Total Quality Management (TQM) is a concept created by W. Edwards Deming. It was originally introduced in Japan after World War II to assist the Japanese in re-building their economy. The main focus of TQM was and is continuous quality improvement in the areas of product or service, employer-employee relations and consumer-business relations. Total Quality Management is a management approach that originated in the 1950s and has steadily become more popular since the early 1980s. Total Quality is a description of the culture, attitude and organization of a company that strives to provide customers with products and services that satisfy their needs. The culture requires quality in all aspects of the company’s operations, with processes being done right for the first time to eradicate defects waste from operations.

Total Quality Management is a method by which management and employees can become involved in the continuous improvement of the production of goods and services. It is a combination of quality and management tools aimed at increasing the business and reducing losses due to wasteful practices. The quality of a library is defined and assessed from a perspective of different groups of people. Moreover, the quality of library services decides on the perception of the library within its parent organization (Gilbert, 1992).

The practice of Quality Management in Library and Information Science existed since the evolution of the subject itself, but the terminology used for these varies widely. Performance indicators; performance evaluation; evaluation of reference sources using precision and recall rations; cost benefit and cost effectiveness studies; user surveys electing opinions on library services all these make a part and parcel of quality studies using different mechanisms of assessment and methodologies (Shewhart, 1986).

Quality assurance studies were mostly restricted to technical libraries and academic libraries. Although quality assurance studies based on ISO 9001:2000 and other accreditation schemes were conducted in other countries, such studies are rarely reported in Indian Libraries and Information system.