A satisfação do cliente de serviços de informação : as bibliotecas públicas da Região Centro

Abstract

The scope theme of our essay – The information services management - is specially focused on the public libraries. We aim to analyse the national and international context of the evolution of these organizations, with particular deepness on the determinant role of the national public reading network. We develop the vision of public libraries as information services. These services are essential to the mankind evolution, whose mission is to chance the available informational resources into a wealthy and sustainable growing. We bring into use the value concept and set up the object appraised in the scientific area of information, and we take it as a fundamental necessity of the public libraries’ action. Next, we analyse the “total quality” concept in these organizations, starting with a new dimension and a new perspective of the public services, which put our users’ interest in the core of their management and replace the transactional practices by relational ones. The key concept of this thesis – Users’ satisfaction – is supported on the critical revision of the published literature on the theme. We also show an empirical study made to verify the public libraries users’ satisfaction in the central region of Portugal. To fulfil this analysis, we used the public libraries included in the national public reading network as an example. Two questionnaires were applied: one to the chairmen of the institutions and the other one – which was the main protocol of the research – to their users. Besides the gathered data we obtained, we could also observe and acquaint directly in loco during the visits we paid to the most organizations. These procedures helped us to understand and to know our object study much better. We determined the headmen and the users’ satisfaction level, identifying their main causes and consequences, as well as the strategic outcomes in management. Generally speaking, we can say the data collected reveal a most important role of the public libraries employees to the users’ opinion and to the improvement of these organizations’ performance.