Page 151 - Proceedings-edit-2021_09_20-final

© Proceedings of the Ruhuna Quality Assurance Sessions 2021 (RUQAS 2021)
st
21 September 2021

Keywords: Library Service Quality, Service Quality Index, University Libraries of Sri Lanka,
Resource-Capabilities.

Introduction

Library managers are required to address the growing importance of quality requirements of the
library. Quality is attributed to many factors. In the service sector, it needs to be mostly based on

customer satisfaction, but it will be incomplete if the service quality is determined only based on that
aspect (Wilson et al 2002; Pakurár et al, 2019; Chuang et al, 2015). In the library sector, traditional

quality indicators (such as the size of collections) which were used to measure the service quality in

university libraries have become out of date today because they cannot address the demands of modern
communities (Nitecki, 1996).

“The attributes associated with customer, vendor and trade partner relationships improve a company's

ability to provide service as dedicated (Rahman and Ali, 2015). Service organizations provide services
with the utilization of resources and capabilities they have and they acquire strategic capabilities to

cater to the demand of the services. Hence, the quality of the service must be determined on relative
availability and strategic leveraging of these resource capabilities too. In this circumstance, the

measuring of the library’s service quality singly based on customer perception will be incomplete.

Customer perception is subjective to circumstances and personalization and in most cases, satisfaction
scores are not standardized (Wilson et al., 2002). Satisfaction of the library users is a function of

multiple sources that engage in the resource management of the library (Shi et al., 2004). Therefore,

the quality measuring mechanism should be incorporated with the assessment of resource-capabilities
of the library too (Taib et al., 2013). Customers generally determine their expectations with their past

experiences and with the information they have from various sources like word of mouth. Thus user
expectations can show high variations with their past experiences towards the service quality and if the

quality measuring tools incorporate the relative availability of resource-capabilities in the library it will
help to understand an averaged scenario of the library quality.

The evolution of Resource-Based Inquiry contributes to the divergence of variables related to many

aspects of resource capabilities. Literature supports that key variables of resource capabilities of a

service organization can constitute competitive capabilities, dynamic capabilities, and agility
capabilities (D’Oria et al., 2021). Resources as human, physical or intellectual assets are important to

an organization to achieve its objectives. Resource-based theory (RBT) attempts to explain the priority

importance of resources to achieve superior performance (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990). The theory has
been evolved through various approaches viz. Resource-Based View (RBV) (Barney, 1991; Penrose,

1959; Wernerfelt, 1984), Knowledge-Based View (Grant, 1996), Dynamic Capability View (Teece et
134