TITLE:
The Impacts of Economic Development on Public Libraries: A Study Case of Bibliotheca Alexandrina Library
AUTHORS:
Samaa Soliman, Pan Wei
KEYWORDS:
Public Library, Bibliotheca Alexandria, Economic Development, GDP
JOURNAL NAME:
Modern Economy,
Vol.7 No.5,
May
18,
2016
ABSTRACT: Public
libraries have the mandate of promoting the knowledge enhancement and awareness
building of local residents. The national and local economic development on the
other hand could directly impact the governmental public investment to the
libraries and therefore affects their ability to deliver sufficient services
either directly or indirectly. To investigate this sort of impact, the research
extracted data from the annual reports of Bibliotheca Alexandria about various
library services, collections, and financial data. As for the data concerning
the Egyptian economy, it has been extracted mainly from World Bank data. Using
Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, results prove the existence of
a strong relation between the country GDP and the allocated budget to the
public libraries. Moreover, results show that there is a strong positive
relation between the allocated budget to the libraries on one hand and the
salaries & wages on the other hand, which explains how library staff and
librarians are very likely to be affected by any budget reallocation, which is in
turn affected by the economy development.