Public Libraries
faraj allah rahimi; javad pour karimi; seyedeh zahra salari; reza salehi
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Nowadays, public libraries by providing cultural, educational and scientific services to all groups of society, at urban and rural levels are considered as a main criteria for evaluating social welfare of nations. In analyzing social welfare criteria, the existence and extent ...
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Background and Objectives: Nowadays, public libraries by providing cultural, educational and scientific services to all groups of society, at urban and rural levels are considered as a main criteria for evaluating social welfare of nations. In analyzing social welfare criteria, the existence and extent of development of public libraries are in the range of housing, education, employment and health are considered as one of the indicators of the countries' development. Reaching more users and readers and increasing their willingness to re-visit the library lead to increases the efficiency of public resources. Every library needs to provide good, efficient and effective services, given the growing competition between information systems and the diverse needs of libraries, libraries need to place special emphasis on quality of service to attract more users. And improve productivity. However, the productivity of libraries is influenced by users' perceptions and experiences of evaluating the library environment, available facilities, collection size, staff attitudes, and reading activities in the library. Parasuraman (1988) proposed a comprehensive model to evaluate service quality that recognized as an important tools, to identification the difference in perceptions of service provided and expectations of the public libraries. A review of past studies in this area indicates that researchers have also used the SERVQUAL model to provide a framework for library service quality assessment. Given that quality of service is examined through several indicators and sub-indicators, it is very appropriate to apply multi-criteria decision-making techniques to evaluate service quality through SERVQUAL model. Among the multi-criteria decision-making techniques, the DEMATEL method successfully illustrates the internal relationships between variables. This study aimed to identify the indicators of service quality assessment among public and university libraries in Ahvaz based on the SERVQUAL model and then examine the internal relationships between indicators and sub-indicators.
Methodology: This research is applied in terms of purpose and in terms data collection it's considered as a descriptive-exploratory. The statistical population of this study consisted of all supervisors and senior managers of public and university libraries in Ahwaz city with at least 10 years of experience and sufficient research experience. Using purposive sampling method, 45 people were selected and 31 of them were returned to correctly questionnaires, So that 13 people were from public libraries and 18 people were from libraries in universities. In this study, a questionnaire was used to measure the quality of librarian services. The questionnaire consists of 5 main indicators of the SERVQUAL model including tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, Assurance and empathy. Multi-criteria decision making techniques were used to analyze the data. All calculations for the DEMATEL method are performed using Microsoft Excel software features
Findings: The results showed that the indicators of empathy, tangibility and reliability are among the influential indicators, and the indicators of Assurance and Responsiveness are among the effectual indicators. All of the research indicators have impact on the responsiveness criteria, which indicates the importance of this criteria. Likewise, for each cluster all the calculations of the Casual and effectiveness of the components have been examined and the importance of each component has been calculated. In the indicator group, tangible sub-criteria (a4) " Materials associated with the services (such as pamphlets or statements) are visually ", In the Reliability subgroup (b3), "Library Suitable Services" and in the responsiveness index sub-criteria (c4) "Librarians are never too busy to respond to your requests" are considered the most influential indicators.
Discussion: Based on the results, the following research suggestions are offered to senior managers of public and university libraries in Ahvaz. Given the importance of the Assurance criteria, it is suggested that readers be provided with a sense of security when conducting exchanges with librarians so that librarians' behavior will improve a sense of trust in users and readers. Also, when librarians have sufficient knowledge to respond to readers and users, it improves the effectiveness of the Assurance components and ensures that readers will ultimately have a better assessment of the quality of service provided by the library. Responsiveness criteria is also very important. It is recommended that librarians provide services at a higher rate, giving users a sense that librarians are always looking to help them. Likewise, when responding to librarians without delay, it impacts and reinforces other components of responsiveness to ultimately give users and readers a better assessment of the quality of libraries.
