The quality of interlibrary loan service provided by large Canadian academic libraries was investigated from the perspective of both the libraries and their clients. Grounded in the gaps model or disconfirmation theory, the study used a modified version of the SERVQUAL instrument developed in the private sector over the last 10 years. The study unobtrusively investigated the characteristics of 54 interlibrary loan transactions initiated by proxy clients in 15 academic libraries across Canada. Traditional institutional measures of interlibrary loan service quality produced a fill rate of 82 per cent and a turnaround time of 13 calendar days. More recently devised measures of service quality from the perspective of the client showed that initial expectations of quality were higher than the perceptions of the service that clients actually experienced. Reliability, the dimension ranked most important by clients, was rated the lowest in actual performance whereas tangibles, the dimension ranked least important by clients, scored the highest. The study showed incongruence between traditional measures of service quality used in academic libraries, fill rate and turnaround time, and more client-centred outcome measures of service quality.
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