Page 154 - Proceedings-edit-2021_09_20-final

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

services provided. Then there should be a relationship between resource capabilities and service
quality.

However, the existing tools have ignored the impact of strategic utilization of resources capabilities on

the service quality of the library. It is puzzling if the quality is determined only on the attitudinal basis

on global criteria without considering the relative importance of capabilities. Based on the above
discussion, an integrative measuring model associated with users’ perceived quality, librarians’

perceived quality and resource capabilities would provide a much more comprehensive, representative,
and conditional base picture of quality other than global benchmarking which is arbitrarily imitating

the global criteria. Based on this approach it will be able to formulate a national level service quality

index for university libraries. As this approach is still lacking in the literature, conceptual and
empirical investigations are required to address the research gap. This study attempts to address this

void. The purpose of this study is to develop an integrative service quality model associated with
resource capabilities applicable to university libraries of Sri Lanka and thereby propose a service

quality index for university libraries of Sri Lanka. The objectives of the present study are, to

conceptualize the integrative model of service quality and resource capabilities, to measure the key
variables of resource capabilities and perceived service quality and to propose a service quality index

for university libraries of Sri Lanka.

Methodology

The study followed a quantitative method of sample survey through a self-administered questionnaire

and descriptive analysis of data. Firstly, the key variables associated with service quality and resource
capabilities in academic libraries were identified through the literature review based on the resource-

based view and formulated a conceptual model representing these variables (Figure 1). The model
measures the integrated service quality of the library through five variables viz. competitive

capabilities, dynamic capabilities, agility capabilities, service provider’s perceived quality, and service
user’s perceived quality (Figure 1).

Secondly, a survey instrument that included five questionnaires to measure the key variables and sub-

variables was designed with the literature review and expert panel opinion following a vigorous

process of scale development (Zamanzadeh et al., 2015; Carpenter, 2017). Accordingly, Questionnaire
1 which is available in the published literature (Arachchge et al., 2021) was utilized to measure the

competitive capabilities (CC) of the library. Questionnaire 2 was adapted from Kump et al. (2019) to

measure dynamic capabilities (DC) in the library context and the Questionnaire 3 was adapted from
Worley and Lawler (2009) rephrasing and adding survey statements to fit the academic library

environment aiming to measure agility capabilities (AC) of the library (Arachchige, 2021).
137