As part of a project to develop an instrument for measuring service qu
ality in special libraries, this article reviews the service marketing
literature for models and data-gathering instruments measuring servic
e quality, emphasizing the instruments SERVQUAL and SERVPERF. SERVQUAL
, developed in 1988, measures service quality on the basis of expectat
ions and performance; SERVPERF, a modification of SERVQUAL devised in
1992, is based on performance alone. This article assesses their appli
cability to special libraries and information centers.