Service Quality in Sungai Petani Public Library: Malaysian Evidence

Abstract

Service quality has emerged as a key strategic issue in management. The service quality assessment tool SERVQUAL was introduced by Parasuraman (1988) that cover tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, and assurance and empathy dimensions of service quality. The objective of this study is to identify the relationship between dimension (tangibles, reliability responsiveness) and service quality in Sungai Petani Public library in Kedah State Government and to investigate which service quality dimensions that mostly influenced the service quality in public library in Sungai Petani. The issues regarding public library are the physical aspect of the public library make people lack of interest to go, the public library facing problem in term of qualified staff to deliver quality of service and also comments by people regarding on the problem of the contents in public libraries in the poor condition. The study was conducted among library users and the information was gathered via questionnaires which consisted of structured questions. In this study, simple random sampling was used where only 132 respondents were selected. The discussion methods are using the Descriptive Statistic, Pearson Correlations, Cronbach’s Alpha and Multiple Regressions used to analyze the result of this study. The findings indicated that all three hypotheses which are tangible dimension, reliability dimension and responsiveness dimension was accepted by the researchers. Based on the finding, the reliability dimension is a significant relationship with service quality in public library Sungai Petani which is strong positive relationship. However the researchers recommend that the management of public library Sungai Petani needs to focus on several services that needs further improvement such as the online public access catalogue (OPAC) and welcoming atmosphere is important part of providing excellent services towards modern library service. In future research, the library’s management should take an effort to create the pleasant surroundings to encourage the widest possible segment of the population to use the library and to regard it as an essential part of community life and more ‘user freindly’ with the customers. Keywords: Service, Quality; Service Quality; SERVQUAL; Library; Public Library; Users