Background Research

The population in Vancouver, Burnaby, and Richmond is increasing, so is the demand for library services. From 2002 to 2005, the circulation of items in Vancouver Public Library (VPL), including books and visual-audio materials, has increased by 12.2% [1]. The borrowed items in Richmond Public Libraries also increased from 3.3 millions in 2001 to 3.58 millions in 2005 [2,3]. There is a need to build a new library in the area of these three municipalities.

There are other features that characterize the library use. Between 2003 and 2005, 87% of VPL patrons are age between 10 and 59 [4]. In addition, multilingual users form a important patron group. The circulations of multilingual materials are increasing in the libraries of the area, and they were accounted for 16% of the total circulation in 2005 [5]. The VPL maintains the items collection in 13 languages. The library officials in Richmond and Burnaby also actively provide multilingual materials to meet the demand of the communities.    

Project Objective

Geographical information system is a powerful analytical tool for location selection. This project will use IDRISI, one raster-based GIS service package, to find out the optimal location for a new library in the region of Vancouver, Burnaby and Richmond. The analysis is based on the raster data structure, and because of this, a multi-criteria analysis with analytical hierarchy decision process is possible and suitable to be applied to this project.