A Comparative Analysis of Children's Reading Activity for Digital Picture Books in Local Public Libraries

摘要

Children's rooms in local public libraries are important places for children's reading activity. Although the locational conditions of local public libraries affect children's reading activity, there is no detailed analysis considering their correlation. In this paper we clarify this correlation by comparatively analyzing page flipping for digital picture books in the children's room. We conducted a field study in 6 local public libraries in Oita prefecture, Japan. The page flipping data was collected automatically over the course of 5 months. Through the field study, we found that children's population and the number of parking lots strongly affect the ratio of actually read digital picture books to opened ones. Another finding was that the convenience of private/public transportation strongly affects the page flipping patterns for digital picture books. The results of the study suggest that recording children's page flipping data is a promising approach worth developing further.