Spatial Analysis of the Federal-State Cooperative System's Public Library Statistics

摘要

The Federal-State Cooperative System (FSCS), a program of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), collects data from over 9,000 public library systems in the United States. This research is an attempt to perform spatial analysis and visually display the data using a geographic information system. To do this, the NCES data has to be joined with GeoLib's spatial data of library outlets' geographic coordinates. The researcher also joined this combined dataset to 2000 Census shapefiles for demographics of the states studied. The study produced several national maps of some library statistics, e.g. total circulation. In addition, block group level maps were produced for some states to display spatial trends within those states. Spatial trends appear with some of the variables and further research can explore the causation behind these correlations.