id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
crl-15460	Robbins, Kathryn; Daniels, Kathleen	Benchmarking Reference Desk Service in Academic Health Science Libraries: A Preliminary Survey	2001-07-01	6	.pdf	application/pdf	3372	170	52	Thomas W. Shaughnessy and Sa­ rah M. Pritchard have provided overviews of benchmarking in libraries.8, 9 Recently, several reports of benchmarking studies in academic libraries have been published that look at service measurements such as wait times and Web site usage.10–12 Suzanne H. Angel and Leslie G. Mackler described a benchmarking survey of hospital libraries that examined a range of library services, including reference performance.13 How­ ever, the libraries that Angel and Mackler studied did not use a standardized means of determining patron satisfaction, so it is unclear how comparable their results were. A 1998 pub­ lication by Peter Hernon and Ellen Altman provided thorough background information on assessing service quality in libraries using a variety of methods.1 Charles A. Bunge, as well as John C. Stalker and Marjorie E. Murfin, described the Wisconsin–Ohio Reference Evaluation Program, which compares librarians’ and patrons’ perceptions of the same reference transactions and points out the strengths and weaknesses of both sets of percep­ tions.2, 3 Jennifer Mendelsohn reported on a study designed to better understand what constitutes reference service qual­ ity by interviewing reference staff and patrons.4 Other researchers have relied solely on patron perceptions and opin­ ions, explaining that only the patrons know if they have been satisfied with a service.5, 6 Although measuring service quality in a single library can be accomplished with a variety of methods, self-assessment alone may not be very useful.	cache/crl-15460.pdf	txt/crl-15460.txt