Introduction:

Toronto is the most populous city in Canada. It is recognized as one of the most multicultural and cosmopolitan cities of the world.

Toronto Public Library is the largest public library system in Canada, and the world’s busiest urban library system. Every year more than 18.5 million people visit the 100 branches and borrow over 32 million items.[1]

The current study aims to identify the socio economic and demographic factors that influence the circulation of materials from library branches located in 44 Wards. The analysis is specifically interested in the reason for higher circulation of materials in specific branches to help enhance the role of libraries in communities. The source of the data is the Toronto Public Library which has released datasets in their website under the Library’s Open Data policy. They encourage the public to analyze published data sets and respond to any additional data sets requests from the public.

Methods:

Data Collection:

In order to carry out this study, data was obtained from two sources:

Exploratory Analysis:

Socio economic parameters are expressed as percentages (which is a non-dimensional measurement). Hence it is appropriate to transform Collection of materials and Circulation of Materials from absolute values into non-dimensional measurement. This was done by obtaining the value per resident and scaling it up to 100 residents.

In the exploratory phase, this study considered the influence of Socio Economic factors such as : Percentage of Non-immigrants, Percentage of Immigrants, Percentage of Visible Minority Population, Percentage of Employment Rate, Percentage of Unemployment Rate, Percentage of No Certificate Or Diploma Degree , Percentage of High School Diploma Or Equivalent, Percentage of Postsecondary Certificate Diploma Or Degree, Median Income within a ward, Collection of material in branch libraries within a ward on Circulation of Materials within a ward This study finds surprisingly that, only the Collection of material in branch libraries within a ward has statistically significant (p < 0.05) effect on Circulation of Materials within that ward.

Findings:

Fig. 1 shows a linear relation between circulation and collection among the library branches located in wards. The figure has points that are outliers-that is data which deviates from the overall general trend in the graph, which needs further investigation.

        Fig. 2: Diagnostic Plot of Fitted Model

In Figure 2 Normal Q-Q shows the data is normally distributed, except for outlier records 19, 20 and 38. Table below shows ward number of the outliers consists of neighborhoods with circulation and collections in branch libraries.

Figure 3 - The residuals randomly spread around the 0 line, which suggests that the linear assumption is reasonable. The residuals roughly form a horizontal band around the 0 line. This suggests that the variances of the error terms are equal. At least two residual points are identified as outliers which stands out from the basic random pattern of residuals.

Figure 4 - Depicts the circulation for every 100 residents when plotted along with descending order of collections for every 100 residents in a ward. There is a general trend that circulation is low in wards where collection is low however there are several wards where this is not the case. It will be interesting to investigate the reason for this behavior.

*** Table 1: Outliers ***

Ward Libraries Circulation Per 100 Residents Collections Per 100 Residents Circulation / Collections
26 Flemingdon Park Leaside Thorncliffe 3255 625 5.21
27 City Hall Toronto Reference Library Yorkville 1244 2224 0.56
43 Cedarbrae Guildwood 7223 1565 4.61

Table 1 shows library branch names and the ratio for the branches located in Wards 26, 27 and 43. These were identified as outliers in this study. It is observed the Ratio of Circulation to Collection in Ward 26 and 43 are 193% and 159% respectively higher than ratio for GTA, whereas the ratio for ward 27 is 69% below the ratio for GTA. Here study compares the ratio from Table 1 to a value of 1.78 obtained for the slope of the linear relation from Fig. 1.

Conclusions:

This study very clearly reveals socio economic and demographic factors do not bear statistically significant influences on circulation of materials. This study concludes that the collection of materials in a library branch directly impacts circulation. It must be noted that, the study points to Wards 26, 27 and 43 being the outliers as compared to the rest of the Toronto Library branches with respect to the ratio of circulation/collection.

References

  1. Toronto Public Library.
  2. Toronto Open Data.
  3. Open Data – Toronto Municipality.