The University of Arizona's Music Library's Needs Assessment

Part I. Purpose

The purpose of the study was to examine the information needs of Music Library customers. The team's hypothesis identified a possible causal relationship between characteristics of the library user and the relative importance of specific types of resources and services. The user characteristics included: the music respondent's subject specialization, class rank, teaching areas, research expertise and non-music respondents' purposes for using the Music Library.

Another purpose of the project was for the Integrated Services Needs Assessment Group (ISNAG) to be able to test what they had learned about needs assessment and research methodologies with a subset of users. The group of librarians conducting the study chose the School of Music as the pilot group for the summer sessions of 1998. However, due to low summer enrollment, ISNAG rescheduled the pilot to the Fall semester of 1998.

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