St. Louis drops two places in the recent ranking of America's Most Literate Cities.

In 2008, St. Louis came in at No. 9. The new list has it at No. 11. 

But the city library system (one of the factors used to measure literacy) rose to No. 2 in the nation.

An e-mail from Rick Simoncelli, president of the library's foundation, noted happily:  "This is the sixth year in a row that we have been ranked as one of the top five urban libraries in the nation."

The list, America's Most Literate Cities, is compiled by researchers at Central Connecticut State University. In a story for 2007, I noted that the study measurements pertained only to the city and did not include St. Louis County. So of the six indicators of literacy tracked (newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources calculated per number of residents), a few might be skewed because St. Louis is not part of St. Louis County.

For instance, the study measures the number of bookstores per 10,000 residents. One of the sources is yellowpagesinc.com. A search on that site for bookstores turns up stores that are in the county. So the city of St. Louis appears to have more stores for its population than it really does. Nevertheless, two years ago a spokesman for the survey told me that it didn't really matter because the same forms of measurement were used for each city (I'm not sure he really understood our city/county division. Overall, Seattle ranks as America's Most Literate City, with Washington, D.C. second.)

Anyway, the library rankings are not skewed and the library and city certainly deserve to publicize them!

Check out the website for more information: http://www.ccsu.edu/page.cfm?p=5446