Enhancing the Service Level of Library Staff: A Study of University of Moratuwa Library, Sri Lanka.

Abstract

Service quality of library staff is one of the performance indicators of a library. The assessment of service quality provides an important feedback for libraries to assess and improve its services to its users. Enhancing the information resources and facilities are not enough to hold the users in the library with the rapid improvement of the technology. ‘Improving the Service Level of Library Staff’ has become a marketing tool in above situation. The objective of the research was to find out the ways to improve the Service Level of Library staff of University of Moratuwa Library. Students of the university were the population of this research and random sampling technique was used to select the sample. Survey was conducted to collect data from students and both quantitative and qualitative methods were used for data analysis. According to results of the survey, students were very satisfied with the service provided by library staff.However they have requested to resolve the background issues and build a conclusive learning environment. Increasing the library opening hours was a very important requirement for the users. Participants have suggested following when using library services; conducting training programs and workshops for library staff, having a session for staff in every month to introduce new concepts in the information field, improving the language ability of Tamil; writing, reading and speaking etc. Developing a ‘Performance Appreciation System’ to measure the service performance of library staffwould be helpful to motivate them to reach organizational goals.