Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Looking Back: Put A Reading Bathtub In The Library, Reinette F. Jones

Library Faculty and Staff Publications

Book lovers may remember when old school librarians warned children not to read library books while in the bathtub. Today those memories are in juxtaposition with the new National Read in the Bathtub Day on February 9th. The unanswered question is when exactly this special day became a thing. While the reference librarians search for a definitive answer, there is a companion question. Who came up with the fun idea to place a reading bathtub in the children’s library? A reading bathtub is just that, a bathtub in the public area of the library, an upholstered piece of library furniture …

Book Review: Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story Of Libraries For African Americans In The South By Mike Selby, Claire Kelley

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Towards A Critical Turn In Library Ux, Alison Hicks, Karen P. Nicholson, Maura Seale

FIMS Publications

In the past decade, cataloguing and classification and information literacy have experienced a critical turn, acknowledging the political, economic, and social forces that shape complex information environments. Library user experience (UX) has yet to undergo such a transformation, however; instead, it continues to be seen as a toolkit of value-neutral approaches for evaluating and improving library services and spaces to enhance user satisfaction and engagement. Library UX draws upon ethnography but is also informed by the principles and values of usability and design. Little attention has been paid to the origins or epistemological underpinnings of UX as a construct, the …

The History And Current Challenges Of Libraries In Japan, Francis A. Alix

SLIS Connecting

Japan's libraries have many positive attributes and continue to evolve. However, many library sectors struggle with serving users because of staff outsourcing, library leadership, and a focus on circulation statistics that prevent them from developing into 21st-century information and community centers. This paper reviews the history and current status of each library sector, including their services and staffing. It then examines their current challenges and how professionalism, librarian education, and community engagement are the main challenges to their success and suggests recommendations to elevate them to compete in the global arena.

The Heart Of Academia: Medieval Universities, Textbooks, And The Birth Of Academic Libraries, Christopher Proctor

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The contemporary academic library occupies a crucial role in the teaching and learning mission of universities. This centrality is perhaps best exemplified by the popular saying that the library is the heart of the university. But has this always been the case since the inception of universities in the High Middle Ages? To help answer this question, the following discussion traces the creation of universities within the medieval world, the textual traditions that informed their scholarship and pedagogy, and the later birth of academic libraries within the college and university system. The author attempts to demonstrate that the rise of …

What’S Mine Is Yours: The History Of U.S. Tool-Lending Libraries, Samantha Hamilton

School of Information Student Research Journal

Tool lending is a relatively new phenomenon in the world of libraries. Instead of loaning books, libraries with tool collections lend kitchen and yard tools to ambitious do-it-yourselfers. These tools can be used to tackle home projects or do seasonal cleanup without burdening borrowers with concerns about cost or storage. As these libraries gain popularity and begin to expand in the U.S., it is worth taking a look at their origins. As it is presented in the current literature, tool libraries began in 1979 with the founding of the Berkeley Tool-Lending Library (BTLL). Information unearthed from newspaper clippings, blog posts, …

A Study Of Public Libraries In India: Post-Independence Period, K Kandhasamy, R. K. Bhatt

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

In a democratic country like India, free access to information without any form of discrimination is very essential to establish an equitable society. India, with a low literacy rate it is crucial to use public libraries as a tool to improve the quality of both formal and informal education and thereby improve the overall literacy. This paper is an attempt to trace the history of growth and development of public libraries in India through an account of all the conditions and circumstances - social, economic, and political that existed during post-independent. The paper examines the role of the government as …

Science Librarianship In Colonial Philippines: Mary Polk And The Philippine Bureau Of Science Library, 1903-1924, Bradley Brazzeal

University Libraries Publications and Scholarship

The Spanish-American War of 1898 ushered in decades of American rule in the Philippines. American colonial administrators established a bureaucracy that included the Bureau of Government Laboratories, later known as the Bureau of Science, which would serve as a central laboratory and also conduct research in the biological sciences, chemical sciences, ethnology, and more. A crucial component of the work of the Bureau was its library, which was headed from 1903 to 1924 by Mary Polk. This article is a study of Polk, the environment in which she worked, and her lasting impact on Philippine librarianship.

The Public Library As Past Become Space, Greg Nightingale

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

I use Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism in The Arcades Project to critique contemporary notions related to the understanding of the public library as a place. My critical theoretical approach, grounded in historical research and Benjamin’s theories of modernity, highlights contemporary aspects of the public library and broadens and deepens our understanding of the library’s physical role, both within and outside its walls. My research is based on the concurrent yet divergent social and cultural development of modern public libraries and Benjamin’s symbolic shopping arcades. Like Benjamin with the arcade, I believe that the public library contains innovative potentiality, in its …

50 And Forward: Sandor Teszler Library Since 1969, Phillip Stone, Luke Meagher, Melissa Clapp

Library Exhibits

Wofford's Sandor Teszler Library, opened in 1969, celebrated its 50th anniversary in August 2019, and this exhibit features the growth and development of the library over the past half century.

Remembering A Visit To The World’S Oldest Carnegie Library, Matthew R. Griffis

SLIS Connecting

Remembering a British Studies class visit to the first Carnegie Library in Dunfermline, Scotland, one of over 2,800 Carnegie libraries worldwide at the turn of the last century. In their day, Carnegie libraries were more than just charming buildings; they fueled a growing enthusiasm among the masses for the existence of free, tax-supported public libraries intended to enrich their parent communities—especially those for which no comparable institution had existed before.

Urban Information Specialists And Interpreters: An Emerging Radical Vision Of Reference For The People, 1967–1973, Haruko Yamauchi

Publications and Research

In the post-War on Poverty years, certain quarters of the U.S. library profession expressed a growing desire to enable librarians to beome more relevant and responsive to low-income, primarily African American, urban communities. This article traces how ideas and trends shifted within library discourse over roughly a decade starting in the mid-1960s, and offers an overview of the urban librarian training programs that emerged in the early 1970s. The latter half of the article, based on archives of internal and external correspondence, funder reports, and other primary documents, examines in greater detail the case of three related projects that were …

Sharing Resources Amid Technological Scarcity: A Sketch Of Historical And Current Resource-Sharing Practices In Cuba, Maureen Garvey, Christine Mcevilly

Publications and Research

Little has been published on the subject of resource sharing in Cuba, particularly in English. This article outlines the history of resource sharing in Cuban and US libraries, reviews the literature by Cuban LIS professionals on resource sharing in Cuba, and details the current resource-sharing practices at three large national Cuban libraries. Finally, there is a discussion of the technological environment in Cuba and how it influences the sharing of, and access to, information. Despite a long history of technological scarcity, the pace of change in Cuba is fast, and Cubans are quickly moving towards dialogue with the international digital …

The Early History Of The Mill Valley Public Library, Rebecca Karberg

Rebecca Karberg

To Honor Our Past: Historical Research, Library History And The Historiographical Imperative: Conceptual Reflections And Exploratory Observations, Jean-Pierre V. M. Hérubel

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

This exploratory discussion considers history of libraries, in its broadest context; moreover, it frames the entire enterprise of pursuing history as it relates to LIS in the context of doing history and of doing history vis-à-vis LIS. Is it valuable intellectually for LIS professionals to consider their own history, writing historically oriented research, and what is the nature of this research within the professionalization of LIS itself as both practice and discipline? Necessarily conceptual and offering theoretical insight, this discussion perforce tenders the idea that historiographical innovations and other disciplinary approaches and perspectives can invigorate library history beyond its current …

A Case Study Of The Progressive Era Librarian Edith Guerrier: The Public Library, Social Reform, 'New Women', And Urban Immigrant Girls, Margaret Bausman

Publications and Research

This paper investigates the intertwined evolution of librarianship and social welfare work during the Progressive Era (1900–1920) via a case study of the librarian Edith Guerrier (1870–1958). From 1898 through 1917, Guerrier worked in the immigrant community of Boston’s North End. She established a programme of girls’ reading groups that provided access to core elements of a progressive liberal arts education. The most notable of these was the Saturday Evening Girls (SEG). Concurrently, Guerrier established the Paul Revere Pottery, a retail art pottery studio run by the young women of the SEG. Using Guerrier’s varied career as a starting point, …

York's Founding Librarian Made H[Er]Story: Remembering Gladys Jarrett, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Gladys Jarrett was the first Library faculty member hired at York College, and was one of the original three librarians when the college opened. Her career at York spanned 1967-1985, and she was very likely the first African-American woman to be a Chief Librarian in the City University of New York system.

Librarians As Wikipedians: From Library History To “Librarianship And Human Rights”, Kathleen De La Peña Mccook

School of Information Faculty Publications

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia built collaboratively using wiki software, is the most visited reference site on the web. Only 270 librarians identify as Wikipedians of 21,431,799 Wikipedians with named accounts. This needs to change. Understanding Wikipedia is essential to teaching information literacy and editing Wikipedia is essential to foster successful information-seeking behavior. Librarians who become skilled Wikipedians will maintain the centrality of librarianship to knowledge management in the 21st century—especially through active participation in crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is the online participation model that makes use of the collective intelligence of online communities for specific purposes in this case creating and editing …

A Room Of Her Own: The Woman's Library, A Footnote To New York City Library History, Sandra Roff

Publications and Research

The revolutionary idea of a library for working women in New York City can be traced to 1830, but it remained dormant for twenty-eight years until a group of prominent New Yorkers revived the cause. In 1858 an address by Henry Ward Beecher and other influential citizens reviewed the benefits of such a library, and after two years of planning the women's library became a reality. New York City was unique in providing a library just for women; however, financial support dwindled, and it was forced to be taken over by the Women's Protective Union by 1870.

Looking Back: Librarian Describes Louisville Free Public Library Flood Damage In 1937, Jonathan Jeffrey

SCL Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Maine Library History, Melora Norman

Maine Policy Review

From the earliest small private and university libraries of the 1700s to today’s high-speed Internet-connected institutions, the history of Maine’s libraries mirrors the development of the state and provides a sense of the concerns people had for access to information and education. Melora Norman describes the development of various kinds of libraries in Maine and the opportunities and challenges they have faced over time. She notes that the 20th century was a time of increasing professionalization and standardization in Maine’s libraries. During the late 1990s through the present, libraries have been changing dramatically as they shift from a focus on …

Prudence And Controversy: The New York Public Library Responds To Post-War Anticommunist Pressures, Stephen Francoeur

Publications and Research

As the New York Public Library entered the post-war era in the late 1940s, its operations fell under the zealous scrutiny of self-styled ‘redhunters’ intent upon rooting out library materials and staffers deemed un-American and politically subversive. The high point of attacks upon the New York Public Library came during the years 1947-1954, a period that witnessed the Soviet atomic bomb, the Berlin airlift, and the Korean War. This article charts the narrow and carefully wrought trail blazed by the library’s leadership during that period. Through a reading of materials in the library archives, we see how political pressures were …

When First We Met: Conferences, Officers, And Activities Of Lsla And Lla, 1909-1932, Florence M. Jumonville Ph.D.

Library Faculty Publications

Newly available sources shed new light on the early years of the Louisiana Library Association and its predecessor organization, the Louisiana State Library Association. They highlight the instrumental role of clubwomen in the establishment of libraries and the evolution of library professional associations and conferences while chronicling the history of the Louisiana library organizations.

'Formerly The Property Of A Lawyer’: Books That Shaped Louisiana Law, Florence M. Jumonville Ph.D.

Library Faculty Publications

Books are indispensable to lawyers and judges, containing as they do the official record of the laws that define rights, liberties, and behavior, as well as the accumulated wisdom with which those laws have been interpreted. Law books were particularly important during the formative years of the American nation, from its founding until the Civil War, as the young federal government and each state developed its unique legal literature. This study focuses on the sources that shaped Louisiana law by examining collections that were developed during approximately the first fifty years after the Louisiana Purchase by six New Orleans attorneys, …

Old Dominion University Library: History, Jean A. Major

Libraries Faculty & Staff Publications

A history of the library at Old Dominion University, written by Jean A. Major, University Librarian 1992-2002.

Old Dominion University Library: History, Jean A. Major

University History Bookshelf

A history of the library at Old Dominion University, written by Jean A. Major, University Librarian 1992-2002.

Gays And Lesbians In Library History, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

Summarizes gay and lesbian activism in librarianship and the role of libraries in supporting gay and lesbian movements.

Libraries In Australia, Norman Lynravn

Information Management

When every community has its professionally-administered, free public library, when the resources of such libraries can be made available to even the most isolated of our citizens, when library services are so coordinated that they can readily provide anybody with any information he seeks, can lend him freely the literature he needs, whether he is adult or child, when the library is recognised and accepted as an indispensable and integral part of our lives, then the goal will be getting near. The story which follows is an interpretation of the progress that is being made towards these ends. Being an …

Libraries Past And Present, Lillian Mabelle George

Student and Lippitt Prize essays

This essay reviews the history of libraries, beginning with Ancient Egypt and Greece, and goes on to explore the changes that have occurred since over time, ending with nineteenth century libraries and librarians.