Thomas J. Hennen Jr., director of the Waukesha County (Wis.) Federated Library System, has released the 2000 edition of Hennen’s American Public Library Rating (HAPLR) index, based on data from the Federal-State Cooperative System and published by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Six input measures and nine output measures—among them cost per circulation, visits per capita, and expenditures per capita—are tabulated to produce the HAPLR index rankings. Although Hennen warns that there is more to quality library service than the components of his rating system, he says he hopes his work fills a need for library and information service accountability in much the same way that listings of top-500 corporations do in business.
Ten libraries topping the list of 100 highest-rated American libraries are:
An article summarizing the 2000 HAPLR rankings appears in the November issue of American Libraries and in AL Online. The full report is available on the HAPLR Web site.
Posted October 30, 2000.