WHY DO WE USE LIBRARIES? BY JESS GLENNIE

WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING Over the last three months I have been researching children's ideas and opinions about the Lincroft school library. I have found out lots of interesting things and I would like to share them with you.

HOW/ WHY I CHOSE MY QUESTION Nowadays Libraries do lots more than just lend out books, so I wanted to find out what people use libraries the most for.

RESEARCH ETHICS Before I gave out any questionnaires or took any observations I got all my participants to sign a consent form. They state that I would not share any information anybody gave me, they could stop participating at any moment, and that their name and age would be completely confidential. Also I did not lie or twist any words anybody gave me and I didn’t lie in my questionnaires.

QUESTIONNAIRE I sent a short questionnaire to 25 people in my Year 7 English class. The next slides will tell you about each of my questions, all with a supporting graph.

CODING For the open ended question I had to code the answers in to categories for example : Positive Negative It’s Big I like the posters The chairs are comfy The computers are bad. It’s too busy

HOW OFTEN DO YOU USE THE SCHOOL LIBRARY? Unfortunately this graph shows almost one third of my English class go to the library less than once a fortnight! 

WHAT DO YOU DO IN THE LIBRARY? I found that most people in my English class use the library for its original purpose: reading! Yay!

WHAT ARE YOUR OPINIONS ON MOBILE LIBRARIES? On this question, I found out that although not many of my class mates had been on a travelling library, they liked the idea!

HOW LONG DO YOU SPEND IN THE LIBRARY? This graph shows that around a 1/3 of my year 7 English class only spend around 10 minutes in the Lincroft school library per visit.

WHAT ARE YOUR OPINIONS ON THE SCHOOL LIBRARY? For this question I had to code the answers, as I had over 20 different responses!

WHAT IMPROVEMENTS COULD BE MADE TO THE SCHOOL LIBRARY? For this question, I was very interested to see my classmates comments. As you can see I had a range of answers.

LIBRARIES ARE BENEFICIAL TO CHILDREN AND ADULTS. This question was a likert scale question. This means that the participants had to choose an answer that best suited their opinion.

OBSERVATIONS I spent one lunch time observing four different people over a 10 minute period. They were all year 7’s and they were 2 boys and 2 girls. Each time they moved on to a different activity, I counted that as one time. Here are my results.

OBSERVATIONS This graph shows that each person did very different things. Also most the things they did where book related e.g. looking for books and reading.

MY ANSWER Looking at all my data I thing the reason people use the school library is because they find it a quiet, calm and nice place they can go to relax read or do work. Also I think many people enjoy using the library. On the other hand I also think that some people do not appreciate the quality of their local library and they don’t know how lucky the are to have so many good facilities around them.

I would like to give a special thank you to Dr Cindy Kerawalla, Mrs Doyle and Miss Smith for all the support and help while I was doing this project. Their help was greatly appreciated!

THANK YOU FOR WATCHING! I hope you enjoyed finding out about my research!