[Publib] America's Most Literate Cities, 2006

[Joe Schallan]

America's Most Literate Cities, 2006:

http://www.ccsu.edu/amlc06/

I hadn't looked at this list since the 2004 edition.

Professor John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University, takes six factors into account -- newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, educational attainment of the population, Internet connectivity, number of publishers, and support and use of library services.

These are arbitrary, of course, and one could quibble, but during the time Professor Miller has been doing this list I have always felt his factors to be a pretty good basis on which to rank the pervasiveness of reading in our cities.  I *would* quibble with his splitting of metro areas -- separate rankings are derived for Minneapolis and St. Paul, for example.

In any case, I would argue that a city in which people are highly educated, read newspapers a lot, support and use libraries a lot, buy a lot of books, use the Internet a lot, and create the printed word a lot, can be reasonably termed "literate."

Professor Miller has ranked 70 cities for 2006.  Congratulations are in order to No. 1, Seattle, and No. 2, Minneapolis, and the other members of his Top Ten.

Miller uses the following criteria for the library component of his survey, which he calls "library support, holdings, and utilization":

- Number of school media personnel per 1,000 public school students

- Number of branch libraries per 10,000 library service population

- Volumes held in the library per capita of library service population 

- Number of circulations per capita of library service population

- Number of library professional staff per 10,000 library service population

Taking the library component separately, Cleveland ranks No. 1 and St. Louis No. 2 (which rankings contribute to these cities high overall rankings of 14 and 12, respectively).


-- Joe Schallan
   Phoenix (No. 59 and a place in which
   I and my colleagues obviously have our
   work cut out for us . . . )