how should we tell librarians of the future about libraries of the past?

Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)

How Should We Tell Librarians of the Future about Libraries of the Past?Author(s): Haynes McMullenSource: Journal of Education for Librarianship, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Summer, 1965), pp. 65-68Published by: Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40321843 .

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How Should We Tell Librarians of the Future About Libraries of the Past?

HAYNES McMULLEN

THIS ARTICLE is about some ways of teaching a beginning course in the history of books and libraries. It will not be concerned with the place of such a course in the library school curriculum or with all the high purposes which such a course should have. That is, it will ignore the essentials and quickly get down to non-essentials.

First, there seem to me to be half a dozen kinds of balances to be considered in presenting the content of a course in the history of books and libraries. Some of these balances should be carefully maintained but others, I think, should be deliberately abandoned at some times - we need only be sure that the abandonment is planned.

First, the balance between the history of books and libraries on the one hand and more general history on the other. Perhaps we have the right to put very heavy emphasis on the book and library side, expecting the students to quickly acquire a little of the other if they do not already have it. But if we dwell on the beauties of fine books and the wonder of great libraries, we are in danger of making them seem too important. After all, outside events have affected libraries more often than libraries have affected outside events. (I can recall only one oc- casion on which the physical book made much of an impression on a person: in a college library, I once watched as a shelf full of bound Life magazines fell on a young and tender female student assistant.)

A second kind of balance is that between the time spent on books as opposed to libraries. A good rule here may be to have no concern about the course as a whole but to take it period by period; that is, when we are in ancient Egypt, to spend more time on papyrus rolls than on libraries, since the existence of true libraries is open to doubt, and to

McMullen is a Professor in the Indiana University Division of Library Science.

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spend more time on libraries in nineteenth century America when their forms and functions seem to have been proliferating at a greater rate than were those of books.

As we talk about books and their predecessors, we constantly have to think of another balance - that of the physical book as opposed to the ideational book. I would let the physical book overbalance the other for two reasons: (1) if we talk about the ideas in the books, we are virtually teaching a course in the history of ideas and (2) if we teach about the physical book, we are more likely to be teaching some- thing which the students have not had in some other course. Few of them come to us knowing when, where, and by whom good books have been constructed - or what is also of some importance, under what conditions the poorer books were produced.

A fourth kind of balance which I think is hard for teacher and student alike to maintain is the balance between the study of great individuals, standing out sharply on the one hand, as opposed to power- ful groups of people, lurking more vaguely on the other hand. The easiest and pleasantest way - and therefore the one I vote for - is to talk mainly about the most striking individuals. That is, to linger a little too long on Goethe, Leibnitz, and Casanova as librarians, to dwell a little too briefly on trends in seventeenth and eighteenth century European libraries. Perhaps we can make up in part for this lack of balance by trying hard to show in what way each bookman or librarian led forth or fought against groups made up of lesser men.

One of the most difficult kinds of balances to maintain is a three-way one involving the magnitude and sharpness of the time units in which we present our material. Should we emphasize sharply defined short units, that is, "events" such as the founding of the Boston Public Li- brary, or longer periods, such as the Renaissance, or still longer and cloudier concepts which make it necessary to deny the existence of the Renaissance as such but to think of it as a group of conditions and ideas which existed in various parts of Europe in various concentrations at various times? Perhaps all we can do is to make it clear that events, periods, and longer trends have always existed simultaneously.

A final kind of balance to be worked out by the teacher is the balance between a chronological progression through the semester or quarter as opposed to a topical progression. Conceivably, a course could be organized around the problems which have faced book makers or librarians for a few hundred years - problems of legibility or of protection of contents (that is, binding) in books, the problem of space for book

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storage vs. reader accommodations in libraries - or any of a score of others. And a chronological course could be taught in reverse order, moving backward to find the reasons for present habits in books and libraries. But beginning students may find a traditional approach more comfortable - to begin at the beginning and end at the present, with some moderately logical subdivisions within each period.

Assuming that we now have the content of our course properly balanced, how can we go about teaching it? With lectures, by all means. There is more to commend them in a history course than in any other part of the library school curriculum simply because students are less likely to bring to a history course valuable insights from their own experience, not having lived through enough library history to be worth mentioning.

But in this day of democracy in education, we feel guilty if we do not let the students help out. Should they be permitted to lecture, too? That is, to study and make formal reports? This technique can provide needed rest for the instructor but it has two disadvantages: (1) the listening students do not know how much of what is being said is important (that is, will be found on the final examination) and the instructor may become fidgety because if he already knows what the student is saying he is sure he could say it more quickly and clearly whereas if the information is new to him, he has no way of knowing whether the student is telling the truth. Perhaps the teacher can keep things under better control if he asks various students to study different aspects of a subject, then to participate in a general dass discussion of that subject.

In a history course, we may be justified in assigning more books as outside reading and fewer articles than in other courses. If the student is to see the sweep of history, he has to read a long, organized piece of work, a kind to be found only in the form of a book and it seems to me that authors of books on bibliographical and library history write, on the average, more attractively than do authors of other books about libraries. If this is true, it follows that reading an entire book about a historical subject will be less painful to a student than reading some other book about libraries.

My last technique is one which should, ideally, be used more than any other - to let the students see and feel books and libraries. Students should be able to sit in the courtyard of Hadrian's library in Athens and gaze at the Acropolis or stoop to enter the door of a temple library in Cambodia. Since they can not, I suppose the best we can do is to

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show them several dozen slides or transparencies for an overhead pro- jector made from photographs taken by people who have been to such places.

For books, we have a better chance because so many old ones have been brought together in American libraries. A few hundred thousand dollars spent on the monuments of printing can support a course like this in the way it deserves. But the less precious objects are also useful. If students can handle a tattered piece of papyrus, they can understand how it was made better than they can if they gaze through plastic at a smooth, well preserved one. And a spineless fifteenth century book gives an excellent "cut-away" idea of how books were made.

As for motion pictures, I think their greatest value is in showing processes which cannot be demonstrated easily in class. I become im- patient - or jealous - when the films are mainly lectures. I prefer the shorter "Milestones in Writing" films where Frank Baxter makes papyrus and other things to the corresponding series of longer films, "The Written Word" where he also talks a lot.

One last kind of object remains to be mentioned: the equipment by means of which books and readers have been brought together - or, sometimes, kept apart. For earliest times we will have to depend on pictures but we have not made enough effort to preserve examples of the multiplicity of forms of charging systems, card catalogs, etc., etc., which our professional ancestors have used within the last hundred years. However, one librarian of my acquaintance sees little hope for forming a museum of such objects if other libraries are like his, where they continue to use all antiquated equipment.

Take catalog cards, for example. Many of our students have never seen examples of "library hand" even though some of their teachers are sufficiently mature to have been taught to produce it. Perhaps the one technique by which we could make library history really live would be to bring into class a few senior citizens of the library world, let them write some library hand on the board and then reminisce about their early days.

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how should we tell librarians of the future about libraries of the past?

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