Your page points to this — good luck finding the hyperlink though!
Anyway, defined as “% of population that did the thing at least once”, movies are first, parks second, and libraries third.
Parks have seen a huge uptick in popularity. The other two dropped off (libraries dropped off more than movies).
In terms of median visits per person (probably the better measurement), almost nothing changed.
Concerts went from 1 to 2 visits, libraries went from 3 to 2. I’d guess those are explainable as statistical noise.
It's one of the few places I know of that has plenty for young children to do, is open in all weather, is anywhere close to home, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg to get into.
I could also imagine someone working remotely having high library utilization.
Most co-working spaces charge $20-$100 per day for a desk.
And of course, plenty of people use them as a place to read books, magazines, and newspapers.
In my opinion, libraries are the single greatest tool an individual has to advance their station in life. I wish more people would take advantage of that opportunity.
Surely the internet beats libraries by a large margin on this.
I lived in such an area. The library itself was great and really did work on expanding internet access (allowing adults to use a laptop, for example) - but it was a small town with a limited budget. It simply couldn't serve the area better.
That's crazy. In California, most libraries are open to all California residents: you can join the San Francisco library even if you live in rural farm parts of California. Great for accessing ebooks.
For example you can read news papers without ads :-) at the Sunnyvale library, the Wall Street Journal, the NY Times, the Washington Post, Economist, Etc. And many periodicals. All without sacrificing your privacy or trying to subvert some paywall.
You can read texts on pretty much any subject that were not only written by someone who took time to write it, but were edited and often fact checked by a third party (publisher).
You can read classic stories, and new stories, in all sorts of genres.
You can socialize at the library, ours has a couple of meeting rooms you can reserve as long as you aren't trying to sell something. Some libraries have a coffee shop in them which is pretty cool.
Oh, and you can surf the web if you want but there isn't anything on the Internet that you can't get at the library and the quality of the interaction at the library is always better.
You can check out eBooks too. All offered with no ad-tech nonsense.
Don't all those papers have ads in them?
ADDED: And furthermore, as other comments have observed, most of library visits are dropping in for maybe 5 minutes. If I were only to count the times I spend multiple hours in the library, it would probably be a couple times a year--and that's mostly because a few city libraries are often convenient places to hangout with free WiFi when I have some time between appointments/activities.
I know there are other uses for a library, and I wonder the percentage of trips to the library to take out books vs. other reasons.
First of all I don’t have a great memory of specific things in my day to day life. Ask me today what I had for dinner two days ago I could venture a guess based on what I usually have for dinner, but I couldn’t give you an answer with great confidence.
Anyway, part of what makes it kind of hard to define how much I have been to the library is also because I sometimes pass through the library at the university.
And I have borrowed like one book recently, but I don’t remember if that was within the last year or not.
But actually what I was wanting to say was that, different people might count what constitutes a visit to the library differently. To me, simply passing by to drop off a book does not constitute a visit. Whereas going there to borrow a book counts. And going there to attend some sort of event counts. And going there to browse the shelves for a while counts. And going there to just sit down and work with some of my own stuff on my computer counts.
Daily More than once a week More than once a month About once every two months Once a year Never
Which is a lot easier to estimate and answer for most people.
For instance my mom would probably just pick the twice a month or weekly answer even though sometimes she’s traveling and wouldn’t be there for a week.
We've also switched to that URL from https://lithub.com/in-2019-more-americans-went-to-the-librar....
I really, really wish attendance at the library was higher than at the theatre. But it's just not what I see happening.
The bigger question is why are people not going to the movies anymore. A few years ago the numbers wouldn't be as close. There is a trend to go out to a movie less and stream more.
For me, it's a combination of alternatives for free time, higher ticket prices, and disgust at the loud-mouthed arrogance of some of the performers. I will actually not go see a movie I might have otherwise seen if the actor speaks down about others who hold opposing ideas about politics or religion.
Just saying.
(council person)
Of course the infrastructure costs money to maintain, and the people working there are paid.
It mentions this in the write up.
That said, most of the people I know have been to far more movies than they've been to the library (which is exactly 0 times). I know people who have never been to the library in their adult life. The library is an underutilized resource.
This isn't a study in how many people you know.
I know no one who goes to movies or libruaries but this study didn't capture that.
Also, the results don't show at all that "more Americans went to the library than to the movies" but rather that Americans went more to the library than to the movies (on average), which is not very surprising given that only one of them is free.
In other words, if 100 Americans went to the movies once, and 1 American went to the library 101 times, the results would still rank libraries higher than movies despite it being obviously not true that "more Americans went to the library than to the movies."