The Academic Library and Its Users

Book excerpt: The many recent changes in higher and further education mean that it is more important than ever to analyse the needs of academic library users, and both promote and provide the service they require. This constructive book, pervaded throughout by the impact of IT on the learning environment, surveys the influences on today's academic library, and explains how to increase user satisfaction through quality management. The author focuses particularly on users' behaviour in the library, the problems they cause or encounter, and how libraries cope. The book examines the varying needs of undergraduate and graduate, mature and part-time students, overseas students, franchised students, distance learners and other groups with special needs, explaining ways in which these needs can be identified and the service evaluated. One chapter is devoted to research and researchers' information demands. The particular requirements of subject communities and their consequences for academic libraries are also investigated, as well as the requirements of teaching staff and ways in which the library can work with them. The author emphasizes the importance of user education programmes and explains how to promote the library effectively with limited resources. For librarians, heads of services and senior library managers in further and higher education, and those, such as subject librarians, responsible for specific student groups, this book provides a comprehensive and realistic guide to providing and promoting a quality service. Students of librarianship and information management will gain valuable insight from this book into user analysis and improving the performance of information provision.