Scholarly Religious Libraries in North America: A Statistical Examination

by John F. Harvey

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.

Scholarly Religious Libraries contains comparative data for colleges, universities, seminaries, convents and monasteries, religious archives, and the libraries located in the headquarters of hundreds of denominations on the continent. 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.

672 pages, Hardcover

First published November 13, 1998

About the author

Father John Harvey, O.S.F.S., is the founder of Courage and was involved with the pastoral care of persons with a homosexual orientation for almost twenty years. He is also the author of the books The Homosexual Person: New Thinking in Pastoral Care and Homosexuality and the Catholic Church