Recently, The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia Research Initiative put out a study entitled, The Library in the City: Changing Demands and a Challenging Future.

For those who work in an urban library setting, there were no surprises in the Executive Summary, which stated:

 “Big-city public libraries have rarely been as popular as they are today and rarely as besieged.”

The report goes on to document the growing popularity of various library services for 14 big cities around the nation, most of which are represented by a number of interesting graphs.

I thought it might be interesting to see how Westchester’s big cities would compare to the data found.  Some of the charts could not be replicated exactly.  Our latest available data is from 2010; we are in the process now of collecting the 2011 data.  Below are a few samples of the charts from the report along with their Westchester renditions.

One interesting note is that the current Director of the Philadelphia Free Library is a former Director of the Westchester Library System, Siobhan Reardon.