Analyzing the Public Libraries' Accessibility in the Municipality of District 20 of Tehran

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the status of district 20 of Tehran in terms of the availability of public libraries and access of its residents to library services. Method: In this research, an analytical–descriptive method was used to analyze the public libraries' accessibility in the municipality of district 20 of Tehran. Parts of the data have been obtained from the documents of the libraries and parts of it have been obtained through a survey done within the area of study. The quantitative analyses were conducted using the indexes “per capita library” and “land use coverage”, and the tools “Buffering” and “Euclidean Distance” in GIS were used in order to draw the coverage areas of any library and determine the accessibility of parcels and population. Findings: Within the area of study, public libraries covered only 4.31 m2 per hectare of the lands and per capita space of them are 0.027 m2 that is approximately 50 percent of the urban planning standard scores. 86.1% of the users assess the access to libraries as “good’ and “very good”, and 74.9% of them believed that the libraries have “good’ or “very good” capacity. Furthermore, 18% of the areas and 18.32% of the population do not have access to any public library whereas 55.14% of the lands and 51.1% of the residents are accessible by at least 2 library covered area. 20% of the population reside within a distance of more than 1000 meters from the nearest public library and have not had an appropriate level of accessibility. Originality/value: This research showed that there is a lot of disparity in the coverage of library services in the district 20 of Tehran and revealed that providing a balance in this regard requires developing quantitativey and qualitatively the libraries with the score 2 and more and establishing new libraries through complying precisely with the considerations of locating with the aid of GIS tools. Therefore, the importance of this research lies in that its findings and results can be used by urban planners as guidelines to create a balanced distribution of library services