For immediate release:
March 31, 2009

For more information, contact:
MaShana Davis
Association of Research Libraries
202-296-2296 x134
climatequal@arl.org

ClimateQUAL™ Launches New Web Site

Washington DC—The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has launched a new Web site for its latest assessment tool, ClimateQUAL™: Organizational Climate and Diversity Assessment, offered through the StatsQUAL^® platform. The site aims to provide information and useful resources for past, current, and potential ClimateQUAL™ participants.

ClimateQUAL™ is a joint project of the University of Maryland Industrial/Organizational Psychology Program and ARL. It is an internal survey that measures library staff perceptions of organizational climate and measures climate for teamwork, justice, and diversity. ClimateQUAL™ is designed to help libraries understand how organizational procedures and policies affect customer perception of service quality in a library setting. The survey results and follow-up improvement strategies can promote the development of a healthy organization. Healthy organizations provide consistent messages regarding policies and procedures to all employees; this consistency relates to improved customer perception of service quality.

The latest information on ClimateQUAL™ can be found in the following articles:

• Martha Kyrillidou and M. Sue Baughman, “ClimateQUAL: Organizational Climate and Diversity Assessment,” C&RL News 70, no. 3 (March 2009): 154–157.

• Martha Kyrillidou, Charles Lowry, Paul Hanges, Juliet Aiken, and Kristina Justh, “ClimateQUAL™: Organizational Climate and Diversity Assessment,” in Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries, March 12–15, 2009, Seattle, Washington: Pushing the Edge: Explore, Engage, Extend, ed. Dawn M. Mueller (Chicago: American Library Association, 2009), 150–164. [PDF]

The ClimateQUAL™ site is on the Web at http://www.climatequal.org/.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 123 research libraries in North America. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/.