ISSN : 1225-598X
This study treats bureaucracy as one of the main systematic characteristics of public libraries and analyzes the effects on performance based on service quality. Doing this analysis, we investigated the service quality of each library by conducting a questionnaire survey from users of eight public libraries in Seoul metropolitan area of South Korea. We also measured the bureaucratic characteristics of the libraries through another questionnaire survey from librarians. Then based on the survey data, it is analyzed how bureaucratic characteristics affect service quality. According to the analysis results, bureaucratic and post-bureaucratic characteristics had causal relationships with service quality. Especially, several combinations of the characteristics affected service quality. In addition, among the characteristics, a system of rules was more important in the relationship with service quality. This study is meaningful to consider bureaucratic characteristics for public library organizations to produce a high-quality service through empirical research.