INTRODUCTION

Today is designated as a knowledge age. In a rapidly changing and expanding diverse global digital information environment, knowledge becomes an important role to develop economic status of a nation as well as to transform the county into a world class one. This knowledge can be obtained only by serious efforts and not by inheritance. The advances in information and communication technology moved the society towards the knowledge society. Furthermore, learning and education are also needed to be as an essential factor in this knowledge society. To be fulfilled this requirement; libraries are one of the local resources to knowledge acquisition that provides basic conditions for lifelong learning, independent decision making, and social, economical and cultural development of individuals and social groups. The term Library comes from Latin word Libraria, which is the place where books, articles, and documents are collected and gathered for public utilization. All operations and resources in the library should support its key goal to deliver the information sources needed by the readers. The traditional concept of a library is being redefined from a place to access paper records or books to one that also houses the most advanced media, including CD-ROM, the Internet, virtual libraries, and remote access to a wide range of resources. Libraries are social institutions which are mainly concerned with education, social and cultural activities of the people in a society. They are the key generators of intangible capital in the knowledge economy functioning as the main source of growth, competitiveness and employment. Moreover, libraries can assist people in finding information and using it effectively for personal and professional purposes. In the modern world, the roles of library services are adapting to changing technologies, information environment and customer expectations. Libraries are increasingly responsible not only to provide traditional library information services but also to deliver online information services according to the actual user needs. They need to keep up with their users expectations to survive and service them. They need to become as the information knowledge navigators who distill data into usable information. Hence as a community knowledge centre, todays libraries can provide all sorts of knowledge to people from all walks of life in all means.

Rationale of the Study Nowadays, it becomes extremely difficult to clearly demarcate the spheres of the two types of organizations public and private. Although the activities of government agencies are defined as public administration, many private agencies also perform tasks which are strictly public service or welfare oriented. On the other hand, many tasks, performed by the public agencies may be of a private nature. Moreover, one group of thinkers like Urwick, Follet and Fayol are of the view that administration is an indivisible entity and its basic principles are applicable equally to all organizations whether public or private (Basu, 1994).

Todays libraries are such kind of organizations which provide public services as a private organization in nature. Though libraries are non-profit-organizations, they should be more concerned on how to bring satisfactory services when offering information and data to readers. In modern economy, the service sector today becomes dominate as nearly 70% of the world GDP. Continuously, rendering quality service is a key for subsistence and success in any organization, more so in a service organization. One of the greatest challenges facing organizations is the ever-growing competition, the continuous increase in customer expectations and customers subsequent demands. In addition, customers are becoming increasingly critical of the service quality they experience (Kandampully, 1998). With mounting customer expectations, explosions in technologies and content, and rising costs and declining budgets, assessment activities have become a routine part of library management. Hence, it becomes important periodically to examine customer satisfaction with the librarys collection, services, and information preferences in order to assure that customers changing needs are continually being met. As increased competition in knowledge service sector, improving service quality to gain competitive advantage is the only way to sustainable management of knowledge society. Consequently, organizations must view quality as an essential part of their strategic process in order to be successful (Behesti and Lollar, 2003). Historically, the quality of a library has been described in terms of its collection and measured by the size of the librarys holdings and various counts of its uses. However measuring of library quality based solely on collections has become obsolete. Alternative approaches to measure quality emerge through marketing research in the business sector. The SERVQUAL model, which was developed by A. Parasuraman, Valarie A. Zeithaml and Leonard L. Berry, has evolved as an instrument to measure service quality and what customers values as important. SERVQUAL is a mechanism to shift the assessment of quality of a library from the traditions of measuring collection size and counting incidents of its uses, to begin investigating how the provision of services relates to the library users service quality expectations (Nitecki, 1996).

Objectives of the Study The main objective of the study is to examine the quality of library services provided by American Centre Baldwin Library by exploring the customers satisfaction on services of that library. To meet this objective, it is also intended to evaluate quality of library services expected and perceived by the library users.

Scope and Limitations of the Study For a library, customers are those who registered as members and they use the library for their acquisition of knowledge. This study mainly focuses on the registered members satisfaction on using services rendered by the Baldwin Library. The study period is from 2010 to 2011. That

means the quality of library services is evaluated by asking questions to those who registered as members and frequently visited the library during June 2010 to June 2011. Due to limited time frame and budget factors, only some numbers of library members from Baldwin Library are chosen for investigation during a certain period of time. To be more comprehensive and representative, the study should not only conduct more samples members of Baldwin Library but also find out the service quality provided by other libraries in Yangon area. Besides, it is more accurate and perfect if the survey used observation method rather than questionnaires survey method.

Method of the Study The study intends to use both descriptive and empirical analysis to arrive at conclusion and recommendations. There are two sources of data primary and secondary. Secondary data are obtained from periodic reports and relevant articles of Baldwin library, research papers, literature reviews on previous study in this field, statistical data issued by government agencies and private organizations, and the Internet. Primary data are collected from selected random samples of 100 registered members and service providers in Baldwin Library, by using structured questionnaires. Questionnaires are designed to make personal interview with librarian and library staff about the services they offered by Baldwin Library in Yangon. Simple random sampling method is used to choose sample library users to be asked about their expectations and satisfactions on the services provided by the library with structured questionnaires. Finally, the data are analyzed by using appropriate statistical software, SERVQUAL method and manually.

Organization of the Study This study is organized into five chapters. The first one is an introductory chapter which comprises rationale of the study, objectives of the study, scope and limitations of the study, methodology and sources of the study, and organization of the study. Chapter Two describes the theoretical framework on service quality, service operations, customer satisfaction, and customer perceived value. The profile of Baldwin Library in Yangon, and the services offered by that library are provided in Chapter Three. Chapter Four reveals the analysis on the service quality for current situation of customer satisfaction and investigation of value added service given by Baldwin Library. Finally, Chapter Five is concluded with findings, recommendations, and suggestions for this study.