Bradley Wade Bishop, Lauren H. Mandel, and Charles R. McClure Have Paper Published in LIBRES

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Bradley Wade Bishop, PhD, former Research Associate of the Information Use Management  & Policy Institute (Information Institute) and current Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky, School of Library and Information Science, Lauren H. Mandel, Research Coordinator of the Information Institute at the Florida State University, College of Communication and Information, and Charles R. McClure, Director of the Information Institute at the Florida State University, College of Communication and Information, recently  published a paper in the most recent issue of LIBRES.  Their paper, entitled Geographic Information Systems in Public Library Assessment, discussed Information Institute library research projects that have employed GIS as a data analysis and display tool.

Mandel noted that the Information Institute has used GIS methods in varying ways for multiple projects and that the use of GIS improved the overall quality of the research in those projects.  Many of these applications are summarized in the LIBRES publication.

The Information Institute has done several projects that employ GIS as a tool to measure and analyze library data: Needs Assessment of Florida Public Library E-Government and Emergency Management Broadband Services (2009), Public Libraries and the Internet (2007), and Who’s Asking? Geography and Demographics of Florida’s Ask a Librarian Service (2007) – this project was published as “The Geography of Virtual Questioning” in Library Quarterly. 

Two current projects at the Information Institute will use GIS mapping techniques to analyze and display broadband needs assessment data for rural anchor institutions in Florida: North Florida Broadband Authority (NFBA) Broadband Needs Assessment and Benchmarking of Anchor Institutions (2010) and Florida Rural Broadband Alliance (FRBA) Broadband Needs Assessment and Benchmarking of Anchor Institutions (2010).  More information on these projects is available at the NFBA project website and the FRBA project website.