| The purpose of this study was to develop and test an instrument that library professionals can apply to evaluate the quality of academic libraries on the Web (Libweb).; By consulting authoritative criteria used for traditional print resources and Internet/Web resources, and browsing a number of academic Libweb sites, a set of 68 essential criteria was generated. The first survey was distributed electronically to solicit 443 academic Libweb librarians' opinions on the importance of these 68 synthesized criteria assessing the quality of academic Libweb (Group-I). Then, factor analysis was conducted to generate a set of 16 criteria for further validity testing. This set of 16 criteria included: Presentation, Integration, Speed, Information about the Links, Heading and Titles, Institutional Information, Reliability, Search Capability, Compatibility, Navigability, Inclusion of Special Collections, Facilitation and Help, Content, Graphic Design, Authority, and Services. Following a second survey applied toward another 443 academic librarians (Group-II), the Analysis of Variance was performed to confirm that the set of 16 criteria could reliably discern the low/adequate/high quality levels of academic Libweb sites. Furthermore, a regression model considering both the respondents' demographics and the 16 quality criteria was applied to identify that 85.26% of variation in the overall quality was attributable to 11 variables. They comprised of Presentation, Information about the Links, Heading and Titles, Institutional Information, Search Capability, Compatibility, Inclusion of Special Collections, Content, Graphic Design, Services (ten of the 16 quality criteria) and Frequency in Browsing Libweb (one of the respondents' demographics).; Alternatively, a reduced set of 8 factors was found to account for still 84.57% of variations in the overall quality. Thus, the results generated by this alternative model contained only eight of the 16 fundamental quality criteria considered in the regression model: Presentation, Content, Graphic Design, Compatibility, Services, Search Capability, Institutional Information, and Information about the Links.; To facilitate prospective users in applying the instrument to evaluate academic Libweb quality and construct and maintain a good site, two of instrument forms are suggested: one covering all 16 fundamental quality criteria (full version) and one involving only 8 significant quality criteria (short version). |
