The Literature of American Library History, 2008–2009

Abstract

The Literature of American Library History, 2008–2009 Edward A. Goedeken (bio) There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. —Donald Rumsfeld1 Historians of American libraries and librarianship might hesitate to consult the wisdom of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as a guide for conducting research. However, the aforementioned quote does provide a useful context for this essay because historical investigations must go beyond what we already know. Research has to delve into the past to recapture the “unknown unknowns” that await our curious probing of dusty documents and forgotten files and help us make better sense of all that has gone before and serves as prologue for the present. This examination seeks to identify, summarize, and emphasize, where appropriate, those writings that appeared during 2008 and 2009 to assist us all in better understanding our shared library past. Sources and Historiography Although no major encyclopedias or similar works appeared during 2008 or 2009, several historiographical items do deserve attention. Jeffrey Wilhite published an update on Josephine Metcalfe Smith’s 1968 A Chronology of Librarianship with his own volume that brings the chronology up to the year 2000. Wilhite’s work treats each year separately and is nicely crafted and easy to use. One wishes someone could go back and make Smith’s older work equally accessible.2 Another source replete with facts and figures is Godfrey Oswald’s new, 2009 edition of Library World Records. The first edition came out in 2004, but in this version Oswald was able to add more information to many of the entries and update [End Page 412] the bibliography. In so doing he increased the earlier book’s length by nearly one hundred pages.3 Jeffrey Wilhite’s chronology summarizes events in the last half of the twentieth century, and Leonard Schlup and Stephen H. Paschen’s new anthology, Librarianship in Gilded Age America, captures significant library writings in the last half of the nineteenth century. Often referred to as the Gilded Age, the post–Civil War era was filled with larger-than-life characters and enough inventions to keep the patent office hopping for decades. Schlup and Paschen have gathered together more than four dozen reports, essays, private communications, and other musings of our illustrious leaders of the past and provided them in chronological order. It is not overtly clear how the editors chose what to include in their 330-page volume, but there is something for everyone here. The book captures many of the most significant essays of the period and should provide a good place for both novice and experienced library historians to acquaint themselves with the thinking of our founders.4 Robert V. Williams, who has spent his career navigating the intersection of library and information science history, provides an insightful assessment of how these two thematic “first cousins” have operated over the past decades in a presentation he gave at the March 2008 meeting of the Board of Advisory Editors of Libraries & the Cultural Record (L&CR). He believes that both branches of library and information science have a great deal to learn from each other, and we can benefit as well from “Enhancing the Cultural Record: Recent Trends and Issues in the History of Information Science and Technology.” Another useful resource Williams maintains is an extensive online guide entitled “A Bibliographical Guide to a Chronological Record of Statistics of National Scope on Libraries in the United States.” Part 1 of the guide covers 1829–99; part 2 covers 1900–1999. This powerful online tool is essential for anyone exploring statistical data on libraries of all types in the United States.5 It is time to update the Dictionary of American Library Biography, whose most recent supplement came out in 2003. Start keeping an eye out for potential entries for the third supplement, which should get under way soon. Special, Private, and Subscription Libraries Histories of the precursors to the public library continue to...