Um modelo estilizado da produção de serviços: aplicação empírica a uma amostra de bibliotecas no Rio de Janeiro 2000 – 2007

The approach to library services provided in the literature on Service Operations and Service Management has long been acknowledged. In this paper we take the generic view that library services production may be seen as the transformation of inputs into outputs as argued in that literature. The main objective of the paper is to empirically examine how does the transformation take place along time. We collected data on a convenience sample of 37 library units pertaining to a federal university in Brazil during 2000-2007 and then applied Canonical Analysis to identify significant links among inputs and outputs. Results show that - for each year as well as for the whole time period - two significant (p < 5%) correlations were obtained and that the yearly measure of cross redundancy varied between 51% and 67%, a quite good “explaining power” since data come from a cross section of observational units. Among the estimated links the dominant one indicates the complete combination of three inputs, while space appears alone as a second significant dimension