Customer satisfaction and the strategic role of university libraries

The paper stresses the importance of listening to customers at university libraries and the need to move from a library‐based view to a customer‐based view. Largely on account of their public nature, academic libraries in Finland – where the study was conducted – have until recently, based their operations and development mainly on conventional procedures and library‐based perspectives. However, in order to better serve their own clientele, as well as their parent organizations, they need to listen to the voices of their customers, the library users. One way of ‘listening’ is through a customer survey, in this case LibQUAL – a survey instrument developed in the US for libraries. It collects data on the quality of the services, thus enabling libraries to identify areas in which service levels should be improved.