LibQUAL+ Survey 2004 @ Queen's University Library : analysis of results

Queen's University Library was one of 202 libraries, including 57 members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), to survey its users in spring 2004 using the LibQUAL+ survey instrument. LibQUAL+ was designed by ARL to assist libraries in assessing the quality of their services and identifying areas for improvement. # Overall: Queen's scored higher than the average for all ARL participants and 1st among the 2004 Canadian participants. This relatively high rating is due to very high scores in the dimensions of Library as Place and Affect of Service. However, there is considerable need for improvement in the area of Information Control where Queen's rated well below the ARL average. # Affect of Service: Queen's strong overall ratings are supported by the many respondent comments praising customer service throughout the system. The ratings and survey comments indicate greatest appreciation by faculty and more experienced students (e.g. graduate students) for the instruction and on-site services provided by the libraries. The ratings also indicate that undergraduates, growing up with the web, want and expected to be able to access library resources independently and do not value these services as highly. The comments also indicated some specific areas for improvement throughout the library system. # Library as Place : All Queen's libraries except for Law ranked well above the ARL and Canadian averages. Overall, Library as Place ranked lowest in importance among the service dimensions for all ARL participants including Queen's. Comparative analysis of LibQUAL results since the survey began shows a decline in “desired” ratings for Library as Place. However, undergraduates continue to give strong "desired" ratings to certain aspects of Library as Place and a relatively high rating for "minimum expected" service. The comments from Queen's survey respondents and ARL's analyses of focus groups indicate that undergraduates value the library much more as a place to study and work with peers rather than for its on-site resources and services. # Information Control: This is the area in greatest need of attention. While it ranked highest in importance for all user groups by a wide margin, Queen's performed poorly in this category. Overall, Queen's ranked far below both the ARL average and the top three Canadian scores. However, the major dissatisfaction was concentrated in the humanities/social sciences (Stauffer primary users) and the health sciences (Bracken primary users) where the overall rating of perceived service quality ranked below the minimum expected service rating. Primary users of the Education, Engineering/Science and Law libraries rated this service dimension higher than the ARL average. The great success of the Canadian National Site License Program (CNSLP) is reflected in the high overall rating generated by Engineering/Science Library users. The low ratings from the humanities and social sciences are supported by respondents' comments and are generally consistent with other ARL participants.

Assisting End-users in Filling Out Web Services

With the quick advance of web service technologies, end-users can conduct various on-line tasks, such as shopping on-line. Usually, end-users compose a set of services to accomplish a task, and need to enter values to services to invoke the composite services. Quite often, users re-visit websites and use services to perform re-occurring tasks. The users are required to enter the same information into various web services to accomplish such re-occurring tasks. However, repetitively typing the same information into services is a tedious job for end-users. It can negatively impact user experience when an end-user needs to type the re-occurring information repetitively into web services. Recent studies have proposed several approaches to help users fill in values to services automatically. However, prior studies mainly suffer the following drawbacks: (1) limited support of collecting and analyzing user inputs; (2) poor accuracy of filling values to services; (3) not designed for service composition. To overcome the aforementioned drawbacks, we need maximize the reuse of previous user inputs across services and end-users. In this thesis, we introduce our approaches that prevent end-users from entering the same information into repetitive on-line tasks. More specifically, we improve the process of filling out services in the following 4 aspects: First, we investigate the characteristics of input parameters. We propose an ontology-based approach to automatically categorize parameters and fill values to the categorized input parameters. Second, we propose a comprehensive framework that leverages user contexts and usage patterns into the process of filling values to services. Third, we propose an approach for maximizing the value propagation among services and end-users by linking a set of semantically related parameters together and similar end-users. Last, we propose a ranking-based framework that ranks a list of previous user inputs for an input parameter to save a user from unnecessary data entries. Our framework learns and analyzes interactions of user inputs and input parameters to rank user inputs for input parameters under different contexts.

The Impact of Geographic Mobility on Canadian Military families and their Children’s Access Special Education Services

To achieve academic success, children with learning-related disabilities often receive special education supports at school. Currently, Canada does not have a federal department or integrated national system of education. Instead, each province and territory has a separate department or ministry that is responsible for the organization and delivery of education, including special education, at the elementary level. At the macro (national) level, inclusive education is the policy across Canada. However, each province and territory has its own legislation, definitions, and policies mandating special education services. These variations result in little consistency at the micro (individual school) level. Differences between eligibility requirements, supports offered, and delivery methods may present challenges for highly mobile families who must navigate new special education systems on behalf of their children with medical or learning challenges. One of the defining features of the Canadian military lifestyle is geographic mobility. As a result, many families are tasked with navigating new school systems for their children, a task that may be more difficult when children require special education services. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of geographic mobility on Canadian military families and their children’s access to special education services. The secondary objective was to gain insight into supports that helped facilitate access to services, as well as supports that participants believe would have helped facilitate access. A qualitative approach, interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA), was employed due to of its focus on individuals’ experiences and their understandings of a particular phenomenon. IPA allowed participants to reflect on the significance of their experiences, while the researcher engaged with these reflections to make sense of the meanings associated with their experiences. Nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with civilian caregivers who have a child with special education needs. An interview guide and probes were used to elicit rich, detailed, first-person accounts of their experiences navigating new special education systems. The main themes that emerged from the participants’ combined experiences addressed the emotional components of experiencing a transition, factors that may facilitate access to special education services, and career implications associated with accessing and maintaining special education services. Findings from the study illustrate that Canadian families experience many, and often times severe, barriers to accessing special education services after a posting. Furthermore, the impacts reported throughout the study echo the existing American literature on geographic mobility and access to special education services. Building on the literature, this study also highlights the need for further research exploring factors that create unique barriers to access in a Canadian context, resulting from the current special education climate, military policies, and military family support services.