A Comparative Study of Cultural Programs Offered by Public Libraries and Other Regional Public Service Institutions

Abstract

This study generated the suggestions to minimize the duplicated cultural programs offered by various regional public service institutions via promoting effective collaboration among the institutions with the limited local resources while making the public libraries as the center of the partnership. We measured the level of program duplicability; conducted statistical analysis of the cultural program offering; and analyzed program participation status as well as the participation surveys. This led to the following results: 1) public libraries focused on offering humanities general education related programs; 2) participants had high expectations on the reading and writing programs; and 3) social welfare organizations offered programs, which targeted the older population, and the corresponding participants had high satisfaction rate. According to the results, the institutions including the public libraries should take into account of the ages and preferences of the potential participants when offering various programs. In addition, the public libraries should continue to offer humanities general education as well as information use programs.