Your Guide to Finding the Best Places to Live in North America, where it was rated 8th out of 343 metropolitan public libraries in the United States and Canada. That rating was based solely on the number of new books purchased each year per thousand residents. Weighting factors included expenditure per capita, percent of the budget going to library materials such as books, magazines, and audio-visual materials, expenditure per capita on such library materials, periodicals per 1,000 residents, volumes per capita, the cost for circulating materials, number of visits to the library per capita, collection turnover or average number of times each item in the collection is borrowed each year, the number of items borrowed per staff hour, circulation per capita, reference per capita, FTE staff per 1,000 population, the number of items borrowed per hour, the number of visits per hour, and the number of items borrowed per visit. The St. Joseph County Public Library was ranked higher than some major city libraries such as Indianapolis-Marion County, Denver, and Toledo. That vision is largely true today.
Most citizens have at least one library somewhere that they can call their own.
The Library Board, Administration and staff wish to thank the public for their continuing support. This ranking would not have been possible without the combined efforts of everyone in the community who loves and uses and works for the library. There will be party favors, refreshments and balloons for the children. A staff celebration will be held on Staff Day '99 and will be just pure fun, we hope. The detailed report, Hennen's American Public Library Rating of the St. Joseph County Public Library , is also available on this site.