Quality News

Herb White, states in Library Journal, “… it should be fairly clear that librarians do not market and that they never have marketed.” He concludes, “What we need to tell people is not how wonderful our public libraries are but rather how wonderful they could be. The awakening of these dreams is the purpose of marketing” (Besant & Sharp, 2000). Since the 1960′s, the most widely taught marketing concept was the marketing mix theory: the 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion)–so clean, so neat, so inappropriate for libraries. Marketing theory cannot always be so succinctly described since relationships are by their nature complex. Marketing and Total Quality Management (TQM) are closely and clearly interlinked. Marketing focuses on capturing and analysing customers’ needs; TQM involves the question of whether products and services do correspond to customers’ expectations and needs and whether both are congruent with each other. TQM has been defined as “a systematic process which focuses on understanding customer needs and improving customer services” (Donald, 2003).

The implementation of TQM in the Library is a useful way to evaluate the quality of library services and provide goals for improvement. One especially beneficial aspect of TQM is its emphasis on continuous improvement.



Libraries are both a creation and a servant of society. A library operates routinely with a known set of customers. A library also operates on trust. When a client walks into the library, he trusts that he will get the material or information that he needs. The library, in turn, trusts that the client will return the items within the specified borrowing period. The specific structure of a library with its strict requirements as to efficiency demands a focus on the quality of value-adding processes. If a library is to be managed according to quality criteria, quality needs to be defined and made measurable. The indicators found must be captured in a measuring system for the sectors “cost and performance”, “customer satisfaction”, and “staff satisfaction” that facilitates quality controlling and provides staff with controlling parameters for everyday work.

The most important condition of effective library services is to support continuous enriching dialog between the library and society by agreeing upon quality targets, which relate to the maintenance or improvement of quality standards. The library staff carries the responsibility for the results of their work and for reaching the agreed targets.

Concept of Marketing Library Services

The history of marketing library services began long before the concept was born. Samuel Swett Green in his often quoted speech at the ALA Conference in 1876 advocated “improved personal relations between librarians and readers.”
It could be said that today’s marketing of library services has its roots in parts of the USA and Northern Europe, in countries with few illiterates and more money, libraries, and library schools than the rest of the world. This certainly does not mean that the idea of libraries reaching out to “the common man” has not occupied librarians in other parts of the world. For instance, there is the example of the “library movement” in India at the beginning of the 20th century (Renborg, 1997).

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