Midterm - Japzon, A.C., & Gong, H.

Japzon, A. C., & Gong, H. (2005). A neighborhood analysis of public library use in New York City. Library & Quarterly, 75(4): 446-463. Addresses social capital issues and library branches serving communities of color in NYC.

• What main question did the researchers hope to answer with this research study?
The researchers were hoping to characterize the factors contributing to neighborhood public library use in New York City. (p450)
• What is GIS, and how and why did the researchers use it in the context of this study? Why were notions of space important?
Geographical Information System (GIS) is software that captures, stores, analyzes, manages, and presents data that refers to or is linked to location. The researchers were able to use this software to study the population characteristics in certain neighborhoods and correlate them with library usage data. Since the study focused on neighborhood branch libraries, the neighborhood characteristics (space) were important. (p451)
• What is “central-place theory”?
“Central-place theory is a location theory in geography explaining the location of consumer services such as library service. The concepts of range (the distance people travel to obtain a service) and hexagonal market area in central-place theory have often evolved into travel time of library users, distance between libraries, or size of the library market area in the studies of library accessibility.” (p448)
• How did the researchers define “neighborhoods”?
“There is a consensus that [a neighborhood] is a geographical or spatial entity with boundaries. All of a neighborhood’s attributes work together to give the neighborhood an identity, although some attributes are more important than others in doing so.” (p449)
• What were the primary findings of the study? (Big picture rather than specific stats for this)
There are several important neighborhood characteristics that contribute to library use, including race, income, education, and the spatial accessibility of the library branch location. (p460)
• What did the researchers discover about circulation statistics? What main recommendations did the researchers make?
The researchers found that “the relationship between circulation and neighborhood characteristics is nonlinear.” Thus, more funding than is proportional to their circulation numbers should be given to library branches in disadvantaged neighborhoods. (p461)