Digital Natives: Its Characteristics and Challenge to the Library Service Quality

Digital natives which always connect to the world through their gadg-ets have special needs for gathering information. Do libraries which in the past can be said as the sources of information can satisfy their needs? What should libraries do, so that they can answer those needs? Those queries are the prominent questions to be answered in this paper. In this paper we describe the digital natives’ charac-teristics when they use their PC and gadgets. The data were collected from 460 university students in Surabaya. We also measure the library service quality (LibQual) for five university libraries in Surabaya. Moreover, using K-means, we also clustered the respondents into two groups, i.e, the first group is the ones who attach to their gadgets, and the second group is the ones who do not attach to their gadgets. For the first groupthe library online information and for the second group, the operational service are the most important factors for measuring the LibQual