THE Gates Legacy.

In libraries with newly installed public access computers, patron numbers grew by nearly 25 percent in 2000 and 2002, with many of them new to libraries. They include home schoolers, travelers, and people from low-income families, who are much more likely to depend on library computers. This sampling of updated findings from the ongoing research on the U.S. Library Program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation indicates the breadth and depth of the impact of this extensive gift to public libraries. These recent findings, combined with the early results of the program, demonstrate that the program's legacy is substantial. The largest gift to U.S. public libraries since that of Andrew Carnegie, the Gates Program will have brought computer "packages" into the majority of public libraries in all 50 states by the end of 2003. By then the contribution will total 40,000 computers since 1997 in about 10,000 eligible facilities. The program focused on libraries that serve populations where ten percent earn below the federal poverty line; it has reached into nearly every low-income area and isolated public library in America. The number of people in the United States who have at least limited access to computers and the Internet continues to grow, and large increases in the number of patrons at libraries--in some cases more than 100 percent--are part of this overall trend. These increases averaged 23 percent in the early states in 2000 and 24 percent in all the Gates states completed by mid-2002. Libraries provided access to a large number of low-income patrons. About half of adult library computer users have household incomes below $25,000, compared with 30 percent of the population of those states, according to the U.S. census. Internet use, library use, and public attitudes toward libraries as well as public access to computers have all changed positively since the Gates Program began. INSET: OCLC's Gates Portal Project.