
  translation issues of the LibQUAL survey
  instrument in Swedish

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The new library user

• Kruse
• Nagata
• Calvert
• Cook and Thompson
• Cook and Heath
• Lincoln

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The wild library user

• A user who is self-reliant and who views
  library control of resources as an obstruction to
  the creation of his or her own cognitive skills.
  
• Lincoln (2002)

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LibQUAL in Sweden 2004
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Descriptive Statistics for LibQUAL in 2004
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Information Control in 2004
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LTH Staff Students

• Undergraduate students 5842
• Postgraduate students 540
• Professors 192
• Lecturers 219
• Other Teachers researchers 280
• Technical administrative staff 230
• Equivalent to fulltime

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Zones of tolerance
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The five most desired items overall
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The five largest Adequacy gaps overall
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All comments divided into subjects
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Comments on the importance of self-sufficiency

• Phase-out the whole service and build a new
  digital library!
• The access to electronic journals is the
  absolutely most important for my work
• To be able to compete with search engines on the
  net the information needs to be more easily
  accessible. The possibility to search and find
  information fast must increase extremely strong

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Translation

• (Employees who are consistently courteous)
• Att alltid få ett tillmötesgående bemötande av
  personalen
• Personal som alltid är tillmötesgående

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LIFE BEFORE THE COMPUTER 

• Memory was something you lost with age
• An application was for employment
• A program was a TV show   
• A cursor used profanity 
• A keyboard was a piano
• A web was a spider's home
• A virus was the flu   
• A CD was a bank account
• A hard drive was a long trip on the road   
• A mouse pad was where a mouse lived   
• And if you had a 3-1/2 inch floppy ..     ...
  you just hoped nobody ever found out   

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September 2006 Charlottesville, VA, USA