Seeing Is Believing: Disparity of Books in Two Los Angeles Area Public Libraries

Abstract

Considering the abundant research that shows the link between access to books and reading ability, this investigation looks at the availability of books in two public libraries, one located in an upper-class neighborhood and the other in a working-class area, focusing specifically on the resources available to children and adolescents. An examination of the book and magazine holdings, the facilities, the reading programs offered, the staff available, and the funding provided reveal that significant disparities exist. Although Beverly Hills serves a community twice the size of Santa Fe Springs, the Beverly Hills Public Library offers four times as many children and adolescent books and has four times as many reading programs as the Santa Fe Springs Library. In terms of the facilities, staff, and funding, the Santa Fe Springs Library lags far behind Beverly Hills. With these stark differences, students in poor and working-class neighborhoods are unlikely to have access to the books in their community, access necessary to develop high levels of literacy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.