The best-kept secret about America’s libraries, Anna Clark says, “is that they are wildly, deeply, and incontrovertibly popular”:
Funding cuts be damned: more than 16,000 public library branches in the U.S. serve 96.4 percent of the population, according to the “State of America’s Libraries Report 2013” by the American Library Association. (The ALA was founded in 1876, the same year the Dewey decimal system was developed.) Public libraries circulated 2.46 billion materials last year, the greatest volume in 10 years. Over this same period, the circulation of children’s book and materials increased by more than 28 percent. Attendance at library-hosted programs for kids hit 60.5 million in 2013.
But it’s not just for kids: public libraries nationwide hosted 3.75 million public programs, and attendance for those events, too, is growing, indicating, as the ALA report put it, “an increased demand for these services.” Unsurprisingly, public computers at libraries are also in high demand—and libraries have responded by doubling the number available over the last 10 years.
The Dish 