Libraries Research Paper

1. The ‘Modern’ Library—A Typology

Some European countries founded ‘national’ libraries as early as the seventeenth century, others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as preservers of their cultural heritage. During the nineteenth century, in North America and parts of Europe, an expanding public sphere included community-supported ‘public’ libraries. At the same time, colleges and universities multiplied, and ‘academic’ library collections garnered prestige. Primary and secondary schools also began to support the curriculum through library collections. Public and private organizations established ‘special’ libraries, as research institutes, religious foundations, and commercial corporations also sought to organize rapidly growing document collections.

1.1 National Libraries

A growing national consciousness encouraged the organization of state-funded libraries that acted as both depositories and sources of national Bibliography:. France’s Bibliotheque Nationale dates from the fourteenth century, but only in the late nineteenth century did a single published catalogue give unified access to its many collections. In 1841, Antonio Panizzi proposed a set of cataloguing rules for the British Museum Library (now the British Library). In the United States, the Library of Congress (founded in 1800), though not strictly a national library, assumed that role. Librarian Ainsworth Spofford (1864–1897) combined the functions of copyright registration and comprehensive collection of the United States’s intellectual product, while under Herbert Putnam (1899–1939) the Library developed shared cataloging and classification procedures and services that extended its influence—even hegemony—to libraries throughout North America, and from there to other countries worldwide.

1.2 Public Libraries

No single model describes public libraries worldwide. However, many countries have drawn upon British and American experience in establishing public library systems. In nineteenth-century North America and Britain, industrialization spurred the spread of public education. From around 1850, some private libraries began to acquire characteristics typical of public libraries: local tax support, board governance, and accessibility to all members of the community. However, universal literacy was seen by some as a threat, by others as a benefit fostering self-improvement. In the United States and Canada, for example, a faith in ‘wholesome’ literature for the ‘masses’ led Progressive Era women’s clubs to boost public libraries, as did philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s building program. Public libraries commonly provided free reading materials—and the space in which to read—to children, women, and men of all races and classes, but their collections lacked the diversity of their patrons.

Elsewhere, free public libraries were largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. In China from 1905 the work of American missionary Mary Elizabeth Wood inspired their growth. After 1917, the Russian Revolution spurred the development of public libraries in the USSR so that by 1941 one public library existed for every 2,000 people. In general, late twentieth-century public library services include supporting independent learning and research, maintaining collections of popular adult and children’s materials, answering reference questions, providing Internet access, and maintaining space for community activities. However, what—and what not—to collect remains a central issue.

1.3 Academic And School Libraries

As a research model of higher education replaced the classical college, and academic libraries became an essential curricular component, university collections grew dramatically. From mid-nineteenth century on, Harvard’s collection expanded from 154,000 volumes to over 12 million, Oxford’s Bodleian collection to over 5 million, and the University of Gottingen’s to over 3 million. In 1924, S. R. Ranganathan’s appointment as librarian at the University of Madras initiated an expansion of Indian academic libraries. By the mid-twentieth century, Moscow State University Library headed an extensive network of academic library collections, and by the mid-1960s, Beijing University’s collection held nearly 4 million volumes.

Some Western elementary and high schools also developed libraries in the late nineteenth century, many more following suit between the two world wars. After World War II, other countries, including newly independent Asian, African, and South American states followed suit. Typically, school librarians combine teaching with librarianship to provide materials in various formats and teach students library skills and information literacy.

1.4 Special Libraries

‘Special libraries’ refers to mission-oriented libraries that range from publicly-funded scientific and technical research libraries to private-sector corporate information centers. Some originated in preindustrial trade, legal, and religious organizations; others— especially those focusing on science, technology, and business—began during the nineteenth century. After World War II, the Cold War expansion of statefunded science and technology fueled a documentation movement that in turn encouraged the growth of corporate and research libraries. The recent rapid increase in digital information resources has prompted another surge in resources devoted to special, especially corporate, libraries.

2. Librarianship

As libraries grew in collection size, librarians’ activities diversified. No longer simply guardians of materials repositories, American and British public librarians sought to create methods of locating books in open stacks, and services that targeted new groups of ‘users’: children, immigrants, rural residents, and the urban poor. Collection management, reference, and cataloging became core components of a new profession: librarianship.

In the late twentieth century, digitization, computer miniaturization, and networking have simultaneously offered solutions and created problems for libraries. Librarians use electronic technology to enhance traditional functions and as new electronic services have proliferated, their reach has expanded far beyond the local institution or community. However, during fiscal stringency, resources assigned to electronic projects detract from those available for print collection, walkin reference, and youth services. The digital, virtual, or electronic library, sometimes called the library ‘without walls’ inevitably threatens the traditional library.

2.1 Skills And Techniques

In an expanding print universe, collection management involved selecting materials to build collections and controlling quality by ‘weeding’ unwanted materials. However, in a mixed print and digital era and with increasing commodification of information, collection managers face new issues. For example, as commercial publishers entered the scholarly journal publishing market, many serials’ prices soared—medical journals by over 90 percent in the 1990s. Another 1990s development—the American ‘commercial’ university—provides no library services, forcing students to purchase materials or borrow from publicly supported libraries. Materials sharing is, thus, an unequal partnership in which some institutions systematically absorb resources from others. The digital environment is also transforming reference (the personal assistance provided by librarians). Traditional walk-in reference, long augmented by telephone service, is now supplemented, and sometimes replaced, by email and web-based reference, thus reducing services to those without computers.

In the late nineteenth century, librarians developed tools for control of the new but vast array of printed publications. Subject classification and cataloging systems that owed much to contemporary developments in lexicography and the natural sciences helped solve administrative and epistemological problems of book, report, and record description and location. In 1876, the American Melvil Dewey published his Decimal Classification, while between 1904 and 1907, Belgians Henri LaFontaine and Paul Otlet produced the Universal Decimal Classification. Commercially published periodical indexes also appeared, but it was the mid-twentieth century increase in ‘documents’ (scientific and technical reports not amenable to traditional classification and cataloging) that prompted a major expansion of professional indexing. The second half of the twentieth century saw attempts to bring scientific, business, and technical ‘information’ under bibliographic control, including coordinate indexing and the computer analysis of natural language. Combined, issues of intellectual and physical access to documents formed the basis of a new field: information science.

In the 1960s, initiatives to automate information storage and retrieval had far-reaching consequences for libraries worldwide. In 1964, the American corporation Lockheed began making data produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) commercially available in searchable online databases through DIALOG; similarly, the National Library of Medicine’s Index Medicus was reborn as MEDLINE in 1971. Online databases multiplied during the 1970s as new vendors created an international market dominated by the United States. Librarians included online searching in their skills repertoire, and struggled to add online database access to an increasingly diverse roster of services.

Librarians were also developing their own electronic databases. American libraries have shared the costs of original cataloging since 1901, when the Library of Congress began to offer ready-cataloged cards for purchase. However, a dramatic increase occurred in the mid-1960s, when the Library of Congress developed the Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) format for creating, storing, and sharing bibliographic data in what has become an international standardized form. In 1967 a bibliographic utility, the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC), made MARC format available to its members, and in the 1970s, extended its shared cataloging services outside Ohio and to nonacademic libraries. Calling itself the Online Computing Library Center, OCLC later included fee-based public access not only to its catalog of worldwide library holdings but also to journal databases, thus rivaling older commercial database vendors.

As Internet access became widely and internationally available, spreading from universities and other research institutions to businesses and individuals, libraries were quick to make use of it. By setting up networked computers in public areas, they provided direct user access. They made databases of library materials available over the Internet and created gateways to indexes at other Web sites. Libraries also began to digitize documents and graphics materials and make these available over the Web. The Library of Congress began the National Digital Library Program, a cooperative venture with private corporations, to digitize part of its collection, emphasizing special collections of unique items in need of preservation. Conservation and preservation—whether by protection, repair, or copying—have long been core library activities. For much of the twentieth century, conservationists focused on paper deterioration resulting from over-bleaching and the use of acidic alum. One answer was to convert paper documents to microform. But while conversion to digital format can solve libraries’ twin problems of space and conservation, it raises new issues, especially the rapid obsolescence of hardware need to ‘read’ the digital materials.

2.2 Education And Values

For much of the twentieth century, analysis of libraries as cultural and social institutions saw libraries as neutral institutions that could improve people’s lives by providing reading materials and educational opportunity. Recently, more critical perspectives have spurred an analysis that highlights the relationship of print and power, and points to ways in which reading is channeled by a social infrastructure shaped, for example, by class and gender relations, as well as ways by which reading itself shaped those relationships.

In North America, librarianship was largely feminized by 1900. The Carnegie-funded Williamson Report (1923) lamented that this caused the profession’s low status, and prescribed two-tier staffing: mainly female clerks would perform routine filing and typing, managed by a predominantly male administrative cadre educated in specialized, graduate-level library schools. In 1926, the Carnegie Foundation also helped fund the University of Chicago’s Graduate Library School, stimulating librarians to adopt a research agenda strongly influenced by the empirical, positivist social sciences—‘library science.’ Library schools awarded doctoral degrees, mostly to men who in turn became library school faculty and large research library administrators, thus reinforcing the gender gap between library managers and clerks.

In the Anglophone West, Victorian values of utilitarian individualism and collective responsibility competed as sources of justification for libraries accessible to the public. Carnegie’s systematic support of public libraries in English-speaking countries helped perpetuate a myth of libraries as the foundation of the ‘self-made man.’ But others, including some North American women’s club members, argued for library access to print as essential to an informed citizenry— itself seen as the foundation of republican democracy, resulting in a continuing tension between individualist and collectivist legitimations. Other tensions revolved around collecting ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural items, definitions of ‘improving’ as opposed to ‘pernicious’ literature, and its concomitant—‘censorship’ vs. the ‘freedom to read.’ Moreover, special libraries constituted a new phenomenon: librarians who defined their mission in private, for-profit terms seen by some public-sector librarians as antithetical to their beliefs, thus fueling a new tension around the opposition of ‘public’ and ‘private.’

In the 1930s, while some librarians supported a value-free library science, others debated what was for many to become a defining professional value: intellectual freedom. Early in the twentieth century, the American Library Association (ALA) regularly black-listed controversial titles, while World War I librarians banned books by German authors, and books criticizing the war. However, during the 1920s and 1930s, mainstream public opinion turned against intrusive censorship. Exiles from Nazi Germany called for civil liberty; Chinese librarians appealed for American help against Japanese censorship. In 1939, ALA issued the Library Bill of Rights, a policy statement favoring intellectual freedom, that has endured as an expression of a core value in American librarianship. Late twentieth-century political and technological developments have raised new debates about intellectual freedom. In the former Soviet Union, libraries and reading rooms systematically discriminated among readers, making materials defined as anti-Soviet avail- able only in certain restricted locations and under restricted conditions. The end of the Cold War loosened many restrictions, and libraries began to make available the works of previously banned writers. At the same time, electronic transmission has made readily available materials previously controlled through the publishers’ and librarians’ cultural practices. Availability of sexually explicit material has prompted new calls for censorship in the guise of Internet filtering software. Thus, the late twentieth-century explosion in digital information renews questions among librarians of what to ‘collect,’ encouraging them to create new means of physical and epistemological access. Traditional professional skills and activities, like providing bibliographic control and user services are in increasing demand, albeit adapted to new technologies, as organizations of all types struggle to meet their changing information needs.

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