An Analysis of Spatial Accessibility Changes According to the Attractiveness Index of Public Libraries Using Social Media Data

Abstract

Public libraries provide equitable access to information for all citizens, and they play an important role in preserving and promoting culture, formal education and self-education, and enriching leisure time. Accordingly, there has been an increasing amount of research on the use factors and accessibility of public libraries, but research on the accessibility of public libraries in non-Western cities is insufficient compared to the corresponding research on other public facilities. In particular, in high-density cities such as Seoul, the Republic of Korea, it may be desirable in terms of sustainability to focus on the qualitative, rather than the quantitative, expansion of public libraries. In previous studies, the attractive factors on the supply side were analyzed using questionnaire surveys, but in this study, the attractive factors for users were quantified in the form of the library attraction index by means of user-generated contents such as location-based social media, and the accessibility was analyzed based on this. The results showed that many public libraries have high accessibility, with a high library attraction index. Therefore, these findings indicate that the qualitative expansion of public libraries is important for information equality. It is meaningful that this study analyzed the attractive factors on the supply side by analyzing the contents generated by users.