Of the top 100 top circulating titles at the Toronto Public Library (TPL) last year, the leading authors are predictably named Grisham, Rowling, Grafton, and Cornwell - plus Carol Shields for some local flavor. Sprinkled throughout the list, however, the name Bruce Rogers appears four times. His books help people pass the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language).

Welcome to Toronto, 2003, where over half the city's residents were born outside Canada - one in five since 1990 - and a bare majority claim English as their mother tongue. Yes, there are ethnic neighborhoods in Toronto ("place of meeting," to the Huron Indians), but immigrants live throughout the city. In several of TPL's 98 locations, the first shelves you see hold multilingual materials. The system actively collects in 40 languages, most recently in Somali.

That's the most striking thing about TPL - along with its vast size and heavy usage. Equally important but less visible is the impact of the recent amalgamation of the six municipalities of Metropolitan Toronto into a 247 square mile megacity, with urban and suburban elements. In April 1997, the Ontario provincial legislature voted for the merger, ostensibly to reduce bureaucracy. By January 1998, the new TPL had begun to integrate the six disparate library systems, plus the flagship Metro Toronto Reference Library, a regionally supported entity since 1977.

Last year, TPL was the busiest library system in North America, with 18.2 million visits. Its 2002 circulation, 29.2 million, was undoubtedly the highest. In fact, the 2001 circulation was more than 50 percent above that of the continent's next busiest library, the Queens Borough Public Library, NY. This usage is remarkable because Toronto, with some 2.5 million people, has only 25 percent more people than Queens.

"We've found that the whole is greater than the sum of seven parts," declares City Librarian Josephine Bryant, who until 1998 headed the North York Public Library, then Canada's second-largest system behind neighboring Toronto. Indeed, the benefits of amalgamation are clear: cross-pollination of programs, access to more books, collective purchase of databases, and a rich web site (www.tpl.toronto.on.ca).

Such advantages also pose new challenges. There's been a major increase in holds filled - up more than 50 percent from 2000 to 2002, with nearly half the requests coming in via the web.

Bryant says TPL has worked hard to meld "seven cultures," but some problems persist. Notably a salary structure has yet to be harmonized. Salaries for entry-level librarians vary up to 21 percent - from $40,295 ($28,609 USD) to $51,178 ($36,337 USD) - depending on the system pay scale in the branch before amalgamation. "The turnover rate is huge" in the lower-paid western region, says Maureen O'Reilly, a librarian and union officer. Staffers with comparable experience may earn different salaries in amalgamated central departments.

Bryant sees a significant improvement in labor relations since amalgamation, citing an absence of strikes, no significant backlog of grievances, and a consolidation of most job descriptions. But the union wants retroactive pay for more than half the workers, following the example of paramedics and others, who got seven months' of such pay after consolidation. TPL has said no.

"It's an affordability issue," says Bryant, noting that the matter is now before a provincial arbitration board. Union head Brian Cochrane says, "Our members are furious that it's taken so long."

TPL spent the first few years of amalgamation downsizing staff but not facilities. It tends to recruit externally for jobs in lower-paying regions, as internal candidates shun those positions, says the union's O'Reilly. Some 200 positions have disappeared, mainly in consolidated departments like finance, information technology, and interlibrary loan. "The next frontier is self-checkout," says Larry Hughsam, the finance director. It will debut next year at two branches.

With more than half the board members from the city council, the library has done better in funding than most city agencies. Budget increases averaged a little more than four percent over the past five years. Still, observes Bryant, "The city has been under significant financial pressure since amalgamation," as it lacks taxing powers beyond the property tax. "Now there's a recognition that cities have been badly neglected by both levels of government."

In a country where public services rely more on government funds, the local "culture of giving" is finally turning to libraries. The Toronto Public Library Foundation, incorporated only in 1997, raised $2.15 million ($1.53M USD) in 2002; nearly a quarter was in-kind (including a large donation from the Chinese Consulate). Bryant aims to build on these numbers.

In the trendy Yorkville neighborhood, on the north edge of downtown, the Toronto Reference Library (TRL) looms over Yonge Street, the city's main drag. Inside the reddish brick slab, six floors surround a central atrium - "one of the city's last truly public spaces," according to Toronto Life magazine. Most of the collection's 4.5 million items, a third of them cataloged books, aren't for circulation.

TRL is busy, especially on the first floor, where an information commons is emerging, complete with a new computer terrace, workstations for word processing, and a fee-based digital design studio. "We're trying to demonstrate we are for everyone, not just an academic library," says Linda Mackenzie, who's headed TRL since 1998.

Upstairs and downstairs, the facility appeals to more specialized users. In the performing arts department, a bulletin board lists auditions. In the basement, the Toronto Star Newspaper Centre, refurbished in 2001, provides access to papers in 47 languages. Computers, mostly designated for research, and study spaces fill out the upper floors.

Canada's National Library in Ottawa opened relatively late, in 1953, so TRL's special collections especially help those researching the country's early history. Here Margaret Atwood researched Alias, Grace, a novel based on the story of a notorious 1840s criminal.

The auditorium seats only 160, so the library now holds popular Friday evening programs in the footprint of the atrium, which can hold 400 people. "We've started to see this building as a destination point," Bryant says. "We've always had events, but now we've packaged them differently." Indeed, TPL this year won an American Library Association John Cotton Dana public relations award for the recent Performing Arts Lecture Series, sponsored by Starbucks.

Still, TRL has an understated presence to pedestrians, so the library plans an ambitious set of renovations, including a dramatic new entrance, a new performance space, and a better coffee bar. With a cost of $10 million ($7.1 million USD), it's a focus of fundraising.

Half a block away from TRL, the 1906 Yorkville branch - the only extant example of the first round of four Carnegie branches - circulates more than its behemoth research library neighbor.

The system's 79 smaller branches, known as neighborhood libraries, averaged 177,696 in circulation last year. The 17 larger branches, district libraries, averaged 558,144 in circulation. The circulation leader, by a slight margin, was TPL's other research and reference library, North York Central, which mixes circulating and research materials.

North York Central, a straight shot up Yonge Street, formerly anchored another system. Linked to a mall and government center, near a subway station, it exemplifies a once-suburban zone that has gotten more use as the city has grown. The library boasts a large genealogy collection, a teen center with jukeboxes (radical when it was implemented 15 years ago), and collections in Chinese, Russian, and Persian. A new French-language center is coming. (Canada is officially bilingual.)

While a large majority of users in a 2001 survey praised the library, only 59 percent were satisfied with the number of new books on the shelves. Hence, TPL introduced a seven-day circulating collection of new fiction and nonfiction, Best Bets, offering 1000 - 1500 items in five locations and 100 - 200 items in another 24 spots.

TPL gets good bang for its buck: last year it was seventh in circulation per capita among 29 large libraries (serving populations of one million - plus in the United States and 500,000-plus in Canada), ninth in holdings per capita, but only 15th in materials budget. The library's new budget - $134.753M ($95.674M USD) - includes an 8.4 percent rise in materials spending, to $5.99 ($4.25 USD) per capita. TPL also will tap its foundation to buy materials.

Library use continues to grow, especially among newcomers. In 2001, 30 percent of nonnative Canadians used the library weekly, more than double the rate of those born in Canada. The same year, while circulation increased nine percent, multilingual circulation increased 28 percent; it is now some 12 percent of total circulation, commensurate with spending.

At the Sanderson Branch, on the western edge of downtown, nearly one-quarter of the circulation comes from Chinese materials, though they represent only 16 percent of the collection. Named for the system's chief librarian (1937 - 56), Sanderson was built in 1968 of institutional brick and wood. It was expanded in the 1970s and connected to a new community center. The section is considered a "settlement area," a place waves of immigrants pass through.

The neighborhood, once heavily Portuguese, now is predominantly Vietnamese and Chinese. Users want books on English, job skills, résumés: "How to better themselves," says branch manager Jim Montgomery.

Online catalogs, he notes, "are not friendly to new immigrants," so staffers spend a lot of time helping people. While TPL cybercatalogs multilingual books through transliteration and offers a print-based Chinese catalog, a multilingual online system is severalyears away.

The top five non-English languages spoken in Toronto are Cantonese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Tamil, but at TPL, the most-used multilingual materials are in Chinese, Hindi, French, Tamil, Polish, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Urdu, and Gujarati.

Given the four languages collected at Sanderson, plus a standard library collection and various formats, Montgomery says there's a constant budget challenge.

TPL also must be nimble. "People settle, we develop collections, they move," notes Kim Huntley, who manages the York Woods branch in an area of high-rise apartments near the airport.

To help order materials, TPL has a jump on many other libraries: 34 of the 40 languages collected are spoken by staff with collection responsibilities. At the branches, it is more challenging. "I would love to have staff members who speak Vietnamese and Mandarin," says Montgomery, who notes that Sanderson staffers - not necessarily librarians - speak Portuguese, Spanish, and Cantonese. To compensate for the gaps, TPL provides phone access to interpreters at all branches.

At the Cedarbrae branch in eastern Toronto, a semisuburban area with an enormous ethnic mix, children's librarian Rosemary McGuire Herman says the library offered its first story time in Tamil this year. A Tamil clerical supervisor recruited a Tamil-speaking teacher to handle the two six-week sessions. "In a couple of years, it's going to be fairly mainstream," Herman says.

TPL hasn't received funding to survey what languages its staff actually speak, but managers and front-line staff alike see the system's multilingual needs eventually solved by hiring native speakers - though not necessarily librarians. "Our great untapped resource is our pages," says Jane Pyper, director of service planning and support, noting that pages accrue seniority as union members. TPL also offers a tuition reimbursement program. A more national effort is emerging.

Downtown, near the University of Toronto and not far from Sanderson, the Lillian Smith branch is a handsome brick building with an elegant entrance arch guarded by bronze griffins. When it opened in 1995, the Toronto Starcalled it the city's "most happily eccentric building." It operates as a typical district library on two floors, but the other two climate-controlled floors house two of TPL's special collections: the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy and the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books.

This satellite placement is another holdover from amalgamation. Both collections were placed in Lillian Smith (named for the librarian who launched TPL children's services) before merger, and the TRL wasn't part of the Toronto system at the time. The Osborne collection began as a gift in 1949 from British librarian Edgar Osborne. The Merril Collection, where novelist Atwood researched The Blind Assassin, was established in 1970 when sf author/editor Judith Merril donated her 5000-item personal library. Both collections have grown enormously, thanks to steady funding and their own Friends groups.

A short drive north of downtown, the Barbara Frum Library & Recreation Centre - named for "Canada's Barbara Walters" - models another TPL strategy, joint-use facilities. It looks like a bookstore, with high ceilings and a handsome wooden staircase. In this heavily Jewish neighborhood, it offers newspapers in Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. A sign alerts people that there are over 400 holds on Michael Cunningham's The Hours, so they should try an e-book. It's one of six branches offering Rocket eBooks.

Barbara Frum is one of 12 joint facilities in TPL, mostly combined with community centers. Another facility, along with a parks and recreation center, should open next year in the most densely populated place in Canada, St. James Town, a thicket of low-income high-rises just a 15-minute walk from the TRL, now served only by a bookmobile.

In 2000, TPL issued a three-year strategic plan: many of the goals - like a new OPAC, increased registration of children and teens, increased multilingual circulation - have been achieved. Others, like digitization of the Osborne collection and new guidelines and procedures for collection management, are on their way. Some others have been deferred for budget reasons, such as the St. James Town project and the creation of a new children's catalog.

Over the longer term, TPL will soon launch renovations of nearly half its buildings, thanks to a new $50 million ($35.5 million USD) five-year capital funding plan.

A new strategic planning process will begin soon, as well. In a few years, the challenge of amalgamation should be met, and TPL can focus even more closely on the multitudinous cultures in the city it serves.