American Library History Research Articles

Autherine Foster Lucy: Another Hidden Figure in American Library History

Autherine Foster Lucy: Another Hidden Figure in American Library History

Remembering LHRT

Remembering LHRT

Dateline 1977: The LHRT as Connective Tissue

Dateline 1977: The LHRT as Connective Tissue

Teaching the History and Organization of Libraries: The Coronavirus Pandemic as an Opportunity to Study Public Library Reopenings

Teaching the History and Organization of Libraries: The Coronavirus Pandemic as an Opportunity to Study Public Library Reopenings

Spreading the Gospel of Books: Essae M. Culver and the Genesis of Louisiana Parish Libraries

Louisiana native, archivist, and historian Florence M. Jumonville is singularly qualified to write this work. Her understanding of the culture and politics of Louisiana gives her a particular insight into the complexities of the story she tells and allows her to provide a local flavor to the story.The book's title is somewhat misleading, as the actual content of the book ranges far beyond Miss Culver and the beginnings of Parish Libraries in Louisiana. A prologue provides a concise summary of Louisiana library history from 1805 to 1925, focusing in particular on the role of women's clubs and the Louisiana traveling library. It contextualizes this history within the larger American public library history, as well as Louisiana history, a practice that will be continued throughout the work.The first chapter includes a biographical sketch of Culver's early life as well as a brief overview of her work first as a public librarian in Salem, Oregon, and then as a county librarian in California under Milton J. Ferguson. The body of the work covers Culver's administration as state librarian from 1925 to 1962 and that of Sallie Ferrell from 1962 to 1975.Utilizing Culver's personal and professional journals and papers, as well as manuscript materials found in multiple archival collections at the state library and other repositories, Jumonville describes in detail the social, political, and legal challenges that Culver faced throughout those forty years. Not only was she charged with establishing parish libraries in rural areas that had never had library service, but also, before she could begin, she had to craft the legislation that would make such libraries even possible and convince a populace hostile to the concept of publicly funded services to vote for increased taxes. Later, she was be called on to meet the new demands of the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights era.Jumonville does not shy away from addressing racial issues, including both segregation and desegregation of public and school libraries. The Rosenwald Demonstration Library established in Webster Parish in 1929 to serve both the white and black populations, albeit with segregated branches, receives detailed treatment, as do the protests that led to the desegregation of public libraries in 1964. Nor does she restrict herself to events with which Culver was directly involved, but includes relevant events of the time. The history of Angola Prison and other libraries serving the incarcerated is included, as well as the beginnings of education for librarianship and the establishment of the LSU School of Library Science, for instance. Politicians and other leaders who were instrumental in promoting the cause of public libraries—or opposing it—appear throughout the work.The book includes numerous contemporary photographs of people and places, including many that illustrate the unique culture of Louisiana, with its bookmobiles serving patrons who arrive by pirogue on the banks of the bayou. It is easy to read, written in a conversational style, and of interest to anyone interested in the history of libraries and librarianship in the United States.

The African American Struggle for Library Equality: The Untold Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program

The African American Struggle for Library Equality: The Untold Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program

Sanitizing American Library History: Reflections of a Library Historian

AbstractLibrarianship has a propensity to sanitize its history. As evidence for this statement, this article uses the Library Bill of Rights that the American Library Association adopted in 1939 an...

The Literature of American Library History, 2016–2017

This biennial review of the writings on the history of libraries, librarianship, and information surveys about two hundred publications that were published in 2016 and 2017. The essay is divided into a number of sections, including academic and public libraries, biography, technical services, and the history of reading and publishing. It also contains a brief list of theses and dissertations that were completed in 2016 and 2017.

The Literature of American Library History, 2014–2015

Abstract This biennial review of the writings on the history of libraries, librarianship, and information surveys about two hundred publications that were published in 2014 and 2015. The essay is d...

Performing Refuge/Restoration

According to bell hook, the public library is one of the 'most subversive institutions in the United States'. Considered the cornerstone of the democracy, the public library in the United States is charged with educating citizens of the democratic process. At the founding of the American Library Association, as with that of the United States of America, the concept of democracy was limited to the white colonists; literacy for the enslaved was considered an act of sedition. The library, particularly the public library, for African Americans thus inhabits a precarious site: one of performative and transformative possibilities for education and the participation in the democratic process—fraught with exclusionary politics and ensconced in a history of violence and death. This essay plays with the concept of ‘subversion’, as noted by hooks, to suggest libraries as contested sites of restoration and ones that produce, what Ngūgī wa Thiong'o considers, enactments of power. The public libraries during the racial protests in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland are highlighted to locate libraries as theatres of restoration and refuge and furthermore extends the performative modes of restorative enactments by considering The Dorchester Project by community-based artist Theaster Gates. The place of African Americans in library history, or African American library history, particularly in relation to the public library system in the United States, is significant, and this essay provides both a historical contextualization and theoretical frame that recalls the library as a contested site and a space of endless possibilities.

Mapping Race and Racism in U.S. Library History Literature, 1997–2015

This paper is a critical bibliography which examines U.S. library history literature from 1997 through 2015 to map the current research around race, ethnicity, and racism in such literature. Seventeen years ago Wayne Wiegand (2000) examined fifty years of published research literature (1947–1997) in American library history looking for varied theoretical perspectives. He argued for the use of more critical theories, and for library historians to join with social and cultural historians to help contextualize library history within broader cultural and social forces in the United States. The paper examines the progress of histories around race, racism, and people of color in libraries since Wiegand's call, and discovered that theoretical perspectives around library histories have broadened into the areas of race and ethnicity, but that there is still much research to be done. Many topics and time periods are still underresearched. For example, the paper found few or no articles that focus on race or ethnicity in the histories of U.S. private libraries, the predecessor to the public library, special libraries, or library education; it also found many articles in ethnic studies journals rather than LIS journals.

The Literature of American Library History, 2012–2013

The Literature of American Library History, 2012–2013

The Literature of American Library History, 2012–2013

It takes courage to be an historian. Striding forth from the comfortable knowledge of our own time and place to explore the mysteries of the past, a past often shrouded in a miasma of uncertain memories confounded by missing or incomplete records, we nevertheless seek to explain for ourselves and for others how the present came to be the way it is. Since our last effort, two years have quickly passed, time enough for dozens and dozens of books and journal articles to appear as tokens of our industrious output. It is time once again to gather together the disparate writings that characterize our collective efforts to understand the library past and make some sense out of what we have done. As usual, this essay is broadly conceived, taking into account a wide range of contributions both from active historians and from those who only dabble in our scholarly enterprise. And as usual, the present writer wishes to acknowledge that he stands on the shoulders of giants who established the tradition of this biennial exercise.

The Four Rightly Guided Caliphs. Commentary on Shera, J. (1969). Twelve apostles and a few heretics

There is a certain symmetry in being asked to write a commentary on Shera's summer 1969 JEL article about higher education because he wrote the foreword to my own history of education for librarianship at the University of Chicago entitled The Spirit of Inquiry (Chicago: ALA, 1981). It came about in the following way.As a doctoral student at Indiana in the late 1970s, I had interviewed many former Chicago GLS students including Dr. Shera who was also a former Chicago faculty member, along with his mentor and adviser, Dr. Pierce Butler. Of course, I was hoping my dissertation might make its way into book form and looking ahead to that time, I had talked with my major adviser, Dr. David Kaser, about who I might ask to write the foreword. He concurred that it would a coup if Dr. Shera agreed because Shera was an eminence grise of librarianship, having graduated Yale, worked in the OSS, and served as dean of Case Western's library school. So while I was happily looking forward to finishing my dissertation in early August of 1978, I received an invitation to speak at the Chicago ALA in early June as part of a panel Report of Recent Historical Research on Specific Developments in American Library History. I hope that nobody has a copy of tape #23 from that conference because you will hear a confident Dr. Shera and a rather timid voice from me; but afterward he did, nevertheless, agree to write that foreword.Note that I can't call him Jesse even though he was one of our first LA house guests in 1980, when we had literally just taken possession of our Village Green townhouse and things were still in boxes. Maybe Dr. Shera truly couldn't see (but he certainly seemed able to step aside or over them), so you can understand why I think that he was just being polite about those boxes. Similarly, I do remember well another early AALS (before it was changed to ALISE) conference in the Palmer House in downtown Chicago. In those days, one only had to stand in the lobby of that place and anybody you wanted to see would come wandering in off the streets. One evening a bunch of us were standing around, when one of his many admirers came forward to tell him that she had read everything that he had ever written (which you can see from the appendix of Wright's book which you hold in your hand is nearly 600 items); well, he was polite until they were out of earshot, and he turned to me and said sotte voce: Either she is a liar or a damned fool! I know that I greatly miss his witticisms and other public comments at AALS meetings, for which he was justly famous.As you read this 1969 article from Shera's more than 800-item oeuvre, you will see that he had a seemingly prescient ability to know the fads and fancies of our field. Yet, some, if not many of the twelve titles (ok, it grew to twenty-three finally) he listed in 1969 as being useful to under- stand higher education, aren't ones you'd readily reach for today. No doubt, I also risk committing the same heresies, but I asked my UCLA Department of Information Studies colleagues much like he did- Jean-Francois Blanchette, Anne Gilliland, Leah Lievrouw, and Beverly Lynch who responded to my request. …

Foreword

Foreword Donald G. Davis Jr. (bio) My generation, born before World War II, grew up during the era of the cold war, roughly between 1945 and 1990. It was a peculiar time, when the Soviet Union and its satellites were pitted against the United States and its allies. Measured against the times, before and since, when national borders were more open and freedom of thought and movement prevailed generally, this period will always hold special memories for those who lived through it. As one who during these years was educated and entered his chosen career—library historian and bibliographer in professional education—this was an unusually interesting period. Most people only read about the East–West struggle in Europe, and comparatively few from the North Atlantic community traveled much in Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1975, along with my wife, Avis, I attended the Library History Seminar VI in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. After we had picked up Paul Kaegbein, a distinguished and indefatigable German library historian, at the airport, we shared dinner with him at a restaurant that featured Central and Eastern Europe cuisine. A native of Estonia who was caught up in the war and the Soviet hegemony of Eastern Europe in its aftermath, Kaegbein was passionate about maintaining somewhat risky collegial relationships with our professional colleagues in the Eastern bloc. They often could not travel, he said, but we in the West could. That dinner talk was the beginning of my interest in embracing my mentor’s passion for crossing the Iron Curtain for the sake of library connections. Subsequent trips to Poland and the Soviet Union cemented this interest. My enthusiasm was rewarded when Hermina Anghelescu, guest editor of this two-part issue, came from the Romanian National Library to study in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1990s. She stayed on to complete her doctorate [End Page 107] with a magisterial dissertation on the history of libraries in modern Romania. Hermina may have left Romania, but her heart was always with her colleagues at home. Thus, she organized four short summer seminars for Romanian public and academic librarians in the late 1990s, for which she enlisted American friends as faculty. I accompanied the team on three of these ventures and witnessed for myself how librarians were developing new attitudes and charting new courses in a society free of former constraints. While the communist mentality had boosted literacy on a wider scale, librarians were now eager to provide new resources and services. Later, the 2004 IFLA Conference in Berlin brought the post–World War II period into clearer vision for me as my family and I stayed in a beautiful apartment in what was once East Berlin. We roamed all over the reunited city at will, enjoying its beauty and treasures. True, we have had surveys of libraries during the cold war. Now it is time to assess the status of Eastern European libraries in the twenty-five years that have followed since its demise. The commissioning, collecting, and editing of the extensive essays that follow in this comprehensive survey could only have been accomplished by the guest editor who possesses extraordinary gifts of imagination, networking, persistence, and completion. This collection will provide a new benchmark in the history of libraries in Eastern Europe. While all the news may not be good, we can be grateful for this summary review. [End Page 108] Donald G. Davis Donald G. Davis Jr. is a professor emeritus of library history at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught from 1971 to 2006, having received his education at UCLA, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He edited the quarterly journal Libraries & Culture for thirty years and coedited American Library History: A Comprehensive Guide to the Literature (1989) and Encyclopedia of Library History (1994). Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois

The Literature of American Library History, 2010–2011

As historians of libraries and librarianship, we face the constant challenge of understanding the people and actions of another era, of another time, and perhaps even of another culture that has changed remarkably from the past to the present. Joyce Carol Oates observed recently that when it comes to the past we “are forever viewers, voyeurs. We haven’t a clue.”1 Yet, in order for us to do our work we need to find the clues that are left behind and from them create a story that will inform our readers about the library past and about how that past has influenced the present. That is the task before us each day as we labor in the vineyards of American library historiography.

The Literature of American Library History, 2010–2011

Presentation d'ouvrages concernant l'histoire des bibliotheques americaines privees, publiques, d'enseignement superieur, de recherche, specialisees, concernant les associations de bibliotheques, l'enseignement en science de l'information et en bibliotheconomie, les technologies de l'information, les techniques documentaires, des biographies, la lecture, l'imprimerie et l'edition et concernant des etudes generales

The Literature of American Library History, 2008–2009

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...

Histories of the Library of Congress

Histories of the Library of Congress Jane Aikin (bio) Much has been written about the Library of Congress (LC), but relatively little of it consists of the scholarly historical appraisals that are the primary focus here. The emphasis is on book-length treatments and significant articles; with limited space, it is impossible to even reference the numerous theses, memoirs, articles, guides, pictorial works, and exhibition catalogs as well as most of the descriptions of individual collections and individuals. A great deal of writing about the Library's history has come from the Library itself. One of the most important treasures is the Library of Congress Information Bulletin (1942–); its brief, fact–filled articles are gems recoverable chiefly through patience and indexes. Another publication, the Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, which began in 1943 as the Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions and ceased publication with the 1983 volume, is likewise valuable for its specialized articles, especially the detailed descriptions of the collections. The first century of the Library's existence (1800–1900) produced nothing in the way of a full-length history. But in July 1900 Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress from 1899 to 1939, hired William Dawson Johnston, a former history instructor at Brown University, as the first assistant in the Division of Bibliography. His assignments included editing a series titled Contributions to American Library History. The first volume, History of the Library of Congress, Volume I, 1800–1864, Johnston's own history of the Library, appeared in 1904. He planned three volumes, with the second volume covering 1864 to 1900 and the third the history of other federal libraries.1 The first volume, the only one published, reproduced "all documents of importance which relate to the history of the national library" (some complete, some excerpted), and the product seemed to some critics to be "a collection of documents strung together on a rather thin thread of narrative."2 But Johnston's history also contained, as he noted, "many picturesque incidents, many antiquarian details, many expressions of contemporary opinion, which in the history of another library might be of merely local interest." That detail, together with its [End Page 5] important documentary and tabular materials, assures the History continued prominence as a record of the Library's early years.3 In retrospect, Johnston's decision to end his first volume with 1864 was unfortunate, for it left untold the story of the remarkable ascendance of the Library in the late nineteenth century. Apart from the acquisition of Thomas Jefferson's books in 1815, the years prior to 1864 seemed undistinguished, and the reviewers of Johnston's book took notice. While one praised the book's attention to both political history and biography as well as its exposition of the history of the library and the grounds for its future development, others emphasized the failure to realize the promise of Jefferson's insistence that "there is no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer." They deplored early congressional unwillingness to support the purchase of notable collections, and one even commented that it was surprising that the Library had attained its current stature. Johnston's history also revealed that the Library had been hostage on occasion to partisan politics and sometimes suffered under humdrum administration. By ending the volume with 1864, Johnston could not provide the happy ending that the administrations of Librarians Ainsworth R. Spofford (1864–97), John Russell Young (1897–99), and Putnam gave the Library's first century, and the reviewers seemed to feel in some measure shortchanged.4 By the late 1920s a good number of written, on-the-spot observations of the LC began to appear. The line between memoir and history in this body of work is thin, with many of the texts marked by praise—sometimes hyperbolic—for Putnam's accomplishments. Most notably, on Putnam's thirtieth anniversary as Librarian former LC staff members William Warner Bishop and Andrew Keogh compiled a volume entitled Essays Offered to Herbert Putnam by His Colleagues and Friends on His Thirtieth Anniversary as Librarian of Congress 5 April 1929. In generally brief articles many of Putnam's associates aired their memories...

<i>A History of the Book in America, Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880</i>, and: <i>A Companion to the History of the Book</i>, and: <i>Books on the Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade</i> (review)

Reviewed by: A History of the Book in America, Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, and: A Companion to the History of the Book, and: Books on the Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade Susan M. Allen A History of the Book in America, Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880. Edited by Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship. Chapel Hill: Published in association with the American Antiquarian Society by the University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 560 pp. $60.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8078-3085-7. A Companion to the History of the Book. Edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 616 pp. $158.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-4051-2765-3. Books on the Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade. Edited by Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote. London: British Library; New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2007. 180 pp. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-58456-219-1. Two of the three books reviewed here—A History of the Book in America, Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 and A Companion to the History of the Book—do not concern themselves in a major way with the history of libraries. Their focus is the relatively young interdisciplinary field that has come to be called history of the book, and each puts forth essays written by many scholars in history, literature, and librarianship. That said, it is difficult, if not impossible, to decouple book history from library history. The third title, Books on the Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade, proves this point and demonstrates that any [End Page 488] focused scholarship about books, book collecting, and the book collections that are the result of that collecting must touch on the history of both private and public libraries. The scholar of library history will be well served to treat both A History of the Book in America, Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 and A Companion to the History of the Book as reference tools to be kept at hand for their readable and accessible essays, arranged by topic, and the accompanying notes and helpful bibliographies. The single nod A History of the Book in America makes toward the history of libraries in nineteenth-century America is an essay entitled simply "Libraries" (in chapter 9, "Sites of Reading") by the respected authority on the history of Harvard University Library, Kenneth E. Carpenter. In some sixteen dense pages Carpenter surveys the 1840–80 period during which American libraries of every form grew at a rapid rate. He draws to our attention school district libraries, Sunday school libraries, and social libraries—those nineteenth-century institutions perhaps long forgotten but very important to readers in their day—while not neglecting the origins during the same time period of free public and academic research libraries. Nor does he neglect the story of the founding of the American Library Association in 1876. The endnotes for this chapter provide thorough documentation for the arguments made by Carpenter. The section of the book's concluding "Bibliographical Essay" that relates to chapter 9 names in its first paragraph seminal works in the library history field, including the writing of Wayne A. Wiegand, whose contribution figures in A Companion to the History of the Book. This paragraph also points to further research and writing that should be done, such as updating the surveys of American library history that were published in the mid-twentieth century and providing better access to source materials available to support research in library history. Unfortunately, A Companion to the History of the Book, a broad survey of the field, devotes only one of its forty chapters specifically to library history. In chapter 39, "Libraries and the Invention of Information," Wiegand is forced to condense fifty centuries (3000 BC–AD 2000) of the history of library development into eleven pages of text. By necessity, this is a very shallow overview that traces the growth and history of libraries from those in the ancient world to religious libraries of the Middle Ages and then to the development of national...