American Public Library Research Articles

Collective Effort: The American Union and the American Public Library

Collective Effort: The American Union and the American Public Library

Anonymity in a World of Digital Books: Google Books, Privacy, and the Freedom to Read

With its Books project, Google has made an unprecedented effort to aggregate a comprehensive public-access collection of the world’s books. If successful, Google’s collection would become the world’s largest and most broadly accessible public book collection—indeed, project leaders have frequently spoken of their desire to create a “universal library” (Toobin 2007). Still, the Google “library” would differ from established contexts for the provision of free, public access to reading materials—like public libraries—along several policy-related dimensions, of which perhaps the most glaring is its treatment of reader privacy. This paper teases out the specific differences in reader privacy protections between the American public library and Google Books, and what those differences might mean for the values and goals that such contexts have historically embodied. Our analysis is structured by Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity decision heuristic” (2009), which focuses on revealing changes in informational norms and transmission principles between prevailing and novel settings and practices. Based on this analysis, we recommend a two-pronged approach to alleviating the threats to reader privacy posed by Google Books: both data policy modifications within Google itself and inscription of privacy protections for online reading into federal or international law.

<i>The Vatican Library and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: The History, Impact, and Influence of Their Collaboration (1927–1947)</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Vatican Library and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: The History, Impact, and Influence of Their Collaboration (1927–1947) Patrick Valentine The Vatican Library and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: The History, Impact, and Influence of Their Collaboration (1927–1947). By Nicoletta Mattioli Háry. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2009. 749 pp. €150,00 (paper). ISBN 978-88-210-0849-8. Illustrated. One of the great centers for ancient and medieval manuscripts as well as for early printed books, the Vatican Library nevertheless hardly seemed fit for scholarship and consultation when Pope Leo XIII began the process of modernizing it in 1884. Under its German-born director, Franz Ehrle (1895–1914), the project slowly gathered speed but faced many obstacles. An American visitor claimed that the library was "a miser's treasure" buried under red tape and weighed heavily down by bureaucratic inertia (11–12 n. 12). But the real problems, according to this dissertation from Indiana University completed in 1991 by the Italian American librarian Nicoletta Mattioli Háry, were the lack of cataloging to facilitate access and the scattering of its riches into separate physical collections based on provenance rather than subject. The Vatican Library was not unique in lacking a single or comprehensive catalog, but, somewhat surprisingly, it requested American help in the 1920s and 1930s. The papal librarians were conscious of the need for reform but also wanted to free it from competing European entanglements, and the Americans seemed a likely source of funding. This was only shortly after the great period of Carnegie largess, while the Carnegie Endowment under Nicholas Butler was receptive partly for personal reasons. The amounts eventually granted would seem very small even for that age but did bring American academic cataloging methods and interest in patron-based service to a continent aware of American public libraries but not much else. Prior to the 1920s French influence had been greater at the Vatican, since Italy was considered hostile and Germany predominantly Protestant. The Americans, it might be said, were more neutral, farther away, and richer. For their part, as William Warner Bishop of the University of Michigan wrote, the Americans believed that the Vatican Library's prestige merited their effort to help, despite difficulties of distance and language. Bishop wanted to rescue it from the influence of the Bibliothèque nationale ("No more backward library exists" [103]). Bishop is indeed one of the heroes of this book, along with the French priest and later cardinal Eugène Tisserant and the Italian Giovanni Mercati, who also became a cardinal. [End Page 503] Despite the detailed, even voluminous, nature of Háry's work, readers might want more historical context. This was, after all, the period of Mussolini and the Lateran Accords and, in the United States, the Wilkerson report, which indicated grave deficiencies in American library education. Surely the latter must have occasioned some concern within Vatican Library circles: why should they be learning from the Americans if the latter's education methods were little more than clerical? A greater attention to secondary works would have been helpful here too, and indeed there is no mention of research published since 1990–91. Quite a lot of the book concerns cataloging questions of the time, the Italian tradition being "più teoretica che practica" (563 n. 84). Háry quotes liberally from original documents in Italian, French, and German, often without translating or paraphrasing in English. Much of the book is organized in strict chronological fashion and filled with excessive detail of often minor importance, such as which ship a cleric or librarian sailed on or his or her exact itinerary. This makes following more thematic discussions difficult. On the other hand, she has done extensive research in manuscript and published sources in Europe and the United States. The notes often are worth reading in their own right. The index, admirably full, runs over forty-five pages. Special problems were encountered during this modernization (or, as Baudelaire would say, Americanization) because not only were the collections large, diverse, and sometimes fragile but the facilities were small, cramped, and poorly designed. A partial floor collapse in 1931 killed five people. Probably...

Online Readers’ Advisory Services for Adult Patrons: Analysis on American Public Libraries’ Service Cases

Online Readers’ Advisory Services for Adult Patrons: Analysis on American Public Libraries’ Service Cases

Were Tom and Huck On-Shelf? Public Libraries, Mark Twain, and the Formation of Accessible Canons, 1869–1910

Public libraries are "accessible canons" for their communities. As part of their efforts to connect people and ideas, librarians purchase classic and bestselling books from "selective," "personal," "nonce," and other canons. They also create bibliographies, professional standards, and other tools that help shape reading habits. Thus libraries embody complex, ongoing processes of canon using and canon forming. This essay illustrates the canonical activities of American public libraries during the early years of the profession. It describes the American Library Association Catalog, local finding lists and accession records, and other primary sources that shed light on collection building during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) as a case study, it presents statistics on library ownership during the author's lifetime from more than seven hundred communities across the United States. Tables focus on nine titles: The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson. Statistical analysis reveals that "controversial" items such as Huckleberry Finn were widely available in Gilded-Age and Progressive-era public libraries, thus calling into question some assumptions about censorship of Twain's work. Also, library holdings of some titles varied by decade and geography, demonstrating that libraries implemented "national" and "recognized" canons unevenly. In sum, the essay shifts attention toward the operationalization of literary canons and provides empirical evidence of Mark Twain's presence in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary landscape.

<i>Readers' Advisory Service in North American Public Libraries, 1870–2005: A History and Critical Analysis</i> (review)

<i>Readers' Advisory Service in North American Public Libraries, 1870–2005: A History and Critical Analysis</i> (review)

Consumer health information services in public libraries in Canada and the US

In response to a growing demand from the public for health information resources, North American public libraries have provided varying levels of consumer health information (CHI) services since the 1970s. Due to the availability of funding in the US, many American public libraries have provided CHI services, although the majority of these have been as partnerships with health sciences libraries or via the “Go Local” programs. In Canada, where no specific funding has been available for CHI services, few public libraries have set up CHI services; health information has generally been provided by augmenting health collections or “virtually,” i.e., by providing links to recommended electronic resources via the library’s Web site.

Readers’ Advisory Service in North American Public Libraries: 1870–2005; A History and Critical Analysis. By Juris Dilevko and Candice F. C. Magowan. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. Pp. v+252. $45.00 (paper). ISBN‐13 978‐0‐7864‐2925‐7.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsReaders’ Advisory Service in North American Public Libraries: 1870–2005; A History and Critical Analysis. By Juris Dilevko and Candice F. C. Magowan. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. Pp. v+252. $45.00 (paper). ISBN‐13 978‐0‐7864‐2925‐7.Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Catherine Sheldrick RossFaculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario Search for more articles by this author , Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western OntarioPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Library Quarterly Volume 78, Number 4October 2008 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/591213 Views: 43Total views on this site © 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Romance novels in american public libraries

AbstractIn library literature, the collection of romance novels has produced a fairly vociferous debate that has not surrounded other genres. However, there is relatively little in the literature that examines current practices. The authors conducted a national survey, asking libraries how they acquired romance novels for their libraries, what their proportional expenditures were for romance, and the extent of their romance collections. Responses suggested that libraries in general have sizeable romance collections. Some libraries do indeed have smaller collections and spend little or no money on the romance genre. Little is known about public libraries' collection development practices for any genre, and these results help fill that gap in the library literature. Results also suggest that library and information science education, beyond supporting leisure reading, ought to emphasize the roles that leisure reading serves for readers.

Romance novels in american public libraries: A study of collection development practices

In library literature, the collection of romance novels has produced a fairly vociferous debate that has not surrounded other genres. However, there is relatively little in the literature that examines current practices. The authors conducted a national survey, asking libraries how they acquired romance novels for their libraries, what their proportional expenditures were for romance, and the extent of their romance collections. Responses suggested that libraries in general have sizeable romance collections. Some libraries do indeed have smaller collections and spend little or no money on the romance genre. Little is known about public libraries' collection development practices for any genre, and these results help fill that gap in the library literature. Results also suggest that library and information science education, beyond supporting leisure reading, ought to emphasize the roles that leisure reading serves for readers.

<span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education, and the Public Good</span> (review)

Reviewed by: Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education, and the Public Good James Jesson Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education, and the Public Good . By D’AngeloEd . Duluth, Minn. : Library Juice Press , 2006 . xiv, 127 . $18.00 (paper) . ISBN 978-0-9778617-1-2 . Many readers of Ed D’Angelo’s thought-provoking and very readable book, Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library, will come away with a newfound commitment to saving the ailing American public library. Some will disagree with the book’s critiques of popular culture. And most will wish for more information from this book, which asserts the public library’s fundamental importance to democracy but discusses the institution surprisingly little, albeit while discussing many other important and related issues: education, information technology, globalization, free-market economics, and the division between high and low culture. As his subtitle indicates, D’Angelo’s target is postmodern consumer capitalism together with the philosophy that Thomas Frank sees as its public-relations arm: “market populism” (75). This philosophy proposes consumer choice as the new agent of worldwide democracy, replacing the traditional governmental form that is withering under the decentralizing forces of technological development and globalization. Consumers can “vote” instantly with their wallets. D’Angelo laments that libraries have become influenced by this philosophy, catering to popular demands for entertainment and abandoning their role in promoting and facilitating the rational debates necessary for a vital democracy. This role is particularly important today, D’Angelo writes. As we have entered an information economy, the new citizen-consumers have been trapped in a downward spiral: they opt for the instant gratification of mindless entertainment or watch news programs produced by the entertainment conglomerates, both of which reinforce consumerism’s primacy. Given this vicious cycle, American society needs an institution independent of this cycle that represents the public good. America needs strong public libraries and, more specifically, qualified librarians. D’Angelo argues that librarians’ appropriate function is as cultural “gatekeepers” (5), trained to guide people to more edifying and enlightening sources of information and to distinguish between “’good’ literature and ‘bad’ [End Page 232]literature” (2). Briefly sketching the history of public libraries, D’Angelo recounts the democratic impetus behind the earliest ones, driven by Enlightenment ideals about each citizen’s fitness for democratic participation, given a proper education. The force of capitalism, hostile to democracy in its postmodern phase, was not always opposed to government-based democracy, D’Angelo writes. Despite some arguably antidemocratic attitudes among major nineteenth-century library giants like Melvil Dewey (5–6) and Andrew Carnegie (6–7), the general philosophy in the age of the robber barons supported the public good. In this context D’Angelo cites British philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose utilitarian thinking helped justify public library funding through the idea that economic liberalism would succeed only if citizens were educated to make rational choices that served their best interests—and, by extension, the interests of society as a whole. D’Angelo writes that the capitalism of Mill’s time “both presupposed certain moral values and produced a public good which transcended private economic interests. Educational institutions such as libraries were expected to instill these moral values in the public and thereby promote liberal capitalist democracy” (16). Around World War II American libraries moved closer to an active promotion of democracy with two national reports from the American Library Association emphasizing the importance of “democracy and enlightened citizenship” (8) in the public library’s mission. The latter half of the twentieth century, however, saw a movement away from these national standards and toward a localization of practices that have left libraries without a coherent mission to adhere to in resisting market populism. As one may notice from his admiration of Mill’s ethical liberalism, D’Angelo is not the stereotypical leftist that a first glance at his book might suggest. Indeed, instead of citing an antiglobalization activist like Naomi Klein or a theorist like Saskia Sassen, D’Angelo bases much of his argument on classical philosophers. D’Angelo received a doctorate in philosophy, and he...

Resonant Texts: Sounds of the American Public Library

ABSTRACTPublic libraries have long been associated with silence and order. Historians have argued that the architecture of library buildings has served in disciplining patrons into silent reading subjects. I argue that, in light of evolving, subjective definitions of and responses to noise, changing philosophies of librarianship and library design and the proliferation of media formats and the sounds they emit, we need to consider new ways of thinking about sound in the library, not as something to be eliminated or controlled, but as something to be orchestrated, and even designed for. In order to do so, I propose that we consider first what sounds people, buildings and media make, and then use architectural design to promote their cooperative interaction.

A History of Location of U.S. Public Libraries Within Community Place and Space: Evolving Implications for the Library's Mission of Equitable Service

ABSTRACT This article reviews the spatial development of the American public library. The article describes and illuminates the effectiveness and simplicity of past siting and location criteria, compared with the need for more sophisticated methodology in the complex present-day environment in which the majority of public libraries now reside. This article lays the groundwork for the implications of continuing traditional, simplistic, and haphazard site selection methods that worked in the past, which now demand critical re-evaluation. The article provides a summary of past and present trends in public library facility location, the profession's attitudes and opinions regarding the physical location of facilities and official standards historically and presently available to guide location decisions. The descriptive literature is reviewed in a chronological manner to offer insight into how some views remained and some changed over time. Although the review is not exhaustive, the material is representative of criteria espoused and practiced over the past 100 years or so.

Marketing Practices Used by the Emerging American Public Library System from Inception to 1930

This study explores the marketing practices used by the emerging American public library system from its inception in 1876 to 1930. This period fits the Era of Institutional Development, when most modern marketing practices were believed to have appeared. The results show that libraries adopted contemporary business practices and developed marketing strategies to identify and target specific market segments through the development of unique products. This can be seen as an example of the “complex flux” model, in which change in marketing practice is linked to past phenomena. Libraries developed complex marketing and promotional strategies using a mix of media to reach their targeted market segments.

The Rich Potential of American Public School Library History: Research Needs and Opportunities for Historians of Education and Librarianship

Although the American public school library is one of this nation's most ubiquitous educational institutions, we know very little about its history. For the past century public school libraries have provided service to tens of thousands of schoolteachers and administrators and millions of K-12 users of both sexes and of all creeds, races, ethnicities, and classes. In recent years students annually averaged 1.5 billion visits to school libraries, about one and a half times the number of visits to state and national parks. On those visits they checked out and read billions of books, listened to millions of stories, accessed thousands of computerized databases, and constructed millions of reports and pa- pers on hundreds of thousands of topics that they later submitted for academic evaluation. 1 Public school libraries are everywhere American public schools exist. Statistics demonstrate conclusively that they have been used by most Americans sometime in their lives. But to what ends? For what pur- poses? As of this writing no comprehensive book-length history of the institution is available to help identify the multiple roles it has played in elementary and secondary education over the generations. Nor is there an adequate scholarly body of historical literature available to

HELPING YOUTH AT RISK: AN OVERVIEW OF REFORMIST MOVEMENTS IN AMERICAN PUBLIC LIBRARY SERVICES TO YOUTH

One of the hallmarks of the American public library is its service to youth. In fulfilling this mandate, it has often been involved in social reform movements. This was true in the past and it continues today. From the late nineteenth century until the beginning of World War I, the American public library was very much involved in progressive social reform issues of those periods. In those times, librarians tended to define their social reformist role as that of improving culture, in raising standards of literacy, and in fostering the love of reading and good books. On a larger scale these movements, of which the American public library was a part, had both social and political motives in the perceived need to control and contain certain labour and social movements that were viewed as harmful to American social order. Much of the energy for these feared social dislocations was believed to come from the growing American working class in urban areas and its association with the rise of organised American labour and the arrival of European immigrants with non-American socialistic agendas. In concert with other social reform groups, the American public library directed much of its attention to improving the lot of the working-class poor youth (both native and foreign-born) by improving culture and literacy and in helping working-class youth become good Americans. Providing good literature and good books for working-class youth was a mainstay of the public library's reform activities. Understanding this to be a primary social responsibility, librarians easily condemned as harmful to youth certain types of literature and other forms of mass entertainment often enjoyed by both working-class and middle-class youth while at the same time supporting only literature judged by them to be of higher cultural value. Although this aspect of reform has been replaced by more enlightened understanding of the role of the librarian in society, modern-day librarians have much in common with their earlier counterparts as they still seek to improve the lives of at-risk youth. This paper highlights this commonality, and emphasises the role that community and new concepts of community development play in current-day American reform movements.

黒人への公立図書館サービスの転機 : 『公立図書館へのアクセス』(1963年)の意義(2)

黒人への公立図書館サービスの転機 : 『公立図書館へのアクセス』(1963年)の意義(2)

The American public library and its fragile future

PurposeTo argue that the future of the US public library depends on a commitment to the library as a place within the public sphere for the intellectual development of a community primarily through books and reading, where service to the public is framed by professional librarians.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses supportive literature from within and outside librarianship to provide an alternative perspective to Michael Sullivan's Public Libraries' article of 2003, which argues that the future of the public library is fragile because of its inflexibility before the pressures of the internet, failing public commitment, and a potential shortage of librarians.FindingsPublic libraries continue to be identified as places for reading and books. Despite the public's embrace of the internet for ready reference, there are still questions best answered through print reference materials and professional assistance. Through active collection development, libraries remain places of heterogeneity and serendipitous discovery. The fragility of the public library is attributable to the incursion of a market‐capitalist model of service into an institution of the public sphere. Deprofessionalization threatens to lose a corps of professionals committed to values of civil liberties and community.Originality/valueThis paper suggests that the future of the public library depends on its commitment to being a place for books and reading, as an alternative to a model of service based on the Internet, the bookstore, and a paraprofessional staff. The paper should be of use to those who provide, design, manage, and teach models of service in the public library.

黒人への公立図書館サービスの転機 : 『公立図書館へのアクセス』(1963年)の意義(1)

黒人への公立図書館サービスの転機 : 『公立図書館へのアクセス』(1963年)の意義(1)

Still Struggling for Equality: American Public Library Services with Minorities (review)

Still Struggling for Equality: American Public Library Services with Minorities (review)