Assessing the spatial accessibility and spatial equity of public libraries' physical locations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2021.101089Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Proposes a scalable method to evaluate spatial accessibility and equity of libraries.

  • Spatial equity is measured for groups of distinct socioeconomics and demographics.

  • More disadvantaged populations have worse spatial accessibility to public libraries.

  • Spatial equity should be considered in the allocation of library resources.

Abstract

Spatial accessibility of libraries affects their usage. It is crucial to consider spatial accessibility's impacts on equity and inclusiveness of public libraries. A method is proposed to evaluate the equity of spatial accessibility to library resources and services across population groups. Spatial accessibility is measured in two ways: the closest-based and quantity-based measurements that respectively characterize the level of accessibility to the closest one and to diverse resources according to travel distance and travel time in road networks. Two approaches are applied for equity evaluation with socioeconomic and demographic indicators of census tracts, including the minority population, non-adults, and population in poverty. The method is applied to examine the physical locations of public libraries in four major cities of the U.S with diverse population composition. Results show spatial inequity for socially disadvantaged populations in the cities of Washington DC, Baltimore, and Chicago. Inequity is more prominent for non-adults and minority populations in DC and Baltimore. The analysis helps identify the potential inequity for subpopulations and guide the decision-making in library services to improve equity and inclusion.

Introduction

Public libraries are essential facilities to provide services for equal information access and to support sustainable communities (Audunson et al., 2019). In the digital age, library services have become especially vital for socioeconomically disadvantaged subpopulations who may lack information access at home and rely on public resources to access information and social relations. Public libraries support free access to the Internet for people who cannot afford private facilities or telecommunication services (Bertot, Real, & Jaeger, 2016); provide varieties of learning programs for children, K-12 students, and immigrants (Varheim, 2011); and serve as a shared space for people to engage in community activities and build social connections (Varheim, 2017). These services are critical for people who lack resources to gain opportunities for upward social mobility.

Equity and inclusiveness are the key tenets in library services. Libraries have made significant efforts in designing services and programs for assisting disadvantaged subpopulations. However, only a few studies have paid attention to the spatial accessibility of these people to libraries. Spatial accessibility, interchangeable to “accessibility” in the context of geography, refers to the cost or effort one takes to travel between places. The geographic location of a library relates to the frequency of its usage, thereby affecting its equity and inclusiveness to community residents (Brook, 2016; Glander, Dam, & Chute, 2007). Spatial equity evaluates the fairness of spatial accessibility to public resources for people of different demographic backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses. Urban studies have shown that the spatial distribution of facilities tends to present a concentric accessibility pattern, where elite groups tend to possess better access than others (Stanley et al., 2016). If libraries' locations follow such a pattern, the result could be unequal access to information or a limited usage of information for underserved populations, which could lead to more economic and social disadvantages (Lievrouw & Farb, 2003). Therefore, it is essential to consider the spatial accessibility and its effects on the spatial equity of library facilities and services for all members of the community.

The location of such facilities can either improve or possibly limit some residents' access to vital services and resources. Decisions for public library locations that consider factors such as spatial accessibility and spatial equity may have a significant effect on the libraries' capability to serve certain at-risk groups, groups currently underserved and economically disadvantaged. Many factors could influence the decisions on the locating of public facilities. In addition to the political and economic ones, locating public libraries should take into consideration spatial equity to better serve the population groups with economic or social disadvantages. This study describes a robust evaluation method to assess spatial accessibility and spatial equity and then uses the method to assess the locations of public libraries in four metropolitan cities.

Section snippets

Problem statement

The evaluation of spatial equity has been integrated into the decision making of allocation of facilities and resources, such as playgrounds (Smoyer-Tomic, Hewko, & Hodgson, 2004), parks (Tsou, Hung, & Chang, 2005), and libraries (Donnelly, 2015). Spatial accessibility is a vital factor to be considered for the location choice of library facilities and services, for example, the establishment of new library branches. Most location strategies consider suitable sites as places where there is high

Literature review

The evaluation of spatial equity is based on the measurement of spatial accessibility. This section examines and reviews different types of approaches for the evaluation of spatial accessibility and equity.

Methodology

This research first measures fine-grained spatial accessibility over a city of interest, then evaluates spatial equity by subpopulations in the city with different socioeconomic and demographic indicators. Fig. 1 shows the processing steps for the computation of spatial equity. The method uses publicly available data, including the road networks, grid-level population density, and census maps that encode the socioeconomic and demographic indicators. Fine-grained accessibility in travel distance

Findings

This section shows the comparative analysis of the spatial accessibility and equity for four cities, DC, BTM, CHI, and PHN. After evaluating the impact of multiple travel modes on the spatial accessibility and equity, the researchers found that different transportation modes introduce little variance in distance-based measurements. Although time-based accessibility is affected by transportation modes, that is faster transportation modes reduce the time to access libraries, the direction of

Discussion

The previous section presented the results from using an evaluation method for assessing spatial accessibility and spatial equity of library locations in four major U.S. cities. It shows that the evaluation method can determine under-provision of library resources or services to identified subpopulations in different cities. Table 5 shows the summary of spatial equity evaluation in DC, BTM, CHI and PHN. Significant inequity suggests that the disadvantaged subpopulation have worse spatial

Conclusion

Spatial accessibility measures the effort required to overcome geographical barriers to access amenities and activities. The location choices of library resources and locations inevitably generate variances in spatial accessibility for individuals and communities. An evaluation method was presented to measure the spatial accessibility and equity to libraries for subpopulations of distinct socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. This method was applied to evaluate and compare the spatial

Wenting Cheng is an assistant researcher at the Center for Governance Studies, Institute of advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai. She was a visiting scholar at University of Maryland in 2018. She obtained her PhD in information science in 2019 from Peking University. Her research interests are user information behavior, open data and human-computer interaction. Her research has been published in Library and Information Service in China, ACM

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  • Wenting Cheng is an assistant researcher at the Center for Governance Studies, Institute of advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai. She was a visiting scholar at University of Maryland in 2018. She obtained her PhD in information science in 2019 from Peking University. Her research interests are user information behavior, open data and human-computer interaction. Her research has been published in Library and Information Service in China, ACM SIGCHI Proceedings: Interaction Design & Children, and Proceedings of the Association for Information Science & Technology.

    Jiahui Wu is a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Information Studies, University of Maryland. His research interests are spatiotemporal behavior modeling, urban computing, machine learning and data visualization. His research has been published in ACM SIGSPATIAL, IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Proceedings of the iConference, and Proceedings of the Association for Information Science & Technology.

    William E. Moen is an associate professor in the Department of Information Science, College of Information at the University of North Texas. He received his Ph.D. in information transfer (now information science) at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University. He has been principal investigator for numerous grants from IMLS and the State of Texas. Primary research areas have been information organization & metadata, interoperability, networked information discovery & retrieval, and information policy His research has been published in Proceedings of the iConference, Proceedings of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Communications of ACM, and Library Quarterly, etc.

    Lingzi Hong is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science, College of Information, University of North Texas. She received Ph.D. in information studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests lie in data science for social good, using data-driven methods to understand human mobility, social interactions, and communications to enhance decision-making for sustainable development. Her research has been published in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Proceedings of the ACM on Web Science, Proceedings of the Association for Information Science & Technology, IEEE International Conference on Big Data, EPJ Data Science, Information Systems Frontiers, etc.

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