St. Louis is No. 8 this year in the annual rankings of America's Most Literate Cities.

Last year it tied with Portland, Ore., for 9th place.

The study, by Central Connecticut State University, gathers data in six categories. St. Louis' best category is again in library services. It ranks 2nd in the country, just behind Cleveland.

"To get No. 2 in library services is the clearest indication of how strongly St. Louis supports its library, which means it is committed to literacy," said Mark McLaughlin, associate vice president for the university's marketing and communications. The fact that St. Louis is consistently ranked so high for library services and often has been in the 10 among literate cities is "terrific," McLaughlin said by phone.

The study, in its ninth year, says it "measures a key component in America's social health by ranking the culture and resources for reading in America's 75 largest cities."

For the 2011 report, Washington D.C. ranked No. 1, followed by Seattle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, San Francisco and Denver.

The statistics for St. Louis can be tricky. St. Louis is not part of St. Louis County, and while some of the study's categories only measure the St. Louis population, others seem to take into account services based in the county (booksellers, magazines).

McLaughlin, however, said that "we try to make the study as much as possible apples to apples... We control for those kinds of variabilities as much as possible."

He said that the rankings use each "city proper" for population data, not the whole metro area.

Here is how the study explains its methodology:

The study ranks cities based on research data for six key indicators of their citizens' use of literacy: booksellers, educational attainment, Internet resources, library resources, newspaper circulation, and periodical publishing resources. The information is compared against population rates in each city to develop a per capita profile of the city's literacy.

This is a macro survey, with huge amounts of data, McLaughlin said by phone. This year, the study also looked at whether wealthier cities were more literate.

According to the study author, university President Jack W. Miller, there is no correlation:

Other notable cities that exemplify this finding are St. Louis, which ranks 70th in median family income but #8 in literacy; Henderson, NV (#7 in wealth and #53 in literacy), San Diego (#8 in wealth and #33.5 in literacy. While poverty has a strong impact on educational attainment, its impact on literacy is much weaker.

This demonstrates that if cities are truly committed to literacy, they can find a way past poverty and other socio-cultural challenges to create and sustain rich resources for reading.

For more information, go to http://www.ccsu.edu/