Abstract:

It is accepted that in today’s conditions of a rapid development process, the cultural development of countries should be attached attention as much as economic development. The need for knowledge of culturally developed countries is very important. Public libraries, one of the greatest helpers in accessing information, provide individuals with the resources they need. The aim of this study is to determine dissimilar provinces in Turkey in library use and examine the relationship between human development of the province. In this respect, a dataset was created in Turkey’s 81 provinces for the years 2008-2017 with the usage numbers of public libraries, the number of public libraries, the number of books in the public libraries, the number of useof public libraries per thousand, the number of material lent in public libraries, and the literate population of these provinces. The obtained panel data set were applied cluster analysis with the Ward method using temporo-spatial Euclidean distance. As a result of the analysis, the provinces were divided into 5 groups. According to the library usage, the provinces divided into 5 clusters were examined with the human development of the provinces by taking into account the local Human Development Index (HDI) 2013 values. It was observed that the use of libraries in the provinces was not parallel to the human development index, but other provinces except Şanlıurfa, which entered the very low humanitarian class, were at a low level in terms of library use.

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