LIBRARY USERS

TABLE 1 3

UseE oF SELECTED SoUrces oF Books By MEN AND
WOMEN, ADAPTED FROM VARIOUS STUDIES

PERCENTAGES
Selected Jobnson, 1932  NORC, 1946 Field & SRC, 1948
Sources Peacock, 1948
of Books MEN WOMEN MEN WOMEN MEN WOMEN MEN WOMEN
Purchase 22 11 47 35 27 19 52 34
Friends 21 27 20 25 17 21 19 22
Rental library 2 3 4 10 4 5 8 11

TOTAL NUMBER OF CASES

267 218 /Not”: Net: w460 risnisct sNoE = NGE
given given given given

skilled, and unskilled workers). Here, again, the proportions
of these groups in the library registration or in the actual cli-
entele vary in these studies because of variations in local con-
ditions investigated.”* But the central emphases seem reason-
ably clear (Table 14). The student group represents from
about one fourth to more than one half the total registrants or
users of the public library, the housewives from less than one
tenth to as much as one third, and the white-collar groups
about the same proportions. The two extreme groups in the
occupational hierarchy—professional people and business man-
agers, on the one hand, and wage earners on the other—each
make up about one tenth of the “normal” library clientele.
It is also relevant, and perhaps more important, to-inquire
"Compare, for example, the occupational distributions by Fair, 1935, and by
Zatterberg, 1941, for two different sections of the same city. The Fair sur-
vey, laid in an industrial part of Chicago, shows 46 percent of wage earners
in the library registration and only 20 percent of professional, managerial,
and white-collar people combined. Zatterberg’s study, laid in an upper
middle-class district on the opposite side of the city, shows that only 15 per-

cent of the library users were in wage earning jobs and fully 48 percent in
professional, managerial, and white-collar occupations.

   

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