Quality assurance in libraries: Who's doing what and why?

RAIS, 23 July 2004.
For our mid-year event for 2004, we chose to take a look at what's happening with Quality Assurance in Libraries. We had three speakers - Jenny Natt from the Adelaide Institute of TAFE, Helen Culshaw from Flinders University and Christine Cother from the University of South Australia.

Jenny was the first to speak, talking of her role as a representative on the quality groups at the Adelaide Institute of TAFE. The library is involved with the initiatives put forward by the Institute as a whole. The Institute uses two quality frameworks, the first being AQTF, the Australian Quality Training Framework (which is mandatory for registered training organisations delivering VET). The second is ISO 9001, an international quality system, which is used as a business management tool. There is a quality unit, which has a continuing consultancy and monitoring role.

Jenny pointed out the advantages and disadvantages of the quality assurance process. The disadvantages include the time and energy it takes to make changes and improve on an ongoing basis, and advantages are continuous improvement through planning, monitoring, incorporating outcomes and feedback and as a formal tool for best practice.

Helen Culshaw was our next speaker. She is the law librarian at Flinders University, and is also a Quality Officer and the library's representative on a University-wide quality project team. Flinders University will be audited in 2006 by AUQA, the Australian University Quality Agency, an independent not-for-profit agency for higher education. As part of the audit process the University tells AUQA what it is trying to do in terms of missions and objectives, then AUQA conducts an audit checking with all of the various stakeholders, before publishing the results. In preparation for the audit Flinders in undertaking a complete self-review of all policies, educating staff and will conduct a trial audit in 2005.

Flinders library is also identifying specific library-related issues from the existing 16 AUQA reports. Good points noted from these surveys include - synergies between the library, IT, flexible learning and academic support services; peer review; active role of subject librarians; 24x7 IT help desk and user surveys.

Our third speaker for the evening was Christine Cother from UniSA. UniSA has undergone the AUQA audit process in 2004. Since late 2000 UniSA library has undertaken a quality assurance process. This began as part of the increasing demand for accountability, created by issues such as a diversifying client group, increasing demand for a broad range of services and the introduction of fee-based services.

Christine has concentrated on quality assurance in the two areas of flexible delivery and lending services so far. This has lead to the creation of policy documentation and performance indicators. Initially this caused the staff to feel pressured to meet the performance indicators, but through continuous monitoring and review, there has been work redesign, new services have been introduced and there has been a reduction in delivery and turn-around times for some services.

Through the quality assurance process, documentation has been created, statistics kept and procedures have been written. Christine points out that this process has also increased the library staff's understanding of their roles and responsibilities and improved team spirit.

So by the end of the evening we all understood a little more about quality assurance, and the rationale behind why libraries are actively involved.

A a