Nineteenth-century Library Research Articles

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Donna M. DeBlasio This issue of Ohio History brings both sad news and good news. This issue is dedicated to Stuart Stiffler, a respected scholar of nineteenth-century library history, and Owen V. Johnson, a professor who trained hundreds of students to be professional journalists around the world. Mr. Stiffler passed away on April 21, 2022. Professor Johnson passed away on August 6, 2022. Their articles in this issue are their last published works. On behalf of Ohio History and our editorial board and staff, I would like to extend our sympathies to Mr. Stiffler's and Mr. Johnson's family and friends. On a happier note, I am pleased to report that one of our authors, Dr. Perry Bush of Bluffton College, is the recipient of the Bowling Green State University Local History Publication Award for best article dealing with the history of northwest Ohio. Dr. Bush's prizewinning article, "'We Have Them Whipped Here:' Lynching and the Rule of Law in Lima, Ohio," appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of Ohio History, which can be accessed here: https://oaks.kent.edu/ohj/ohio-history-fall-2021. Congratulations from all of us at Ohio History to Dr. Bush on this honor. [End Page 8] Donna M. DeBlasio Youngstown State University Copyright © 2022 Ohio History

Classified by their classifications: nineteenth-century library classifications in context

ABSTRACT This paper investigates influences upon the development of library classification systems in nineteenth-century Britain. Two case studies – Edward Edwards's ‘scheme of classification for a town library’ of 1859 and the Bibliotheca Lindesiana of the earls of Crawford who made a number of significant contributions to the development of library classification over a fifty-year period – are deployed to explore how classification schemes reflected the habituses of their creators and how they were shaped by their socio-economic, epistemological and geographical contexts. The paper also investigates the discourse of classification, examining authors’ claims for the legitimacy, widespread applicability and superiority of their schemes, while revealing how these claims were compromised or modified by practical considerations. The case studies suggest that a modernizing narrative of a transition in the second half of the nineteenth century from an aristocratic, largely rural and amateur paradigm of knowledge formation to a bourgeois, urban and professional model requires significant modification: a more nuanced approach is required, which recognizes the permeability of geographic and social boundaries and the continued relevance of aristocratic libraries as key sites of knowledge formation until the end of the century.

De Bibliotheek van de Tweede Kamer

Abstract The library of the Dutch House of Representatives is a collection of thirty thousand books in the fields of constitutional law and Dutch politics. The collection is rooted in the nineteenth century and has seen the various stages of expansion and decline typical to a library of use. In recent years, the historical book collection has been brought together in a single location for the first time in its history. The books are placed in a four-stories high nineteenth century library that is known as the ‘Handelingenkamer’. Bringing the collection together in one place has created a visual reflection of two centuries of Dutch parliamentary history. This article explores the history of the collection as a whole, not only as a library for the support of the work of parliamentarians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also as a collection and library space that has representative value which can be employed for temporary exhibitions and educational purposes.

HathiTrust as a Data Source for Researching Early Nineteenth-Century Library Collections

An intriguing new opportunity for research into the nineteenth-century history of print culture, libraries, and local communities is performing full-text analyses on the corpus of books held by a specific library or group of libraries. Creating corpora using books that are known to have been owned by a given library at a given point in time is potentially feasible because digitized records of the books in several hundred nineteenth-century library collections are available in the form of scanned book catalogs: a book or pamphlet listing all of the books available in a particular library. However, there are two potential problems with using those book catalogs to create corpora. First, it is not clear whether most or all of the books that were in these collections have been digitized. Second, the prospect of identifying the digital representations of the books listed in the catalogs is daunting, given the diversity of cataloging practices at the time. This article will report on progress towards developing an automated method to match entries in early nineteenth-century book catalogs with digitized versions of those books, and will also provide estimates of the fractions of the library holdings that have been digitized and made available in the Google Books/HathiTrust corpus.

Recent Books

Common Heritage: Documents and Sources Relating to German-British Relations in the Archives and Collections of Windsor and Coburg. Vol. 2: The Photograph Collections and Private Libraries. Ed. by Franz Bosbach, John R. Davis, and Karina Urbach; comp. by Oliver Walton, based on preliminary work by Sonja Schultheiss-Heinz. (Prinz-Albert-Forschungen / Prince Albert Research Publications, 7/2.) Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. 2018. 799 pp. €161.90. isbn 978 3 428 15190 5 (hardback); 978 3 428 55190 3 (ebook). The first volume in this series was devoted to documents in the Royal Archives and at coburg concerning Anglo-German relations. This one takes us to the libraries and photograph collections—at coburg (home of Prince Albert) and several in Britain. The history of the British libraries has long been confused, beginning with the incorrect assumption that George IV gave all his father’s books to the nation. In fact, some remain at Windsor. Later on, Queen Victoria and the Prince consort, in their separate apartments, gathered their own, also separate, libraries. This project is concerned with Britain and Germany, and thus focuses only on those parts of the various nineteenth-century libraries having some relation to the matter, whether literature, politics, travel, or the fine arts. The result is naturally imbalanced, but it gives a good idea of the breadth of reading that was expected, anticipated, or perhaps accomplished. The Queen’s private library in 1843 emerges as distinctly modest in its German holdings, with fewer than 150 titles. Prince Albert’s, fruit of determination to accustom himself to his new country and language, and reflecting an extraordinary range of interests, was a distinct contrast: over 600 in the 1843 catalogue, and almost 4,000 in about i860. ‘About’ is an important word, for there are books in this list at least as late as 1880, long after Albert’s death. These libraries were mostly dispersed among the royal palaces in the twentieth century, and their virtual reassembly in this volume is the result of a great deal of teamwork. It is a reminder of the complications lying behind the easy phrase ‘the royal library’, where there are several and where, naturally enough, books moved round buildings, towns, and family relatives. The first part of the volume contains a catalogue of part of the immense photograph collection in England and coburg. Both Victoria and Albert were eager in the new medium: Albert’s first experience of being photographed was in 1842 when he sat (unsuccessfully) to a photographer who had recently established himself in Brighton. In albums, cartes de visite, studio portraits, and landscapes, some bought and some commissioned, they assembled a collection that deserves much wider study.

National Differences in Perceived Benefit of Libraries May Be Due to Their Investments in Libraries, Library Supply, and Cultural Factors

A Review of:
 Vakkari, P., Aabø, S., Audunson, R., Huysmans, F, Kwon, N., Oomes, M., & Sin, S. (2016). Patterns of perceived public library outcomes in five countries. Journal of Documentation, 72(2), 342–361. http://dx.doi:org/10.1108/JD-08-2015-0103
 
 Objective – To compare citizens' perceptions of the benefits of libraries in five culturally diverse countries.
 
 Design – Postal survey to a random stratified sample and web surveys (some with a sampling plan, some apparently not).
 
 Setting – Surveys were administered in Finland (by post), Norway, the Netherlands, the United States of America, and South Korea (online).
 
 Subjects – Selected or self-selected members of the general adult population in the specified countries who had used a public library within the past year.
 
 Methods – Surveys were administered and data were collected in each of the five countries. A dependent variable representing perceived outcomes was calculated from 19 outcome measures (related to life experiences). Within this, 4 indices were calculated from subsets of the 19 measures, relating to work, education, everyday activities, and leisure activities. Five independent variables were used: frequency of library use, number of services used, gender, age, and education level. Respondent country was also entered into analyses. Descriptive statistics and analysis of covariance results were presented.
 
 Main Results – It was noted that each country's sample was skewed in some way towards one or more of the variables of gender, age, and education, and some statistical corrections were employed. While patterns within countries are similar, library users from Finland, the United States of America, and South Korea reported higher levels of benefits overall. "Fun in reading" and "self-education" were the two outcomes with the highest scores by respondents. Higher numbers of visits and greater use of services may account for the higher perceived benefits in the three countries reporting them. In fact, these two factors appear to explain a substantial portion of the variance in perceptions of benefits between countries, meaning that between-country variation in library resources and supply plays a role in perception of benefit. There were varied rather than linear patterns of benefit reporting along age and education continua, with those at the lowest education levels deriving the most perceived benefits in all spheres. By gender, women derived fewer perceived benefits in the work sphere than men.
 
 Conclusions – There is variation across countries in the level of public library benefits reported, as well as variation across individual measures, creating different profiles of response by country. Even when respondent demographic characteristics and library usage are controlled for, country differences remain. These may be explained by the differences in investment in – and hence supply of – libraries by country, types of investment (e.g., according to the authors, Finland invests in services, Norway in collections, and the USA in staffing), and cultural factors such as the propensity of USA respondents to have a more extreme response style. Future research may profitably concentrate on policy contexts of libraries in each country. In the nineteenth century libraries provided social welfare services and in the twentieth they provided human rights through equitable access to information, so research should focus, by country, on what libraries will provide in the twenty-first century. Future studies might also address how differences in demographic patterns among respondents play out in benefit perceptions between countries.

Books for the Profession: The Library of the Supreme Court of Victoria (Book Review)

Melbourne’s three great nineteenth-century libraries — the Parliamentary Library, the Public Library (now the State Library) and the Supreme Court Library — were all creations of the 1850s. Together, they formed a group unique in Australia. The history of the Parliamentary Library has been studied in Patrick Gregory’s excellent Speaking Volumes. The centenary in 2013 of the domed reading room at the State Library is being celebrated in an exhibition and public lectures. Now the Supreme Court Library has a scholarly history written by library historian Sue Reynolds.

The library of the Royal Society of Physicians in Budapest becomes today's Semmelweis Medical History Library.

The 170-year history of the library of the Royal Society of Medicine in Budapest illustrates both that political and cultural context matter and that "medical" libraries, if they survive, in due course become primarily "medical history" libraries. Two of the authors are on the staff of the Semmelweis Medical History Library; the third is a US scholar who makes frequent use of the library. Together, they avail themselves of archival and published materials-and personal experience with the collection-to establish the context that produced the original library, trace its evolution, and describe its present-day incarnation. A tale of transformation emerges that reflects how collections are likely to change. The authors present events and individuals in the life of the Royal Society's library and paint a picture of the value of today's Semmelweis Medical History Library. Unique treasures in the collection are described. The story told here is of how a particular nineteenth-century library became a twenty-first-century institution. The authors establish its peculiarly Hungarian context and potential value to librarians and historians from outside Hungary. The overall message is that general medical libraries everywhere are perforce likely to become medical historical libraries over time.

Research Files: Oregon's Historic Sites Database: A Tool for Tapping the Research Potential of the Built Environment

RESEARCH FILES Oregon sHistoric Sites Database A ToolforTapping the ResearchPotential ofthe BuiltEnvironment byRogerRoper HISTORICAL RESEARCHERS are adept at gleaning facts from obscure places. They know the nuances and secretofferingsof thevarious archives, libraries, and repositories of public and private records. Yet they often overlook a key primary source: his toric structures themselves. What was built and how it was built often helps answer some of history's "whys."And sometimes there is physical evidence of how a structure has been used and adapted thatofferscompelling insight into the people and practices of the past. The following examples illustrate the point: VictorPoint School, Marion County: This 1889 one-room schoolhouse originally had fourwindows along each side of the building, but those on the south sidewere laterremoved. This actionwas in response to an educational expert's recommendation that cross-lighting was damaging to students' eyes. To compensate forthe loss of natural light, three more windows were thenadded to thenorth side.The building stillreflects thatpolicy change. Marshfield Sun Building, Coos Bay: The deeply worn floorboards where pub lisherand printer JesseLuse planted his foot to run the hand-operated press is testament to his commitment to pro ducing a newspaper for the community from 1891 to 1944. Roba Ranch House, near Paulina: Deco rative stone carvings on the exterior of this 1900house suggestold-world tradi tions brought to theAmerican West by theCzech immigrant family who estab lished the ranch and built thehouse. Crook County Courthouse, Prineville: This dignified courthouse, set back from the street in a park-like setting, commands our attention and respect ? both for the edifice itself and, not coincidently, for the county govern ment and its workings. Architects of the 462 OHQ vol. 110, no. 3 ? 2009 Oregon Historical Society Vi?c?or Powf School,pictured here in 1919,northofSublimity,was typicalofmany one-room schoolhouses of theperiod with a gable-end door and evenlyspaced windows along both sides. Windows on thesouth (right) elevationwere later removed,as seen in the inset photograph, toprotect students'eyesfrom the perceived harmful effects ofucross-lighting.y) period understood the importance of establishing, through settingand archi tecture, the proper tone forhow both occupants and visitors should conduct themselves on the premises. These buildings and stories may not be headliners in the same sense as more recognizable landmarks, such as the State Capitol, Vista House, or Union Station in Portland, but both landmarks and lesser-known struc tures provide important insights into Oregon's diverse history. Learning to read and interpretthem takes timeand training. Ithelps tremendously ifthere is a comprehensive and reliable set of records about all those structures. It helps even more if those records are computerized and can be queried in a variety ofways to respond to awide range of research questions. Oregon has such a record set in the State Historic Preservation Office's Historic Sites Database ? a one-stop source for answering a wide variety of research questions. Have you ever wondered, for example, which build ing inyour community is the oldest? How about the oldest in the state? Or maybe you have a more complex research question about historic struc tures inOregon, such as: How many grange halls are there, and which of them are listed in theNational Reg Roper,Oregon's Historic SitesDatabase 463 Courtesy ofOregon SHPO TheMarshfield Sun Building inCoos Bay isnow a museum featuring original printing equipment and relatedartifacts.Itsmost compellingfeature, however, may be the worn floor boardsfrom theoperator's shoesas he leveragedhisweight to engage the press ?for somefifty years. isterof Historie Places; are there any nineteenth-century library buildings still standing; which counties still have their historic courthouses; and what are thedates of construction and locations ofBeaux Arts stylebuildings, Queen Anne houses, Octagonal struc tures, buildings designed by Pietro Belluschi, and CCC-era fire lookout towers? The database has been created by theOregon State Historic Preserva tionOffice (SHPO) in recent years to better organize, track,and research the tens of thousands of historic building records in itsfiles.The federal govern ment and the state established SHPO in 1967, and ithas been coordinating the collection of information about the state's historic buildings and sites ever since. This information iscritical tohistoric preservationists and histo rians statewide. Maintaining amaster record set of all...

<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...

A nineteenth century library and its librarian: factotum, bookman or professional?

The recurring question of ‘what is a librarian?’ was of as much interest in the new Colony of Victoria in the nineteenth century as it is in the 21st century. From 1854 to 1864, during a protracted endeavour to convince the colonial government to include in its civil establishment, and thus pay for, a librarian for the Supreme Court Library, the designation ‘librarian’ was applied expediently to various people performing a variety of tasks in the Library, depending on the arguments being presented to the Government by the Library Committee, which included Sir Redmond Barry, or by the Government in response.

Twilight of the Gatekeepers: Crisis and Innovation in a Victorian Regional Library, 1867–1880

For nineteenth-century libraries, the compilation of catalogues and maintenance of access were difficult and time-consuming tasks. This article examines the factors that created the problems, and how one library dealt with, and eventually overcame those challenges. It traces shelf arrangement and cataloguing practices at the Sandhurst Mechanics Institute from 1867 to 1880, through examination of the remnants of its collection now held at the Bendigo campus library of La Trobe University and records of the Institute’s committee.

"The Utmost Amount of Effectiv [sic] Accommodation": Andrew Carnegie and the Reform of the American Library

The last years of the nineteenth century saw the widespread acceptance of the idea that library facilities should be made available to the American public free of charge. In the same years, the design of the free American library was at the center of a prolonged and heated debate: on one hand, the newly organized library profession called for designs that supported efficiency in library administration; on the other, the men of wealth who often underwrote library construction continued to favor buildings that reinforced the paternalistic metaphor that sustained their philanthropic activities. Between 1886 and 1917, Andrew Carnegie undertook a program of library giving that reformed both library philanthropy and library design, encouraging a closer correspondence between the two. Using the corporation as his model, Carnegie introduced many of the philanthropic practices of the modern foundation. At the same time, he rejected the rigid social and spatial hierarchy of the nineteenth-century library. In over 1,600 buildings that resulted directly from this program and in hundreds of others influenced by its forms, Carnegie helped create an American public library type that embraced the planning principles espoused by librarians while extending a warmer welcome to the reading public.