Staff Report
Gilroy – The Santa Clara County library was named the best public library in the nation for its high quality and cost-effective service according to the Hennen’s American Public Library Ratings 2006 published in the nationwide professional library journal.
This is the fifth time that the library is rated the best in the nation from 97 other libraries in the same population category.
Thomas J. Hennen Jr. compiled data from the U.S. Federal-State Cooperative Service that identifies the pubic libraries in America with the highest input and output measures that includes cost per circulation, visits and books per capita, funding per capita and hours open.
“It’s a great honor for us to get this acknowledgment for the last few years, in spite of the fact that we had to cut back on hours, we rated high compared to other library services across the nation, particularly on the west,” said Gilroy Librarian Lani Yoshimura.
The county has nine libraries in the system, and three million visitors that check out 10 million items each yea.
The Santa Clara library provides materials in different formats such as CD’s, DVD’s, videos, audio books, and electronic full-text databases in 25 languages, but what has made the library so popular is the way they cater to the communities.
“Our library tends to have more Spanish language books because of the population that we serve,” said Yoshimura. She said the bookmobile also travels to places such as migrant camps and institutions to make books available to these communities.
