The Impacts of Economic Development on Public Libraries: A Study Case of Bibliotheca Alexandrina Library

Abstract

Public libraries have the mandate of promoting the knowledge enhancement and awareness building of local residents. The national and local economic development on the other hand could directly impact the governmental public investment to the libraries and therefore affects their ability to deliver sufficient services either directly or indirectly. To investigate this sort of impact, the research extracted data from the annual reports of Bibliotheca Alexandria about various library services, collections, and financial data. As for the data concerning the Egyptian economy, it has been extracted mainly from World Bank data. Using Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, results prove the existence of a strong relation between the country GDP and the allocated budget to the public libraries. Moreover, results show that there is a strong positive relation between the allocated budget to the libraries on one hand and the salaries & wages on the other hand, which explains how library staff and librarians are very likely to be affected by any budget reallocation, which is in turn affected by the economy development.