Ellen Altman

Service quality and customer satisfaction: An assessment and future directions

The literatures of many disciplines and professions, including library and information science, present and analyze service quality and customer satisfaction. This article presents key literature, analyzes the application of both concepts to academic libraries, and offers a research agenda.

Misconduct in academic research: Its implications for the service quality provided by university libraries

Abstract A number of investigations into misconduct related to proposing, performing, and reporting research have resulted in research and researchers being discredited. The research reported in this article links misconduct to librarians perceptions of service quality and explores the implications of fraud for library collections and information services.

From retrieval to robotics: The national science foundation's support of information research

Abstract This article describes how the National Science Foundations support of information research has evolved from NSFs original mission of improving the dissemination of scientific and technical information to its present interest in information robotics and intelligent systems. The pattern of grant support, since a major reorganization of the information science division in 1978, is analyzed in terms of the institutions, the investigators, and the disciplines that have been major grant recipients.

Rummaging through dustbooks: An analysis of independent small presses

ConclusionSmall presses are a colorful and wildly variegated lot. They offer materials on every imaginable topic to suit almost any taste and are springing up in towns and hamlets all over the country. New presses are being founded at a furious rate, though their ability to survive is as yet unknown. Clearly, many presses exist for other than purely commercial reasons. Our analysis suggests that only about a sixth of the 1700-odd publishers for which we have data are serious commercial enterprises; well over half, perhaps as many as two-thirds of them, exist for other reasons—personal interests, hobbies, or special causes.

Dissemination and impact of U.S. department of education's library research and demonstration projects: A citation analysis

Abstract Between 1965 and 1980, the Library Research and Demonstration Branch within the Department of Education awarded over

Assessing service quality : satisfying the expectations of library customers

25 million to 312 projects. By tracing the citations in Social Sciences Citation Index from a random sampling of 52% of these projects, this study has attempted to assess the dissemination and impact of the projects in the professional literature. Approximately half of the projects were not cited in SSCI . The citations tended to be clustered among a small number of library-related serials. A small number of funded projects accounted for a large number of the citations. The most cited projects cost only one-fifth as much as the most expensive studies, yet were cited nearly five times as often.