North Carolina Public Libraries: Investigating the Correlation Between Online Readers’ Advisory Services and Other Library Characteristics

Readers’ advisory services have long been a foundational part of public libraries. This paper seeks to investigate how libraries offer these services online and whether or not their prevalence correlates with various other library characteristics. The study employs manifest content analysis and statistics to illuminate the associations between online readers’ advisory services being offered through public library websites and additional library data scraped from national surveys. Because the scope of the study is limited to North Carolina systems, its findings are not exhaustive enough to be applied to public library trends as a whole. However, the data explored holds the significance needed to begin a wider conversation about the evolving relationship between public libraries and online readers’ advisory.Master of Science in Library Scienc