In this article, Kinney looks at why the Internet matters for public libraries, both in terms of the Internet’s impact on the public, especially those with no access, and in terms of the impact of the Internet on libraries. He includes excellent literature reviews for each part, covering changes in public library Internet access t from the mid-1990s through 2009.
In the first part of his analysis, Kinney found “no disparity in the number of public computers available in areas with high and how incomes,” but found “significant—and widening—disparity in the number of computers available in areas with a higher versus lower percentage of non-white and non-English-speaking households” (104).
In the second part of his analysis, the author found that “Having Internet terminals (versus having no Internet terminals) has a significant positive effect on a library’s visits and reference transactions, but not on a library’s circulation” (105).
This article goes way beyond the scope of my project, however, the excellent literature reviews and extensive list of references made it extremely useful to me.
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