In accordance with the recent philosophy of quality in higher education embraced by European institutions, a checklist for the qualitative evaluation of service charters in academic libraries is proposed. The checklist is based on the existing literature on the topic, not only the large number of research papers on quality issues in general, but also more specific research on service charters. So that it can be applied to all types of academic libraries, the checklist is defined on the basis of six criteria (characterization, quality, standards, feedback channels, access-diffusion and accreditation) that are broken down into 21 variables. The checklist was implemented using a randomly selected set of service charters. The relatively low levels of suitability achieved demonstrate that there is considerable room for improvement in the field of academic library service charters. (Contains 2 tables and 4 figures.)