An Extended LibQUAL+ Model Based on Fuzzy Linguistic Information

LibQUAL+ model is a web-based survey to measure the library service quality according to the users’ perceptions. Although it is the most popular method, it presents two major drawbacks: (i) it is devised on cardinal scale to measure the library service quality (from 1 to 9), but, due to the subjectivity, impression and vagueness of the human beings when attempting to qualify phenomena related to human perception, it seems natural that they use words in natural language (linguistic terms) instead of numerical values to provide their preferences, and (ii) it considers that all the users’ opinions on the library services are equally important, however, some users should be more influential than others in some questions as they do not play equal roles in measuring library service quality. The aim of this paper is to present an extended LibQUAL+ model based on fuzzy linguistic information overcoming the above drawbacks.