Thematic Analysis of Change in Use of American Public Libraries’Service

Abstract

Abstract:

Public libraries play an important role in the life and work of Americans, yet the latter’s use of libraries has taken a more noticeable change in recent years. The paper, quoting the reasons stated by surveyed patrons for their change in library use, extracts the themes by way of Nvivo and SPSS Text
Analytics. It then builds the semantic map between these themes by Pajek and VOSviewer, and visualize the result. Education of kids and teens, traditional resources and services, and the convenient access are the major reasons for the increase of library use; whereas the Internet technology, lifestyle change, and the growing need of electronic resources and services lead to the decrease of library use. In the meanwhile,information technology has influenced the library use in both ways: the free internet access and skills training encourage people to use library, but library also loses readers of high income and/or high education to the more convenient technologies. That said, however, public libraries do innovate their services according to the technical surge in an attempt to retain patrons. The paper also notices the class issue as betrayed by the different changes in library use, and plans a further analysis that studies the correlation between class,demographics and behavioral change in library use.

Key words:

Public libraries in the United States, Change in library use, Thematic analysis

Hu Jiming, Yang Ningwei. Thematic Analysis of Change in Use of American Public Libraries’Service[J]. Libraly Journal, 2017, 36(5): 98-104.

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