Community Analysis Report of the New York Public Library
For more than a century, the New York Public Library has supplied knowledge, information, free books and ideas to New Yorkers. NYPL was established in 1895 and its America's biggest public library network boasting 88 scattered branches and four research centres for scholars which provides an unprecedented amount of resources and opportunities to everyone (The New York Public Library, 2017).
NYPL services an estimated 17 million people annually and an even higher number online, it has over 55 million resources such as e-books, books, DVDs and even esteemed research materials which scholars all across the world use in one way or the other. In its iconic 42nd Street located and its three separate research institutes, NYPL is home to a number of historical items including Christopher Columbus's letter of 1493 which announced his finding of the New World, the handwritten score of "Lover Man" by John Coltrane and the original Farewell Address given by George Washington.
One of the parts of the NYPL is the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in addition to the other 88 branches and four research centres situated in Staten Island, Manhattan and the Bronx. The Beaux-Arts landmark facility located on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street houses is often called the "major branch" and it contains extraordinary research items for the social sciences, humanities and even a circulating collection for children. A merger of the Astor and Lenox Libraries brought about the original non-circulating post-graduate collections which have grown to become a world class resource source for understanding human behaviour, thoughts and life experiences such as religion, literature, archaeology, anthropology, sports and world...
The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building contains over 15 million resources which include prehistoric Japanese scrolls, priceless primitive manuscripts, present day novels and poems, comic books, baseball cards and dime novels.
Demographic and socio-
economic characteristics of the library patrons and of the community it serves
The library users form the major factor of consideration before a collection is built (Johnson, 2014). The
statistics of New York City reveals that it covers a massive land area and contains people from various ethnic origins (Gordon, Travers, & Whitehead, 2007). Its America's largest city and it has always been a preferred immigration destination. Its population in 2014 was almost 8.5 million which is more than 40% of New York State's population and only a slightly reduced percentage of the entire New York urban area, which houses about 23.6 million people. In the last 10 years, New York City has enjoyed faster growth than its region which still has a huge lead on the chart of urban gateways for legitimate immigrants entering the U.S.
Coming to religion, 59% of New Yorkers are Christians (33% of them Catholics) and this is the major religion practised as at the year 2014. The next most prevalent religion is Judaism and an estimated 1.2 million Jews reside in New York City, almost 14% of the entire population. Other practised religions include Buddhism,
Hinduism,
Atheism, Islam and Sikhism. 24% of the New York City's population stated that they weren't members of any organized religious groups in the year 2014.
In the census carried out in year 2000, 2,021,588 households were counted and they had average yearly earnings of $38,293. 30% of these households had young
children (
