Popular Religious Libraries in North America: A Statistical Examination

Few scholars of library science, theology, or popular culture know that 27% of all the libraries in the U.S. and Canada have some form of religious affiliation. John Harvey, a noted international library consultant and former dean of the library school at Drexel, has spent years compiling an exhaustive analysis of these collections, an analysis that will provide the framework for further study of the religious library world as it exists in these two countries. Popular Religious Libraries contains the same data for parochial school libraries, congregational libraries, and libraries open to the public. This extraordinary range of statistics provides the tools to analyze these libraries and their collections relative to other types of libraries in the U.S. and Canada. The author compares geographic and demographic settings, and, in separate sections, presents statistics on library personnel, management, material, expenditures, and use. Each section also includes figures from the prior ten years for longitudinal analysis.