A Study on the Structural Goal of the Public Library through the Staff's Perception of Public Libraries in Korea

공공도서관 목적의 구조에 관한 연구 -공공도서관 직원의 인식을 바탕으로-

The goal of the public library as perceived by its staff has asignificant influence on establishing, implementing and restructuring the objectives of the public library. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the nature of staff's perception of the goal. The goals of the library are divided into 'actual goal' and 'preferred goal' according to the level of goals, and into 'aoutput goal' a and 'asupport goal'a according to the areas of goals. This study aims at clarifying the relationship among various goals of the public library. On the basis of staff's perception, personal characteristics of individual staff and their effects on the goal can be analyzed. For the purpose of the research, the author took a sample from the 238 public libraries in Korea and tested a few hypotheses extracted from the questionnaires. A statistical software package called SYSTAT was used to process the data. The result of the study can be summarized as follows: 1. Staff members of the public libraries tend to place a higher priority on support goal with instrumental value over output goal, the terminal value of the public library. This is tantamount to a displacement of goals. 2. Personal characteristics such as the age and the length of work experience appear to influence their present perception of actual goal at large. On the other hand, the formal qualification as librarian and special features regarding the job hierarchy seem to affect the areas of support goal within the actual goal. 3. Perception of preferred goal is affected mainly by formal qualification as librarian among their personal characteristics. 4. There is a significant difference between the staff's perception of actual and preferred goals in the large. Goal discrepancy which indicates the expectation of change and the degree of conflict in goals is very large as well.