Insights into library services and users from qualitative research

In a study of users' perceptions of library service quality, interview data were used to restructure and reorient SERVQUAL, a widely employed survey administered to customers to determine quality of service rendered. When adapted to library users' perceptions of service quality, the new instrument, LibQUAL(TM) was configured as a Web-based survey, and administered to over 22,000 users of Association of Research Libraries (ARL) libraries in North America. The data reported on here are comprised of the original interview data used to ground the Web-based survey. Interpretive and culturally-based analyses are offered as hypotheses for why the data were categorized as they were. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.