Chapter 6 Conclusion

We analyzed museums and libraries in US and found the following facts:

6.1 Museum

  1. The numbers of museums in California, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio are TOP5 largest. In each state, the discipline distributions among different states are similar, and history related museums take the largest share in most states.

  2. For those museums that reported their incomes, most museums either have no incomes or have incomes in range 25,000 and 4,999,999. Most history related museums have no income, on the contrary, Art museums have a great share of high incomes.

  3. The History related museums grow fast from 1950s to 2000s, and the art museum has a rapid growth in 1940s, which can reflect some social changes at different time.

  4. The correlation between geographical locations and museums’ income (revenue) levels is weak, which means that the current development of museums is according to local culture and history instead of being profit-seeking.

6.2 Library

We have several conclusion after our analysis:

  1. California, New York, Ohio, Kansas, Texas are among those states with most well developed library system. They have a relatively high number of library in the state and relatively high amount of electronic or printed material in the libraries. The annual visitor of the libraries are also relatively high. This pattern is partly due to these states have more dense population and also the government attach importance on the development of library.

  2. Through the time series analysis, we found that the annual visitors of library are decreasing slowly during the past 15 years which probably due to the development of internet and people have more kinds of entertainment in the spare time. However, the sharp drop of the number of people visiting library in between 2019 and 2020 which is more likely due to the pandemic.

  3. Additionally, we can see the development and spread of ebook and other electronic resource in the past ten years as many the ebook resource in many states’ library increased quickly during the past years.

6.3 Regional Cultural development

Last but not least, by comparing the library data with museum data, we can see that states with well developed library also tend to have well developed museum. The north east region and California tend to have more library and museum related resources while the north west tend to have less. This is reasonable as library and museum are both important part of cultural development of a country or a region. Also there might be some history reason as some of the states have much longer history and are believed to be well developed region across the country and has higher population.