Customer satisfaction at the Faculty of Philosophy Library in Osijek, Croatia

Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of the customer satisfaction survey of the Faculty of Philosophy in Osijek Library. The purpose of the survey was to determine the level of satisfaction among two customer groups: students and faculty. Design/methodology/approach - The methodology utilised was a five-page satisfaction questionnaire. Findings - This paper presents the findings of the first customer satisfaction survey of the Faculty of Philosophy in Osijek Library. The satisfaction data are collected as a part of a wider library evaluation program and present the first step in future continuous measurement of customers' expectations and their satisfaction. Research limitations/implications - The structure and the size of the sample do not secure the representativeness. Among the student population, the paper was distributed only to those who visited the library, which, in a way, reduces the validity of the sample (those who are dissatisfied with library services may avoid the library). Among the faculty, the survey was distributed via e-mail, but some faculty members do not check their e-mail accounts regularly (or not at all). Originality/value - This is the first measurement of customer satisfaction for the Faculty of Philosophy in Osijek Library. Furthermore, there are only a few similar papers that report on research in Croatian libraries in international literature.

1. Introduction

One of the probably most complicated phenomena connected with measuring library quality is the issue of customer satisfaction. It is counted among subjective or soft measures as indicators of quality ([5] Hayes, 1997). They are soft because they are based on perceptions and attitudes, rather than on objective, hard, criteria. This is partly the reason why there are so many problems with measurement and interpretation of customer satisfaction today.

So far, there are many papers that report the findings of library satisfaction surveys across the world (see, for instance, [3] D'Elia and Walsh, 1983; [12] Perkins and Yuan, 2001; [6] Hiller, 2001; [8] Martensen and Grønholdt, 2003; [9] Morales et al. , 2011; [1] Cook et al. , 2003; [16] Saunders, 2008), but we were not able to find that many papers that deal with this topic in Croatia. It is true that libraries in Croatia are now well aware of the importance of performance measurement of their activities. There have been several conferences and meetings on this topic[1] , there is a research project Evaluation of library services: academic and public libraries funded by Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sports[2] and finally, research into library satisfaction, although not as frequent as in some of the other countries whose libraries have a well-developed culture of assessment, is slowly taking off[3] . Croatian authors from both public and academic library environments, have started investigating this topic and reporting on it since the end of the last century and so far there are several papers that investigate library satisfaction ([11] Pavlinic and Horvat, 1998; [13] Petr, 2000; [15] Sapro-Ficovic, 2000; [2] Cvetnic Kopljar, 2002; [4] Dukic et al. , 2009; [10] Novak, 2010). However, these investigations have been sporadic with no systematic approach in measuring customer satisfaction until to now, but the situation, especially regarding academic libraries, has recorded change for the better. Croatia signed the Bologna declaration in 2001 and this has marked the beginning of profound changes and the reform in the area of Croatian higher education. Among other things, the Bologna process in Croatia has placed the quality of higher education in the limelight of the interest of academic community, especially the funding agencies. According to the new Law on Quality Assurance in Science and Higher Education ([18] Zakon, 2005) all HE institutions in Croatia must undergo the process of external evaluation. There are consequences for institutions that do not conform to standards of quality, the most severe of them all is the withdrawal of the licence for operation of the whole institution or some of its programs of study. This was a massive "wake-up call" for academic libraries and many of them started thinking about the level of quality of their present services, and ways how to efficiently measure and improve them.

This paper presents the part of the findings of the first attempt to systematically collect information about customer satisfaction[4] by the Faculty of Philosophy in Osijek Library (FPOL). This is important for our institution because the library plans to collect customers' opinions systematically in the future. In addition the findings of this survey were processed and analyzed promptly and report was published at library's web page.

2. The FPOL

The Faculty of Philosophy in Osijek (FPO[5] offers nine undergraduate, 12 graduate[6] and two postgraduate teaching programs. In the academic year 2009/2010 the student population consisted of 824 undergraduate students and 533[7] graduate students while the faculty comprised of 134 full-time and 123 part-time teaching staff.

The FPOL with its holdings (65,000 items of book materials, 1,500 items of non-book materials and 3,000 volumes of periodicals) and three reading rooms occupies an area of 338 m² . The collection building policy aims to follow undergraduate and graduate teaching programs with primary emphasis on humanities and social sciences.

Aware of its inadequacies in terms of space, information resources and in particular of information technology, and yet determined to comply with its mission to meet the teaching, science and research information needs of the students and teaching staff, the library tried to identify its current strengths and weaknesses by conducting a survey of user satisfaction with the library services and their expectations about its services. This is the first survey in a series which will be conducted every two to three years.

Since the last survey of the user satisfaction, which was conducted in 1998 ([13], [14] Petr, 2000, 2001), some important developments have influenced its services and users. The library was refurbished in 2008: the reading room was divided into a separate reading room for quiet study and reading room for group study; a bigger part of library holdings has been placed on open stacks accessible for users, and library services have been publicized on the library web site which also contains the library's OPAC.

3. Faculty of philosophy library user satisfaction survey: academic year 2009/2010

3.1 Research objectives

The goal of the new user satisfaction survey, conducted in academic year 2009/2010, was to identify user satisfaction with:

- library services (information service, interlibrary loan, responsiveness to inquiries, library instruction);

- library holdings (across several collections);

- library staff; and

- research conditions in the library (space, equipment, etc.).

3.2 Research methodology, instrument and sample

This paper analyzes some of the most interesting findings of satisfaction survey conducted in spring 2010 for the undergraduate and graduate students, and from spring to autumn 2010 for the faculty. The surveys were e-mailed to the faculty staff on two occasions, in spring and autumn 2010, whereas the students (undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate) were asked to fill in the paper version of the survey in the library. The paper concentrates on questions that dealt with customer satisfaction with various aspects of library service as well as their expected level of quality for these aspects.

Collected data were processed by SPSS package using descriptive statistics and quadrant analysis.

Several points must be pointed out regarding our methodology:

- anonymity - the faculty were e-mailed the survey with the instruction to fill it out, print it and bring to the library so that the anonymity of answers were preserved, but a part of the faculty waived the anonymity and just e-mailed their answers back; student anonymity was better preserved since they filled out the paper version of the survey; and

- representativeness - whereas we may speculate on the representativeness of the faculty sample because all the faculty members received the survey through their e-mail accounts and just had to decide whether they wanted to participate in the research or not[8] , we could not do so with the student population. Not all of them were offered the chance to take part in this survey as only those members of the student population who came to the library in the specific period of time were eligible for inclusion into the survey. Some may argue that in this way we influenced higher scoring on the satisfaction questions since those dissatisfied with library services tend to avoid the library and look for information somewhere else. Furthermore, the number of participants in this survey fell short of the number recommended by [17] Van House et al. (1990)[9] . At first we feared that the faculty would be the weak link and provide the fewest answers, but it turned out that this was the group that was best represented in the sample: we reached 40 members of the faculty (or 29.85 percent). Next come the undergraduate students (176 respondents or 21.36 percent). They are followed by graduate students (78 respondents or 14.63 percent) (Tables I-IV [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]).

Certain data in Table I [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] do not correspond to the percentages of student or faculty[10] population implying uneven distribution of the questionnaires since the sample was random. Tables I-IV [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] bring detailed data about our sample. Broken down by study groups, the best response rate came from the graduate students of Croatian language and literature (23 respondents or 29.49 percent) (Table II [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]), undergraduate LIS students (33 respondents or 18.75 percent) (Table I [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]) and full-time faculty from the Department of Croatian Language and Literature (11 respondents or 27.50 percent) (Table III [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]). Furthermore, broken down by academic title, assistants were most represented faculty members in our sample (18 assistants or 45 percent) (Table IV [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]).

3.3 Results

The data collected from the questionnaires are analyzed below. Depending on the question type, arithmetic mean was used for the analysis of five-point Likert scale measuring satisfaction (scales from 1=very dissatisfied to 5=very satisfied) and importance (scales from 1=not important at all to 5=very important), while the open-ended questions were analyzed by content.

Satisfaction with library services in general

Table V [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] shows that the overall satisfaction with library services is somewhat better among the faculty (mean 4.20) than among the students (mean 4.04). Furthermore, 32.50 percent of the faculty (13 respondents) and 32.96 percent of the students (88 respondents) are completely satisfied while only 2.50 percent of the faculty (one respondent) and 0.37 percent of the students (one respondent) are completely dissatisfied (Figure 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]).

Undergraduate and graduate students demonstrate almost the same level of satisfaction (undergraduate 4.06 and graduate 4.03) (Table VI [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]).

According to the fields of study, students of Education and students of English language and literature can be considered the most satisfied with the library services (mean 4.39 and 4.30, respectively). The least satisfied were students of Psychology and Philosophy (Psychology, 3.88 and Philosophy, 3.83) (Table VII [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]).

The major causes for student dissatisfaction are lack of available materials in the library, faulty computer equipment and disruption of the internet service, while the faculty want access to more online databases and more prompt interlibrary loan service.

When asked to describe the library service aspects which they found most valuable, for students it is mostly the friendliness of librarians, promptness of service, provision of internet and reading rooms for quiet and group study: for the faculty, librarians' friendliness and responsiveness and service promptness were identified as the most valuable assets of the FPO library.

When asked to define what they would like to change about the library, students wanted better computer equipment and faster internet access, a ban on the usage of social community networks such as Facebook and the provision more diverse book materials. The faculty would like richer library collections and subscriptions to various electronic information resources.

Satisfaction with specific library collections

Students and faculty value library collections similarly: students evaluated required materials (obligatory book materials required for the courses and exams) with the mean score 3.77, and faculty with 3.83. The further reading materials (additional information sources for the courses) were scored with mean 3.13 by students and with 2.98 by faculty. The reference collection (encyclopedias, dictionaries, glossaries, etc.) was valued with 3.34 by students and 3.29 by faculty. Faculty were more dissatisfied with the journal collection (mean value 2.93) than the students (mean score 3.31) while students were more satisfied with the research collection (materials needed for writing seminar papers, undergraduate and graduate papers, doctoral thesis and research papers) (mean score 3.44) than faculty (mean value 3.03) (Figure 2 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]).

Both undergraduate and graduate students are most satisfied with required materials collection (undergraduate mean value 3.86, graduate mean value 3.60) and research collection (undergraduate mean value 3.55, graduate mean value 3.27). Those two respondent groups agree also with each other when it comes to the segment of library collection they are least satisfied with. They are both dissatisfied with further reading collection (undergraduate mean value 3.22, graduate mean value 3.00) (Table VIII [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]).

Table IX [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] shows satisfaction data for the student sample broken down by their field of study. Almost all study groups are mostly satisfied with required materials subject collections. Only LIS students are more satisfied with LIS reference collection (mean value 4.00), but LIS required materials collection came second best with mean value of 3.97. It seems that psychology students are most satisfied student group in the sample when it comes to required materials collection for their subject of study (mean value 4.12).

The worst scored parts of the library holdings are further reading collections for philosophy program (2.77), reference collection and journals and newspapers for psychology program (2.81 and 2.87, respectively), further reading collection for psychology and history program (2.92 and 2.94, respectively).

Percentage to which FPOL satisfies overall information needs of its users

As it can be seen from Figure 3 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.], FPOL provides almost all the information for only one member of the faculty (2.50 percent) and 34 students (11.48 percent) suggesting that the rest of the sample (39 faculty respondents or 87.50 percent and 246 student respondents or 82.52 percent) turn to other information resources. For majority of students (83 respondents or 30.74 percent), the library meets between 61 and 80 percent of their information needs whereas with faculty it is for majority of our respondents (15 respondents or 37.50 percent) between 41 and 60 percent of their information needs.

Table X [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] shows that the library meets for majority of both undergraduate (55 respondents or 32.35 percent) and graduate students (23 respondents or 29.11 percent) between 61 and 80 percent of their information needs.

Table XI [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] shows data broken down by student field of study. According to them, the library meets the best the information needs of Croatian (38 respondents or 33.04 percent), LIS (15 respondents or 40.54 percent), German (14 respondents or 29.17 percent) and Education students (nine respondents or 37.50 percent). For them, it meets between 61 and 80 percent of their information needs. For Philosophy students it meets only 41-60 percent of their needs (nine respondents or 30 percent) and the biggest collection problems concern English, History and Psychology department. According to students, library meets only between 21 and 40 percent of information needs of those students.

Importance of FPOL for its users

Both, the faculty (with mean score 4.00 out of 5.00) and the students (mean score 4.34) perceive FPOL to be important for their individual, professional and academic development. For one faculty member (2.50 percent) FPOL is not important at all, and for 11 faculty respondents (27.50 percent) it is very important, for three student respondents (1.11 percent) FPOL is not important at all, and for 132 respondents (48.71 percent) it is very important (Figure 4 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]).

Broken down to undergraduate and graduate students, the library seems to be a slightly more important for undergraduate (mean value 4.38) than graduate students (mean value 4.26) (Table XII [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]).

If we want to know about fields of study, Table XIII [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] gives data which show that Croatian (mean value 4.51), Education (mean value 4.42) and English students (mean value 4.35) find library most important. Psychology (mean value 4.08) and LIS students (mean value 4.14) consider library least important.

Satisfaction vs expectations

In the next block, our respondents were asked to mark (on a five-point Likert scale) their expected and perceived level of service for various library service elements. We calculated means and gaps for both categories and for both respondent groups. As it can be seen from Table XIV [Figure omitted. See Article Image.], service aspects with the biggest gap for both respondent groups are:

(1)] book materials (faculty, 1.53; students, 1.35); and

(2)] computer equipment (faculty, 1.20; students, 1.89).

Quadrant analysis of the data (Figure 5 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]) collocated all the data in the following two quadrants:

(1)] very important for our respondents that the library provides the service; and

(2)] the library provides the service, but it is not perceived as that important by our respondents.

It shows that faculty and students both regard book materials, usefulness of the information received in the library, librarian's availability, librarians' friendliness and responsiveness, librarians' competences and know-how and service delivery time as very important services which the library provide. While faculty also regards the OPAC to be very important, for students on the other hand, this quadrant also includes working hours, reading room and computer equipment.

The second quadrant reveals services provided by the library, but not perceived as that important by respondents. In our case, faculty and students agree that reference service, library holding layout, interlibrary loan and library instruction fall into this quadrant. While OPAC was very important for the faculty, students perceive it as not that important. On the other hand, working hours, reading room and computer equipment are not so important for the faculty as for the students who put these services, as already mentioned, in the first quadrant.

Although there is a substantial gap between the perceived and expected quality of book materials and computer equipment (highlighted by italics in Figure 5 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]), the both fall into the first quadrant with services very important for the library users and provided by the library. The rating of some services as "not that important" (OPAC, information service, library holding layout, library instruction, interlibrary loan) may be caused by the lack of familiarity with these services and unawareness of its full potential. Hopefully, the perception of these services will change till the next survey.

3.4 Discussion

This satisfaction survey was aimed at customers of the FPO's library. They were broken down to two respondent groups - faculty and students. This time we managed to reach 29.85 percent of the faculty, 21.36 percent of undergraduate and 14.63 percent of graduate students. As already argued, there are some shortcomings in our distribution methodology (some study groups and faculty departments were underrepresented or not reached at all) and the size of the sample, which we intend to correct in our next survey.

The comparative analysis of respondents' structure revealed that the results of this questionnaire are mostly based on the opinions of LIS, Croatian language and literature and Psychology undergraduate students, Croatian language and literature, German language and literature, and English language and literature graduate students. As for the faculty, the survey is based mostly on the opinions from the Department of Croatian Language and Literature, LIS Department, Departments of English Language and Literature, and German Language and Literature. Faculty is slightly more satisfied with the library services in general than students with the mean score 4.45 and 32.50 percent of them being completely satisfied. Students are slightly less satisfied with the mean 4.04. However, 32.96 percent of the students are completely satisfied.

The research says ([7] Johnston, 1996) that only those customers that describe their satisfaction level as completely satisfied tend to be loyal. At all other levels of loyalty customers are likely to do their business elsewhere. Therefore it was crucial for our library to identify the percentage (and the structure) of those loyal customers i.e. customers who described themselves as completely satisfied. For our sample that means that 32.50 percent of faculty (13 respondents) and 32.96 percent of students (88 respondents) can be regarded as completely satisfied and loyal to library. Since the library needs that kind of users, measures must be taken to eliminate the reasons of dissatisfaction in dissatisfied or less satisfied users.

According to the fields of study, students of Education and students of English language and literature are most satisfied with the library services whereas the least satisfied were students of Psychology and Philosophy. These findings can be combined with the satisfaction with various parts of library collections.

Students perceive that library as slightly more important for their individual, professional and academic development as faculty do. For just three students and only a single member of the faculty, FPOL had no importance at all; for 48.71 percent of the students and 27.50 percent of the faculty it is seen as very important.

It is not surprising that the Psychology and Philosophy students show the least level of satisfaction with library services as we are aware that the one of the highest influences on satisfaction is the completeness of library collections. Furthermore, if we take into account that studies of Psychology and Philosophy are relatively new additions to the Faculty of Philosophy and their library collections are in the process of being built, it is obvious why those two particular student groups turn out to be least satisfied.

Students and faculty do not differ much in evaluation of individual library collections. The faculty are mostly dissatisfied with journals and newspapers and further reading materials, and students with further reading materials and journals and newspapers. They are both quite satisfied with required materials. In general, the faculty is always somewhat less satisfied with all library collections since they need deeper scientific insights for their research.

Comparative analysis in Table IX [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] is very important for future library collection development policy since the user satisfaction/dissatisfaction is an indication of the parts of library collections most in need of improvement. The parts of the individual library holdings receiving the worst scores were - with a mean value under 3.00 - further reading materials for philosophy, psychology and history, reference collection and journal collection for psychology.

The library tries to accommodate all subject areas and create collections for all fields of study but building good collections takes time. Since the Bologna process requires that a higher education institution must provide all the necessary required materials and further reading materials in sufficient quantities for its students, the library's collection building policy is focussed on those two collections, putting additional resources such as those titles required for research and scientific work mostly on hold until the two main collections are completed. Therefore it is not surprising to find out that Psychology students for example are both extremely satisfied with their required material collection but are also extremely dissatisfied with reference or journal collection. Since further reading lists for some study fields (e.g. philosophy, history) include numerous titles which are either out of print or published abroad in foreign languages, the library finds it very difficult to acquire all the titles for those lists.

Both students and faculty are least satisfied with computer equipment and book materials, but with an annual acquisition budget for only about 400 volumes of book materials, and very old computer equipment this is not surprising and the library is well aware of the problems. However, lacking the financial means and executive power (being a dependent part of a higher education institution) it is unable to rectify them at the moment.

In addition, students are also dissatisfied with interlibrary loan and library instruction and faculty with reading room and library holding layout. Students are most satisfied with librarians' friendliness and responsiveness and their competences and know-how, faculty are also most satisfied with librarians' friendliness and responsiveness and their availability when needed. Both students and faculty regard the most important aspects of library services to be librarians' competences and know-how and their friendliness and responsiveness and availability when needed.

Quadrant analysis revealed that both students and faculty agree on some services which they regard to be very important and which library provides: book materials, usefulness of the information received in the library, librarians' availability when needed, librarians' friendliness and responsiveness, librarians' competences and know-how and service delivery time. The OPAC is also very important for the faculty; working hours, reading room and computer equipment for students.

Both, faculty and students regard information service, library holding layout, interlibrary loan and library instruction not to be that important for them, the OPAC is not that important for students, and working hours, reading room and computer equipment are not that important for the faculty.

The survey brought some interesting, and seemingly contradicting responses of our respondents, especially when it comes to computer equipment, internet provision and book collections. Namely, these elements are both referred to as causes of dissatisfaction of certain respondent groups, but at the same time, the quadrant analysis placed those elements of service in the group of "Important for customers that the library provides the service." Obviously, the library provides sufficient basic level of service when it comes to those service elements: it takes care about required materials collection, and it provides computer equipment and internet access. Obviously, those service elements need looking into because other library collections must be developed and enriched as well, more modern computer equipment installed and faster (and wireless) internet provided.

Our survey also shows that users do not appreciate the value of some important library services such as library instruction, interlibrary loan and the OPAC. These are also questions with the lowest response rate for both students and faculty. It will be interesting to see if the users' attitude towards these services changes in the next survey after marketing activities are intensified, emphasizing the possibilities and advantages of these services to potential users. Further research will demonstrate if maybe the reason for such an evaluation was a lack of awareness of all of the benefits these services can provide.

4. Conclusion

This paper presents some of the findings of the first in the series of satisfaction surveys that the Library of Faculty of Philosophy plans to conduct as a part of its efforts to improve its quality.

Results of this survey were indicative on several levels. They have helped the library to identify service areas which cause most dissatisfaction for costumers and which need more attention on the part of the library, but they also gave a solid base which can be presented to the administration when applying for higher budget (such as for book materials and electronic resources, computer equipment and a new reading room).

The strengths of the library are definitely the people it employs: library users are most satisfied with service elements which fall in the domain of assurance, empathy and responsiveness and these aspects must be maintained and developed further.

The aspects of the services which received the most unfavorable assessments can be subdivided into two groups regarding the actual cause of faults:

(1)] service aspects the improvement of which depends on the support and funds from the administration (computer equipment, book materials, access to databases, additional reading room for group study); and

(2)] service aspects which can be improved by the library itself (the OPAC, interlibrary loans, library instruction).

Although the budget allocated to the acquisition of book materials has stayed much the same, the FPOL has tried to eliminate the sources of dissatisfaction with the information sources by intensifying the promotion of interlibrary loans (posters on interlibrary loans in the reading rooms, basic information on this service during the reception for the first year undergraduate students and during library instruction courses at the beginning of the first year of the study), subscribing to electronic information resources (Cambridge Journals online, Project Muse, Emerald), library instruction on information and library literacy and various e-resources.

The results of the survey have implied some basic priorities in the future library development orientation such as focussing on library instruction and information literacy. They also present valuable reference points for next surveys to be conducted and for the evaluation if the sources of dissatisfaction with library services have been eliminated, or at least alleviated and if the measures undertaken by the library show results or if they have to be corrected.

Footnote

1. In 2008 academic libraries dedicated their annual conference to the topic of library quality (tenth days of special and academic libraries, Opatija, April 24-26, 2008) and in 2011 the section for Statistics and Performance Indicators of the Croatian Library Association organized a round table entitled "From Statistics to Performance Indicators."

2. The project was started in 2007 and finishes with 2011. It is carried out by the Department of Information Sciences of the Faculty of Philosophy in Osijek (FPO).

3. Measuring activities in Croatian libraries are further complicated by the fact that Croatia does not have a good statistical survey that would collect the basic statistical data about libraries. The survey that has been for years used by the Croatian Bureau of Statistics is inadequate and the data are processed and published only in their collective form, which means that no benchmarking between two libraries is possible on the basis of those data. Croatian Agency for Librarianship at the National and University Library in Zagreb initiated in 2009 new statistical questionnaire, but only for Croatian public libraries. One thing that is especially important with this initiative is that, besides new and more appropriate measures, it also came together with comprehensive Instructions booklet which left no possibility for error in filling the questionnaire out.

4. We refer to this survey as the "first" because it marks the beginning of the systematic collection of customer satisfaction. However, there was a customer satisfaction survey conducted in 1998 for the purposes of a master thesis ([13], [14] Petr, 2000, 2001). Unfortunately, back then the library did not see the need for continuation of that activity.

5. The FPO, as a part of Josip Juraj Strossmayer University in Osijek, one out of seven universities in Croatia, provides academic education for the population of the eastern region of Croatia, as well as neighboring countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Hungary).

6. Undergraduate teaching programs of FPO are Croatian language and literature; Education; English language and literature; German language and literature; history; Hungarian language and literature; Library and Information Science (LIS); Philosophy and Psychology. Graduate teaching programs are: Croatian language and literature; Education; English language and literature; German language and literature; History; Hungarian language and literature; LIS; Philosophy and Psychology; Written heritage in digital environment, and the two postgraduate teaching programs: postgraduate university study of linguistics and postgraduate university study of literature and cultural identity.

7. Based on autumn 2009 enrollment list.

8. And while this is true for the majority of our faculty, it is not entirely true for all. There are some faculty members (elder) who reluctantly use the information technology and prefer other ways of communication (e.g. majority of our Education department faculty). These faculty members were, therefore, also excluded from our research because they did not check their e-mails.

9. According to them, for the population of 800 the sample size should be 259 (we had 176 for population of 824 undergraduate students), for the population of 500 the sample size should be 217 (we had 78 for the population of 533 graduate students) and for the population of 100 the sample size should be 79 (we had 40 for the sample size of 134 faculty members). We failed to achieve the required sample size for each of our respondent groups.

10. Some study groups were not represented in the overall sample such as undergraduate students of Hungarian language and literature and English language and literature, English language and literature and education and Hungarian language and literature and history, and graduate students of education and history, education and philosophy, English language and literature and philosophy, German language and literature and education.

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Appendix

About the authors

Kornelija Petr Balog is a Lecturer at the Department of Information Sciences, Faculty of Philosophy in Osijek, Croatia and teaches courses on organization of information, information retrieval and performance measurement. Kornelija Petr Balog is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: [email protected]

Bernardica Plascak is Chief Librarian at the Faculty of Philosophy in Osijek Library.

  

Illustration

Figure 1: User satisfaction with library services in general, students vs faculty

  

Figure 2: Student vs faculty satisfaction with specific library collections

  

Figure 3: Percentage to which FPOL satisfies overall information needs of its users

  

Figure 4: Perception of the importance of FPOL for individual, professional and academic development of the respondents

  

Figure 5: Quadrant analysis of library services

  

Table I: Structure of undergraduate student sample

  

Table II: Structure of graduate student sample

  

Table III: Structure of faculty sample by departments

  

Table IV: Structure of faculty sample by academic title

  

Table IX: Student satisfaction with specific library collections according to fields of study

  

Table V: User satisfaction with library services in general, students vs faculty

  

Table VI: User satisfaction with library services in general, undergraduate vs graduate students

  

Table VII: Student satisfaction with library services in general according to fields of study

  

Table VIII: Student satisfaction with specific library collections, undergraduate vs graduate students

  

Table X: Percentage to which FPOL satisfies overall information needs of its users, undergraduate vs graduate students

  

Table XI: Percentage to which FPOL satisfies overall information needs of students according to fields of study

  

Table XII: Importance of FPOL for users, undergraduate vs graduate students

  

Table XIII: Importance of FPOL for student users according to fields of study

  

Table XIV: Perceived and expected level of library services for faculty and students