Over the last couple of years, the Vancouver Public Library has seen a steady growth in usership. The demand for services offered from the library has increased, including bookcheckout, on-line services, and in-house programs. In 2001, there was especially an increased demand in juvenile and multi-lingual materials, and attendance at children's and adult's programs increased by 26% (1 ). With the rise in usership and population growth in Vancouver, eventually the city will have to look into expanding the number of branches in the system.

In 2000, A survey of library users and non-users was conducted for the Vancouver Public Library by CGT Research International. This survey showed that when non-users were asked why they did not use the library, 'inconvenient location' was the fourth-most frequent response ( 2 ). This means that, in order for the library to ensure higher usership, geography must be taken into account. While there has been a substantial increase in the use of the Vancouver Public Library's on-line services, the majority of the library's services still require the user to go to a branch, so the move towards more on-line services does not affect the importance of branch proximity. Moreover, according to the CGT survey, 40% of the respondents had no internet access at home, and thus cannot access on-line services without going to the library or another place with public internet access
(3 ).

Given the number of factors required to determine where to locate a new library, GIS is an important tool for performing locational analysis of this kind. Only a day after this project is to be published online, a satellite teleconference presented by the Illinois State Library will be held on the use of GIS to determine the best location for new libraries. Entitled 'GIS and Libraries,' the conference also deals with the use of GIS in libraries for the purposes of visually analyzing data.

For this project, I used Idrisi 32 to find where the best location would be for a new Library in Vancouver, based on a number of factors. I also used Arcview 3.2 as a guide for some of the analysis, as it is a program that I was already familiar with and can perform certain types of analysis and queries with greater ease than Idrisi.