A Study of the Status of Libraries of the Islamic Seminaries of Khuzestan Province and an Evaluation of theSatisfaction of their Users

In this research, we first studied the status of the seminary libraries in Khuzestan Province, in terms of staff, collections, services, building, equipment and organization of resources. Then we evaluated the satisfaction of users of the libraries studied. To study the status of the libraries and evaluate user-satisfaction, checklists and questionnaires were used respectively. In this research, 18 libraries were studied and the library-users were selected by chance among students of three different seminary levels. Studies indicated that none of the seminary libraries of Khuzestan Province employ experts in the field of Library and Information Science; due to this the index of “knowledge and expertise of staff” has the highest frequency of dissatisfaction (37.9 percent) after the index of “staff number”. Statistics reveal that resources preserved in seminary libraries are mainly printed resources and have been mostly donated to the libraries. Studies showed that among a total of 18 libraries studied, only 6 had audio-visual resources, which were also very limited. According to the statistics obtained, among the indicators relating to books existing in libraries, respondents were mostly (57 percent) discontent with the diversity of Persian books. With regard to organization of resources, studies showed that none of the seminary libraries of Khuzestan Provinces follow national and international standards and principles and this has caused 41.5 percent of the users to be dissatisfied with the classification of libraries and 40.9 percent to be unhappy with the catalogue of the libraries.