Abstract

This study analyzes the problems in reading program of public libraries and provides some suggestions for the program development and management. For this analysis, I sampled and examined 350 news articles to reading programs done in the public libraries between 2013 and 2015. The result shows that 41.4% of the collected articles were the news about the reading programs in Seoul Metropolitan areas. While the articles about simple reading programs occupied 69.9%, the mixed activity programs reached a significant amount in total. In addition, 51.3% of program participants was under the elementary children and their parents, but only 9.0% program participants came from low socioeconomic status classes. 86 reading programs (28.4%) were designed for one-day events without a long-term policy. Based on such analyses, this study provides three suggestions: utilizing public relation teams and communicating mass media to advertize reading programs to local residents, developing systematic reading programs in users' needs, managing the reading programs for all kinds of local residents.