公益性信息服务能够促进信息公平吗?——公共图书馆对信息贫富分化的干预效果考察

Can Public Information Service Improve the Information Equality? An Investigation on the Intervention Efficiency of Public Libraries on the Information Divide

本文利用2012年对东莞市2 789位成年人调研获得的数据,以个人信息世界贫富状况为信息贫富分化的操作性定义,综合考察公共图书馆对于信息贫富分化的干预效果。主要结论有:以个人信息世界的贫富状况来衡量,中国城市成年人群中存在信息贫富分层化现象。公共图书馆用户的个人信息世界优于一般人群。其中,在信息资产、动力、智识和时间维度上,公共图书馆用户中的信息富裕者明显优于一般人群中的同层次群体;在基础信息源、信息资产、动力、智识和时间维度上,图书馆用户群体中信息贫困者的得分均值都高于一般人群中的同层次群体;在信息资产、智识和时间维度上,图书馆用户群体中的信息贫富居中人群明显优于一般人群中的同层次群体。

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the intervention efficiency of public libraries. Those institutions are always designed to provide public information services for local residents to dimish information divide. Through the research program, we expected to provide both a theoretical reference and practical enlightenment on the assessment of social benefit of public information service under the background of so called information society. The instruments, methods and findings of this research are not only suitable for the assessment of the social benefits of information service provided by public libraries, but also suit for the assessment of the social benefits of other information service institutions which aim to provide information service to meet the information needs of public. Present study selected ＂The Scale of Individual Information World＂ developed by Professor Liangzhi Yu as the instrument and measured 2 789 adults in Dongguan city, Guangdong province. Among the sampling group, 1 500 people were selected by a convenient sampling procedure within the users of the main library of Dongguan and its branches and 1 289 of them were selected by a stratified sampling procedure from the total population of Dongguan. Based on the questionnaire investigation, present study conducted cluster analysis and compare means procedures to meet the research purples. Findings of this research include： 1） on the view of differentiation of Information World of Individuals, a clear informational rich and poor hierarchy existes among Chinese citizens. 2） the Individual Information World of library users is better than that of the average people as follow： on the dimension of information assert, intelligence sophistication, dynamics and time, the information rich among library users are precede their counterpart in common staff; on the dimension of basic information source, information asserts, dy- namics, intelligence sophistication and time, the information poor among library users are precede their counterpart; on the dimension of information asserts, intelligence sophistication and time, the intermediate people among library users in the information divide precede their counterpart. The limitations of this research are that we focused on the comparison of the information richness between users of public libraries and common people. Anyway, it is necessary to test the causal relationship between the use of library and the information richness of people at various levels in the future. The practical implications are as follows. The findings of this research are not only helpful for the assessment of the social benefits of library profession from a new perspective, but also had some practical enlightenment for librarians at two sides. Firstly, it is necessary to enhance the construction of the hardware and equipments for libraries to make the public information service system to operate more smoothly. Secondly, professional library services should not halt at the arrangement of information resources and their use, but also need to expand their services to the deep participation of the cognitive process （ such as learning, teaching activities and so on） of users. In this way, professional library service can improve its interventional efficiency for information divide among people at various levels. Present study operationalizes the concept of information divide into the rich or poor of the Information World of Individuals. Thus, we provide a totally new perspective to assess the value of professional public information service and its efficiency. 5 tabs. 58 refs.