American Public School Librarianship: A History

Abstract

Echoing the past quarter century’s best literature on libraries, Wayne Wiegand, in his American Public School Librarianship: A History, probes his topic as a scholarly critic.1 Early on, readers discover perhaps the profession’s most sustained conflict over status and influence, power, and tensions between dependency and resilience. It’s been a rough road for school librarianship—a lesson we continue to learn every day.This first comprehensive school librarianship history highlights the intellectual labor of one of our most prolific and respected historians. It militates loudly against the profession’s long-pronounced antipathy for its own history, or, as Jean-Pierre Herubel put it, privileges “professional prerogatives over historical interest, even the history of the LIS profession.”2Wiegand’s book ignites a deceptively simple question: What shaped American school librarianship? Unlike most library history, but as in much of his previous work, he addresses both “haloes and warts.”3 The evidence convinces Wiegand that school library history manifests an “imperfect institution,” one benefiting patrons but also perpetually caught “in the crosshairs of culture wars” and its own internecine conflicts—sometimes doing more harm than good—especially considering experiences of marginalized communities. Better than anyone, Wiegand characterizes the perpetually liminal role that locates youth librarianship as a whole—serving taskmasters in no fewer than ten different institutional scenarios.4APSL draws deeply from organizational primary sources and Wiegand’s broader scholarship. Sources include the University of Illinois’s vast and underutilized American Library Association (ALA) Archive of committee reports, minutes, office correspondence, and scrapbooks of a variety of ALA and American Association of School Librarians documents, and records from prominent activists. Also numbering among the work’s primary sources are annual reports from dozens of public libraries and influential profession media.A straightforward chronological narrative beginning in the late nineteenth century allows Wiegand to detect broad culminating themes. He credits, for example, school librarianship at times for having remained “flexible” in its role, contributions, and philosophy. But he also recognizes its rigidity, interstitial position, and the systematic constraints it sustained, “more than any other type” of librarianship,5 resulting in perpetually fraught and tentative relationships with professional and educational bureaucracies. The consequences, Wiegand argues, produced a kind of second-class victimization profile among practitioners for never being understood or sufficiently respected.APSL consistently offers readers a rare analysis of the profession’s own foibles. Wiegand finds that while school librarianship benefited from a broadly supportive women’s culture on the one hand it suffered from poor political acumen rooted in race and class privilege on the other. Wiegand concludes that school librarianship would have been better served by associating with colleagues in teaching than with libraries through ALA. Further, he extends previous acknowledgments that school librarianship suffers a debilitating lack of evidence- and research-based practice.6 Consequently, after over a century, school librarianship can only recommend and urge, not require, particular service practices or metrics.Wiegand also found the school library serving patrons best when exploiting “the distance between it and the hegemony of the classroom”7 in offering students intellectual freedom from grades, curricular dictates, and relative spatial autonomy. On the other hand, APSL also acknowledges the rarely interrogated legacy debates cloyingly advanced by what Wiegand terms the “children’s literature clerisy” concerning “quality materials” versus the popular versus “information access,” as well as issues like “youth behavior” and “information literacy.”Another essential broad theme pursued in APSL is the acknowledgment of how school libraries inhabit the center of intractable culture wars. Wiegand documents, for instance, how neoconservatism (corporatist and anti-civic-institution aesthetics) increasingly attacks the nation’s democratic aspirations for public education.Further, Wiegand argues that school librarianship’s poor research base inhibits its capacity to thoughtfully integrate technology to advance user outcomes. In an eight-page subsection (“Conflicts between ‘the Library Girls and the A/V Boys’”) Wiegand illustrates how “information technology” lingered as another front in the gendered twilight struggle for institutional influence in the form of “open warfare” between those advancing more audio/visual and technical tools (“almost all of them men”) and literature clerisy (dominated by women).Other fulsome debates abound. Wiegand traces many across time: what to call professionals (“teacher,” “librarian,” “media specialist”), what to call their spaces (“instructional materials centers,” “media centers,” “libraries”), and even educational preparation or certification requirements become entangled in a morass of bureaucratic agendas.Further, and as with so many of these debates, Wiegand reflects on how school librarianship rarely resolves them. The “standards” school libraries identify, for example, continually bog down in contentious disputes.8 Another debate documents how slowly the profession responded to major social changes, such as how public and school libraries mightily resisted racial integration.9A few quibbles deserve acknowledgment. First, the primary sources examined in APSL omit the formidable Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA). Published bimonthly from 1978 until recently, VOYA bolstered librarian and teacher awareness of the very popular materials Wiegand advocates.10 The work’s thesis could also have been strengthened regarding his concern for the school library as place. Experimental work since the 1990s has pursued better spatial equity and library design for youth.11Although an outstanding work itself, APSL also anticipates further development. APSL largely tells an institutional story of professional activists and leaders within their organizational structures. It forces us to confront how little we know about library user experience: so-called history from below.12 How did students and faculty—and from today’s headlines, parents—experience school libraries? What meanings did these groups derive from or contribute to them? APSL also sets the stage for private school library history and reveals how LIS scholars generally ignore the historiographies of youth and education.13School librarians may feel the analysis mustered here slights their contributions, as appears in “heart of the school” rhapsodies. But historians and those interested in a more balanced reckoning will turn to this landmark work.