"America's Most Literate Cities"

Cincinnati tied with St. Paul, Minnesota in 9th. Place, overall, in the Center for Public Policy & Social Research’s 2005 “Most Literate Cities in America” study last month according to a recent LLRX post. The study focuses on six factors seen as major indicators in the country’s major cities of 250,000 or more, including newspaper circulation, library resources, and, just this year, Internet resources.

The city tied with Seattle, Washington in 7th. Place as far as public library support, holdings & utilization were used as an index of measure, but only placed 39th. on the newly created Internet resource scale, tying with Chicago. “Of all the cities in the top ten for overall literacy,” the study said, “only Cincinnati and Pittsburg are low on the Internet variable, and they are both below the median.” Seattle, Boston, and Austin, Texas took the top three honors in that category.

“There are strong relations between three of the four internet literacy variables,” the survey noted, “including wireless internet access, and purchasing books & reading newspapers on the internet, but the availability of wireless terminals in public libraries isn’t related to those variables.”