Present: Alan Solomon (chair), Sue Crockford-Peters, Holly Grossetta Nardini (recording), Jae Williams, Danelle Moon, Danuta Nitecki, Sandy Peterson, Joan Swanekamp

Absent: Mark Gentry, Fred Martz, Kim Parker, Kate Reynolds, Paul Stuehrenberg, Carol Jones

The Council spent the full meeting discussing two articles distributed at the last meeting to learn about the concepts of service quality and how they could be applied at Yale.

"Understanding Service Quality" in Delivering Satisfaction and Service Quality, P. Hernon and J.R. Whitman, ALA: Chicago, 2001, 14-30.

"Service Quality in Academic Libraries" by D. Nitecki in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, A. Kent, editor, Marcel Dekker Inc.: NY, 1999, 216-232

Alan posed the following questions to the Council:

• What were your reactions to the articles?
• Is there a life for service quality in the Yale Libraries?.
• What are some of the challenges noted in the articles that might apply to the Yale Library scene?

Some comments from the group:

• Since the Council’s founding two years ago, service quality is more widely discussed on campus and in libraries and common use of the terminology will help our work. Timing is critical and the library may be more receptive now to learn more about service quality as a management approach.
• Reading articles to develop a shared vocabulary is very useful. Then, we must all use the same vocabulary to promote the concept.
• Service quality movement is only 20-30 years old and there’s still plenty of room for learning and writing on the topic.
• Service quality is a complex topic and there is no one universally accepted definition—we must find one that works for the library.
• It’s useful to go back to the basics and learn the concepts of service quality
• The customer-based approach is fundamental to service quaity.
• Support from top administrators is key to the success of a service quality approach.
• Assessment is not an "add-on" but should become part of daily operations.
• It may be difficult to implement, but data gathered about operations and customer feedback are received by staff with "incredibly positive" response.
• We need to have training and infrastructure in place to shift to assessment-based decisions
• "Constant vigilance" – have to maintain effort and keep up the momentum of training efforts, like customer service.
• Leadership will be needed at all levels of the organization.
• All present recognized the four basic service principles of reliability, fairness, recovery and surprise, even if we never quite had the words for them. We need more insights about how to apply the concepts to practice.
• We must overcome the attitude that the customer is the problem, and that our professional judgement is more important than the customer’s perception.
• There is competition for our services—amazon.com, bookstores, etc. There are new realities and new challenges.

The review of the articles ended with a discussion on how to facilitate the cultural change in the library Some noted insights gained from other articles read for today. Among initial ideas posed were to engage more staff (including those working outside traditional "public" services ), to generate ideas from observing service practices elsewhere, and to try contests. Alan offered to work with a few volunteers to plan a forum for library staff to stimulate further exploration of the concepts and practice of service quality.