Integration of public libraries and cultural tourism in China: An analysis of library attractiveness components based on tourist review mining

The integration of public libraries and tourism represents an emerging trend in China, aiming to foster sustainable development of libraries. However, there still lacks an accurate understanding of the attractiveness and performance of library tourism. Targeting all the national first-tier public libraries in China, this study collected a total of 70,301 online reviews provided by library tourists from popular online travel platforms. Text mining on 41,255 valid reviews, based on topic modeling and sentiment analysis, revealed seven primary components of library tourism attractiveness. Chinese public libraries demonstrated a satisfactory overall performance as tourist attractions ($\overline{a}$= 0.732609), though variations were observed across different components: performance was excellent (${\overline{a}}_i$> 0.8) in environment & atmosphere, architectural & interior design, and location & transportation, adequate (0.6 < ${\overline{a}}_i$<0.8) in online popularity, library collections, and cultural events, and just acceptable (${\overline{a}}_i$> 0.5) in personnel & services. A thematic analysis on 883 negative opinions extracted from the reviews further identified 22 major challenges negatively impacting the performance of each component. Additionally, an asymmetric impact-performance analysis recognized architectural & interior design as the basic component and location & transportation as the linear component, suggesting that visually aesthetic and conveniently located public libraries hold the highest potential for tourism. This study establishes a mixed-methods analytical framework and provides empirical evidence about the success of library tourism in China. In addition, it offers valuable insights for the global development of this burgeoning tourism trend.