Article Review #1

Samantha Finefield
September 20, 2011
Article Review #1

Article:

Sei-Ching Joanna Sin (2011), Neighborhood disparities in access to information resources: Measuring and mapping U.S. public libraries’ funding and service landscapes, Library & Information Science Research, 33:1, 41-53.

Introduction:

This article serves to address the inequities present in public library funding between affluent neighborhoods and lower income urban neighborhoods. The author, Sei Ching Joanna Sin, recognizes the public library as a tool to “bridge such inequities”. This study is one of the only ones that recognizes neighborhood-level variations and examines statistics from all of the 9000 library systems in the country. The conclusions found were that there were huge disparities in funding between library systems, and that in most cases, the library systems in low-income areas were not properly funded and had less to offer their patrons. This is particularly unfortunate due to the fact that the impoverished are a segment of our population that can most benefit from library services.  I chose to review this article because I want to research the status of American library services towards the impoverished and perhaps the homeless. This subject is important to me because the library that I work for is in an urban environment and has a large amount of traffic from the extremely impoverished and transient patron.

Problem Statement:

Public libraries that are not properly funded suffer from a lack of information resources, which in turn makes these libraries incapable of “narrowing the information gap”. The problem that this study aims to analyze is two fold: firstly, the extent to which funding varies across public library systems in the United States must be ascertained. Secondly, where the significant disparities are present this study aims to discover how much these disparities are related to the income level of the area that the library is in.

Literature Review:

The earlier studies that the author used were more focused on physical access to materials that library patrons had. More recent studies also chose to focus on factors such as access quality and have made these important factors. The author also examined context, and environmental factors, but the most important areas of research focused on unequal access to information resources and unequal access to public library services.

Method:

This study was largely quantitative. It relied on statistics gathered from the Public Libraries Survey (PLS), National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Census data was also ascertained for this study.

Caveats:

Some of the caveats and limitations that the author mentions is that while the household income was based on values from the surveys ascertained, the data was not altered to reflect and cost of living disparities between areas of the country. Purchasing power was also not taken into consideration.

As this study is mostly quantitative, it doesn’t take the qualitative approach of examining how patrons view their library’s effectiveness and services, and this area could be studied further.

The data studied was also from 2004 mostly, so significant changes could have happened and this study could be repeated with more recent data.