Library Again Ranks High in Literacy Study

St. Louis, MO . . . The St. Louis Public Library is proud to announce that for the fourth straight year it has helped the Gateway City score big in the rankings of America’s Most Literate Cities. For 2007, the St. Louis Public Library finished with an impressive Second-Place ranking in the Library Category. The study was conducted in collaboration with the Center for Public Policy and Social Research at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) and was authored by CCSU President Dr. John W. Miller. The City of St. Louis finished an impressive 6^th overall (up from 12^th in 2006) among the 69 largest cities (populations of 250,000 or greater) in the nation.

The America’s Most Literate Cities study attempts to capture one critical index of our nation’s health—the literacy of its major cities. The study focuses on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources (introduced in 2005 to gauge the expansion of literacy to online media).

St. Louis Public Library Executive Director, Waller McGuire, noted, “It is a great honor to lead the St. Louis Public Library—one of the very best in America, which means the world. This is the fourth straight year the St. Louis Public Library has been named as one of the top three public libraries in the nation.”

America’s Most Literate Cities study was first published online in 2003 at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Says Dr. John W. Miller, author of the study, “From the data, we can better perceive the extent and quality of the long-term literacy essential to individual economic success, civic participation, and the quality of life in a community and a nation.”

To view the study’s results in depth, visit http://www.ccsu.edu/ALMC07.

For more information, call 539-0394.

1/08/2008