Terms for "Neighborhood Analysis of Public Library Use in NY City"

· What is GIS, and how and why did the researchers use it in the context of this study? Why were notions of space important?

GIS stands for "geographic information system". It is a method that was applied in the software used to define the boundries for the space polygons representing "neighborhoods" in this particular study. The notions of "space" were important in this study in order to correlate travel distance and circulation statistics for a library within a given neighborhood.

· What is “central-place theory”?

Central-place theory refers to a centralized location (in this case a library) within a region where travel time to it from its boundries is approximately the same

· How did the researchers define “neighborhoods”?

In this study, a neighborhood was defined as a region of space containing one library exhibiting the central-place theory. The boundries of each neighborhood were also equidistant from the adjacent neighborhood library and its own library