Hacking Your LibQUAL+ Data: the satisfaction tool

What does it take to make the Cites & Insights Librarian Blog Census ? Perhaps the Ubiquitous Librarian needs to step it up with more posts and more content? What do you want Walt, a pic with me and Natalie Portman hanging out? I'll get to work on that one.

I'm going to step out of character here and actually give you folks something useful, although I guess that is debatable. I'm giving you my LibQUAL+ Satisfaction Tool (.xls)

ARL would probably try and charge you $25 for it and call it something like a Supplemental Patron Satisfaction Percentage Scale, and ACRL would charge you $50 to listen to a podcast about it or to participate in an online class—but it's all free here.

People seem to either love or hate LibQUAL+. I'm a statistics hack, so I dig it. Whenever I talk LibQUAL, there's always confusion about the numbers. My adequacy mean is .43, is that good? My answer: it depends.

Ok, so you have this great lump of data—make it meaningful. Enter your results into the spreadsheet and it calculates the percentage of how satisfied the patron group is with each question. (I guess I could pull together a user guide or something—maybe next week or the week after?). The gist of it is based on a talk I attended by Steve Hiller from UWash. He stated that their goal was to give users 50% of what they wanted. Long story short—this tool takes your data, establishes the zone of tolerance or the range of expectations, which is divided by the adequacy mean. The end result is a nice little percentage, which allows you to say something like, in terms of books, we give our undergraduates 60% of what want, while graduate students are 25% satisfied and faculty are only 5%. This allows you to quickly size up your institution, compare with peer groups, and measure progress over time.

I know this is kind of vague, but you don't have to do any math—just plug your numbers in and let the formulas do the rest.

Comments

[walt crawford]

Two answers to what I assume not to be a serious question:

1. It's not a census. It's a look at a slice of the great middle.

2. You're already too cool for this particular school. You have way more Bloglines subscribers than my upper cutoff point. I know popularity can be a drag, but you'll just have to live with it.