Free Library Research Articles

The Library and Material Texts

For the last three years, roger chartier and i have taught an undergraduate seminar called the history of print Culture in Early Modern Europe and America. Although the content of the course has changed, one feature has been persistent: at least half our classes met in the rare-book libraries of Philadelphia. While we have often held the seminar in Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania, we have also gone to the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Free Library, and the Rosenbach Museum and Library. This would not have been possible without the extraordinary openness and generosity of the Philadelphia libraries and librarians. But the work of those librarians has not only provided an infrastructure for the course; it has also reshaped what we've worked on and how we teach it.

The Library and Material Texts

For the last three years, roger chartier and i have taught an undergraduate seminar called the history of print Culture in Early Modern Europe and America. Although the content of the course has changed, one feature has been persistent: at least half our classes met in the rare-book libraries of Philadelphia. While we have often held the seminar in Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania, we have also gone to the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Free Library, and the Rosenbach Museum and Library. This would not have been possible without the extraordinary openness and generosity of the Philadelphia libraries and librarians. But the work of those librarians has not only provided an infrastructure for the course; it has also reshaped what we've worked on and how we teach it.

A Narrative History of Resource Sharing in the State of Maryland

ABSTRACT The evolution of statewide resource sharing and reciprocal borrowing for Maryland public libraries is discussed. Beginning in the 1950s, the Enoch Pratt Free Library assumed responsibility for filling interlibrary loan requests for the state due to the size of its collection. In 1971, Pratt became the State Library Resource Center and its interlibrary loan responsibilities became formalized. Through a series of technological advancements in library catalogs and interlibrary loan systems, Maryland has arrived at the MARINA system to facilitate sharing resources throughout the state. The state has a long-standing philosophy of cooperation, which makes the MARINA endeavor possible.

'Don't Have a Library Rate Thrust Upon You': The Libraries Acts Debate in Whitby, 1878

This paper examines the doomed attempt to adopt the Libraries Acts in Whitby in I878. Comparatively few detailed accounts of the actual debates through which the ratepayers of Victorian Britain decided whether to adopt the Acts have been published. Whitby's stormy free library debate cut across religious and political affiliations. The deciding factor in the town's decision to reject the adoption of the Acts appears to have been class. Whitby's shrinking and almost exclusively male elite were predominantly in favour of adoption, whereas the majority of Whitby's broader middle classes (including most women) and its working-class ratepayers remained unconvinced. The free library supporters were more organized, comparatively more eloquent and generally more principled. Nevertheless, they were defeated largely over the single issue of the cost of providing something mainly perceived by Whitby's ratepayers as an unnecessary luxury. By examining the people involved, and looking at what they said and did in some detail, this paper on the Libraries Acts debate in Whitby uncovers how a fundamental educational and cultural battle was fought out in the past. It shows how different people in a declining British industrial town saw themselves, and outlines the different things they considered to be important in their society. The debate demonstrates graphically that in a climate of economic and industrial decline, arguments in favour of free public provision of services for the whole community can be decisively rejected by the public.

Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens' World , and: Mark Twain and Medicine: "Any Mummery Will Cure" (review)

Reviewed by: Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens' World, and: Mark Twain and Medicine: "Any Mummery Will Cure" Lucy Rollin (bio) Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens' World. By Terrell Dempsey. Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, 2003Mark Twain and his Circle Series, Tom Quirk, Editor Mark Twain and Medicine: "Any Mummery Will Cure". By K. Patrick Ober. Columbia and London: U of Missouri P2003. Mark Twain and his Circle Series, Tom Quirk, Editor When professionals outside our field of literary studies make major contributions to it, we need to sit up and take notice. These two books are fine examples of what an approach from a different discipline can accomplish, each a perfect match of subject and scholar. Terrell Dempsey, an attorney in Hannibal, Missouri, calls himself "an accidental historian." He certainly need not be deprecating about it. He has produced a thorough, passionate, highly readable work that must change the perspective of every Twain scholar and fan. His research began with his own child. As Hannibal's Tom-and-Becky look-alike contest gained its annual fever, his daugliter's discomfort touched him. She is not white. She could not possibly be considered for the honor of being "Becky" for the coming year. Dempsey, too, became uneasy. He began to look around and make connections. He re-read Adventures of [End Page 136] Huckleberry Finn. He read Fishkin's Lighting Out for the Territory and an antique book, which he found by accident, called A Bible Defence of Slavery. He went to the Hannibal Free Library where, at last, in the Missouri Room, he found the mother lode: a microfilm collection of Hannibal newspapers going back to the 1840s, including those for which Sam Clemens worked as a printer's apprentice. There, in black and white, were advertisements for buying and selling slaves, stories of runaways and their punishment, countless racist jokes and anecdotes, reprints of speeches denouncing abolitionists, sermons defending slavery. This was the atmosphere in which Sam Clemens lived from 1839 to 1853, from age four to age eighteen—the most formative years of his life. Using his legal expertise to review the laws of the State of Missouri during the 1800s as well as census and statistical documents, and reprinting much of the newspaper material, Dempsey reproduces that atmosphere as closely as possible in a scholarly book. He traces the slaves in Clemens' own family, the growth of the abolition movement, the support of slavery from the various pulpits in Hannibal, the escalating tensions between Missouri and Illinois as slaves began escaping across the river, the buying and selling of slaves in Hannibal itself (he notes that a great deal of trading and lending were done without record), and the coming of the railroad—which soon cut Hannibal off from the steamboat-driven prosperity it had briefly enjoyed. He recounts major trials and crimes, as well as "minor" incidents such as a white woman flinging a pot of hot preserves into her slave's face for some impudence, then beating the woman while she screamed. The casual inhumanity with which slaves were treated in everyday life streams past the reader, detail after detail, like the muddy Mississippi. That Twain eventually repudiated slavery, made financial reparations in the form of tuition for black college students, and most important, created the character of Jim, is all the more remarkable considering the atmosphere of Hannibal in the mid-1800s and Twain's immersion in it. One element in Dempsey's history may be of particular interest: the abundance of "darky" jokes and anecdotes in dialect which filled the newspapers of the day. Twain would most certainly have typeset a great many such stories, containing sentences like this: "It's because I wants de lucerdations ob your obserbations and 'sperience on a subjec dat's lost in the mazes ob doubt and deplexity to me" (290). Twain has become famous for his mastery of this and other dialects; Dempsey's book suggests that such mastery came early, thanks to his skill as a typesetter within the context of the slave-holding culture of Hannibal. K. Patrick Ober is a physician and teacher in the medical...

The Cover

The Cover Mary W. LoLordo Click for larger view View full resolution Bookplate. Bookplate courtesy of the Halifax Regional Library Board. This pale yellow bookplate, 8.5 by 11.75 cm, is printed with the words "Presented to the Halifax Memorial Library by the North British Society of Halifax as a Centenary Memorial to Robert Louis Stevenson" and with a black line drawing of Edinburgh Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, the birthplace of Stevenson (1850-94). It can be found in many of the books about Scotland belonging to the Halifax Public Libraries in Halifax, Nova Scotia. These books are the initial part of a gift given to the library in 1952. The drawing on the bookplate is signed by R. L. deC. H. Saunders (1908-95), a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax from 1937 [End Page 313] to 1973. He was not a member of the North British Society, the organization that donated these books to the library, but he was a Scot, born to Scottish parents in South Africa. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, so he would have known the castle well, and he came to Dalhousie as a professor of anatomy. According to Peter B. Waite in The Lives of Dalhousie (McGill, 1994), he fascinated medical students with his anatomical drawings, which he did on the blackboard with multicolored chalk, using both hands at once. Dr. Saunders also designed the university's coat of arms and the mace used in university ceremonies. There had been a public library in Halifax for many years before this gift was given. The first libraries in the city, though, were private organizations. D. C. Harvey, in Early Libraries of Nova Scotia (Dalhousie Review, 1934), discusses the development of these libraries. For-profit lending libraries that circulated the popular novels of the day were among the first libraries. Private libraries designed to serve specific groups soon followed. These included the Garrison Library, begun in 1817 for military officers, the Central Board of Agriculture Library, established in 1818, and several church congregational libraries. In 1824 the Halifax Library was established by the elite of local society. It was limited to 125 members, who paid an annual shareholder fee to fund the library. Samuel Cunard (1787-1865), the shipping magnate who began his career in Halifax, was a member of the Halifax Library. This library was eventually forced to close because its funds became too limited to allow the library to continue. The first opportunity for the general public to access books came in 1831, when the Halifax Mechanics' Library was formed. This library was open to anyone who could afford the twenty-shilling annual fee, and eventually it contained three thousand volumes. Not everyone in the city could afford to use this library, but it was accessible to citizens of the middle and business classes. However, this library existed for only thirty years before falling into debt and closing. Chief Justice Sir William Young (1799-1887), a shareholder in the Halifax Library, purchased both its collection and that of the Mechanics' Library and gave them to the city to operate as a free institution. A few years later Sir William also donated the one-thousand-book collection of his late brother, George R. Young (1802-53), to this library. This first free public library, the Citizens' Free Library, began its life in a small room in the old city courthouse. Here all the people of Halifax had access to the collection for no charge. By 1873 the library had outgrown its original home and begun its long search for a permanent home and stable funding. When Sir William died in 1887, he left the city four thousand dollars to be used within four years for the erection of a new library [End Page 314] building, but the conditions of the bequest were not fulfilled, and the money was returned to the estate. In 1890, after two unsuccessful attempts to find a permanent location, the library moved to a room in city hall. There it was hoped that the city's aldermen would come into contact with the library more often and become aware of its need for support. However, during...

A Free Library for Everyone: The History of the Grand Rapids Public Library

A Free Library for Everyone: The History of the Grand Rapids Public Library

Library Profile: William H. Hall Free Library

Library Profile: William H. Hall Free Library

CG3TOOL: an interactive computer program to process Scintrex CG-3/3M gravity data for high-resolution applications

A newly developed interactive computer program, CG3TOOL, has been dedicated to the processing of the gravity data acquired by the Scintrex CG-3/3M automated gravity meter. The aim of CG3TOOL is two fold: to allow for an objective evaluation of Scintrex data and to provide a higher resolution in data reductions than those computed in real time by the microprocessor-controlled instrument. The program reads the gravity data acquired in either field or cycle mode (field surveys and continuous recordings, respectively) and then downloaded from the meter to a PC computer. The processing tasks are divided into two successive levels. Level 1 is dedicated to the reduction of the daily data files by applying standard or accurate corrections (earth tide, instrumental drift, atmospheric pressure). The precise corrections are performed up to the microGal (μGal) level, in accordance with the specifications of high-resolution surveys. Level 2 contains a series of processing tools (including network adjustment, anomaly computation, and gravity meter calibration) that will precisely compute and adjust the gravity values with error estimates. The interactive procedures and the program output (plot and text files) have been designed to ease data handling and archiving as well as to provide useful information for future purposes of data interpretation or modeling. CG3TOOL was developed in a standard C language for Unix Sun workstations and uses the standard graphical and mathematical Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) free library, available from the web. The objectives and principles of the computer program are presented below along with corresponding examples of the main processing tasks applied to observed data.

Revisiting C. H. Milam's What Libraries Learned from the War and Rediscovering the Library Faith

As 2003 unfolds and the world is again troubled with the immediate threat of multinational military conflicts, it is an appropriate time to remember the pioneering contributions made by librarians during a previous conflict, World War I. Although colleagues from this time are now gone, their accomplishments set standards for service that librarians still strive to emulate today. These accomplishments are chronicled in historical accounts of the period and in an obscure Library Leaflet series from the U.S. Bureau of Education.1 During the early 1920s the Bureau of Education issued a series of thirty-six pamphlets to provide educators with lists of references on various topics, including A List of References on Rural Life and Culture, A List of References on Educational Tests and Measurements, and A List of References on Playgrounds. Among these similar titles one stands out: Library Leaflet no. 14, What Libraries Learned from the War by C. H. Milam (1922).2 The pamphlet’s author, Carl H. Milam, is synonymous with the American Library Association (ALA) and the great twentiethcentury champions of public libraries.3 Reading his articulate pamphlet, we relive the wartime experiences of librarians and discover how these experiences influenced the development of library services in postwar America. Milam takes us back to a time when free universal library service was only a dream, total illiteracy rates hovered between 7.7 and 10 percent (for minorities the rate was as high as 44.5 percent), and the average educational attainment was no higher than the eighth grade.4 As Milam points out, World War I offered an opportunity for librarians and their supporters to demonstrate the valuable educational role libraries could play in American society both in war and in peace. Under the direction of Herbert Putnam (and later Milam himself),

Forbidden Fruit: The Banning of The Grapes of Wrath in the Kern County Free Library

The Kern County, California, board of supervisors' action to ban John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath from the Kern County Free Library shortly after the novel's publication in 1939 was controversial and unprecedented in the county's history, but so was the influx of migrant farmworkers into the county. At the height of the Great Depression, the county's population grew over 63 percent in five years. The board's action was influenced by powerful economic, social, and political factors. Caught between the ideological struggles of powers like the Associated Farmers and the unions and the seemingly contradictory policies of the American Library Association, librarian Gretchen Knief, with the advice of California State Librarian Mabel Gillis, complied with the board's order. While Knief protested in personal correspondence to the supervisors, publicly she remained silent, yet she defied the spirit of the order by making copies of the books available to other libraries in California - albeit briefly. Although the ban was lifted when the political climate in the county changed, it reflects the ambivalent attitudes about the Okies, illustrates the power of governing boards to censor public libraries, and underscores the precarious nature of intellectual freedom in libraries.

Gerald W. Johnson: from Southern liberal to national conscience

Fitzpatrick, Vincent. Gerald W. Johnson: From Southern Liberal to National Conscience. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. 310 pp. $39.95. Gerald Johnson belonged to the first generation of modern Southern journalists: men and women who viewed their region's problems as realists rather than as apologists and who looked outward on the American experience for answers. Unabashedly liberal and devoted to civil liberties, Johnson epitomized the courage and reformist nature of these writers, while writing long enough and well enough to transcend his regional identity to become an honored national figure. Like his mentor, H.L. Mencken, he thundered in all directions from his perch in Baltimore. But unlike the vituperative Sage, Johnson felt comfortable with the New Deal and defended it. He grew intellectually with his times and remained remarkably fresh as a thinker until the infirmities of old age silenced his prodigious writing. Scholars such as Fred Hobson and John T. Kneebone have helped modern readers appreciate Johnson's place within his generation. Now Vincent Fitzpatrick gives us the first full-length biography. As curator of the Mencken papers at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and a biographer as well of the Sage, Fitzpatrick presents Johnson as an independent thinker and iconoclast within his own right-indeed, he considers him an important figure within the adversary culture that challenged American smugness and complacency before and after World War II. Never one to ossify in his thinking nor pine for some mythical golden age, Johnson wrote long enough to oppose America's involvement in Vietnam and to lament the corruption that infested the presidency of Richard Nixon. His oppositionist views contrasted with his advocacy decades earlier for the New Deal, which he viewed as a proper and necessary expansion of government power. Johnson grew up in rural North Carolina within a well-educated and public-minded family. He flourished as a student of history and literature at Wake Forest College and served on the front after America's entry into World War I. His military experience in France contributed to his internationalist outlook as well as his commitment to Wilsonian idealism. Upon returning, he distinguished himself at the Greensboro Daily News, earning Mencken's praise for being the South's finest editorial writer. He assailed lynching, Fundamentalism, and similar evils associated with the benighted South, and he continued to pound away at his region's mobs and bigots after he accepted an editorial chair at the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1926. …

Lost and found: media sales

Does file-sharing of copyrighted material harm sales today? The movie, music and book trade associations say it does, but for each form of entertainment, a growing body of evidence suggests otherwise-and not all of the evidence is anecdotal. In a study of about 3,000 individuals, research firm Jupiter Media Metrix Inc. found that experienced file-sharers are more likely to actually increase the amount of money they spend on CDs. 34% said they spent more than before on music, twice as many as said they spent less (15%). One ongoing real-life experiment is the Baen Free Library. The novels in this Web-based collection are made available at no charge and in their entirety by science fiction publisher Baen Books. It seems that a free online copy can boost sales of movies, records and books.

"The Great Fiction Bore": Free Libraries and the Construction of a Reading Public in England, 1880-1914

The Public Libraries Act (England and Wales) was passed in 1850 at a time when democracy was being hotly debated but only one person in forty was eligible to vote, and compulsory elementary education for all was still twenty years in the future. This essay explores how the public library came to act as a legitimating body for the performance of class and gender through reading practices. It argues that the social and political history surrounding the library movement in England is crucial to an understanding of how, though founded on the Arnoldian principle of culture as social panacea, it had come by the First World War to function on the principle of cultural capital as social signifier.

GOP Lawmakers in Wisconsin Fail in an Effort to Kill the Free Library System

GOP Lawmakers in Wisconsin Fail in an Effort to Kill the Free Library System

A Commission Appointed to Inquire Into the Condition and Workings of Free Libraries of Various Towns in England (1869)

The story of the public library movement in Darlington, County Durham, revolves around Edward Pease (1834-1880), grandson of the railway pioneer of that name. Pease was a Quaker philanthropist who in 1869, at his own expense, commissioned Revs. William A. P. Johnman, a graduate of Edinburgh University, and Henry Kendall (1832-1900), a Congregationalist minister, to spend a week visiting public libraries, mostly in the north of England and the midlands. Their extremely subjective, and at times amusing, report on the condition of the institutions which entertained them is a fascinating account of public libraries at a crucial early period in their development. Their paper represents a rare and personal eye-witness account of a number of municipal libraries which had been in existence for less than twenty years, and some of them for less than ten. Their own findings are interspersed with the comments of librarians and users, and they end with a series of wise conclusions on the advantages of public libraries. (The report itself on their travels was drawn up by Johnman and the conclusions by Kendall.) Previously unpublished, the report deserves to be compared to the various official Returns on public libraries presented to Parliament. 1 Sadly, their travels were to no avail, at least in the short term. They presented their findings to a public meeting in Darlington on 19 October 1869, but a subsequent vote of ratepayers produced only defeat. Part of the reason seems to have been because there existed already a thriving private subscription library and a Mechanics' Institute. 2 After Pease's death the trustees of his estate offered to provide funds for a library building, if the Public Libraries Acts were adopted. Not surprisingly the Acts were hastily adopted, and the Edward Pease Free Library was opened in 1885.

The Free library of classics

The Free library of classics

Free Management Library

Free Management Library

Object Lessons: Material Culture on the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web abounds with online exhibits cre ated by museums, historical societies, scholars, antiques dealers, and collectors. Clearly, the study and display of material culture has moved into a new medium, presenting new challenges and raising new questions about the methodology of interpreting artifacts (1). Within these online exhibits, we experience three-dimensional objects in a two-dimensional envi ronment. What implications does this present for a historical method that is based upon on the three-dimensional artifact? With this question in mind, I ventured into teaching with technology for the first time with an undergraduate course in American material culture at Villanova University. In my course, I hoped that in addition to learning about artifacts as historical sources, my students would become critical consumers of material culture on the web as well as creators of their own material culture web pages. I hoped that they would recognize both the advantages and the limitations of material culture studies on the web. In keeping with the proliferation of web sites devoted to artifact-rich world's fairs, the Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876 became the focus of my course. The World Wide Web has become a platform for reimagining spectacles of the past. The potential of the Centennial Exhibition as a source for engaging students in the study of nineteenth-century culture was noted on the occasion of the Bicentennial by Thomas J. Schlereth, a professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame (2). The Centennial project at Villanova took its cue from Schlereth's writings and took advantage of the proxim ity of the exhibition site. The project also utilized sources from the exhibition, including its rich photographic record at the Free Library of Philadelphia. The course was divided into two parts (3). During the first half of the semester, we read books about material culture and applied the various methods of analysis that we encountered in these books by analyzing artifacts on our campus. We used computers in this part of the course as tools for introducing the historical periods addressed in the readings. Before starting each book, we met in the computer lab for an exploratory exercise using the historical resources of the Internet to orient the students to various historical periods. After spending the first half of the semester on methodology, we devoted the second half to the Centennial Exhibition, apply ing material culture methods and constructing a web site from the students' work. The students' research for the most part used traditional sources such as books and archival photographs; the web became the platform for presenting this research not only to their professor, but to the world. Each student in the class completed a small-scale research project on some material aspect of the exhibition?one country's exhibits, for example, or a particular building or artifact. The students turned these papers into individual web pages including text and, in most cases, images. These individual projects then served as source material for a second set of papers that strived to reach overall interpretations of the material culture of the Centennial. These analysis papers were conceived as introduc tory text for the web site and included links to various students' research projects, thereby serving as a gateway into the site (4). The key to this project was collaboration, in scholarship and in the construction of the web site. Collaborative web projects can communicate to our students the process of scholarship. They read what others have written, complete their own research to add to that

The Free library of classics

The Free library of classics