libraries at times of cultural change || the development of librarianship in the united states

The Development of Librarianship in the United StatesAuthor(s): Wayne A. WiegandSource: Libraries & Culture, Vol. 24, No. 1, Libraries at Times of Cultural Change (Winter,1989), pp. 99-109Published by: University of Texas PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25542123 .

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The Development of Librarianship in the United States

Wayne A. Wiegand

The theme of this seminar is Libraries at Times of Cultural Change. After carefully considering this theme, and after attempting to fit it into the

context of librarianship in the United States, I had to conclude that

American libraries of all sorts have not led in the process of cultural change;

they have followed.1 In my opinion, they lacked alternatives because of the

unique professional configuration that librarianship assumed in the last

quarter of the nineteenth century. As I look at the development of librarian

ship in the United States, I see four major components merging into a

whole history: institution, expertise, character, and authority. Much of the

history of United States librarianship can be found in the institution we

call a library?traditionally a place to store information for use by a par ticular group. Managing these institutions?some of them quite large?has

been a challenge. The profession has scored many successes here and ex

perienced some failures. Concern for managing the library institution has

traditionally occupied much of our professional attention.

Expertise here refers to the unique systems, materials, and practices that

librarianship has developed over the centuries to retrieve the information

that the institution chooses to store. Classification schemes, cataloguing

codes, and reference services serve as examples. Concerns for improving

expertise have also occupied much professional attention over the years. But

at this point please let me postpone further discussion of institution and ex

pertise until later in my presentation.

By character I mean the kinds of people libraries have employed to staff and manage the institutions and apply the expertise in professional prac tice. We know the names and some of the history of the most prominent, but what about the less visible trench workers, upon whom the institution

Dr. Wayne A. Wiegand is associate professor at the School of Library and Information

Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Libraries and Culture, Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter 1989 ?1989 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713



100 L&C/Librarianship in the United States

and the expertise it practices depend for success? How did they "qualify" for service in librarianship? Taking demographic profiles of the profession at regular intervals may tell us much about the development of librarian

ship,2 especially when weighed against developments pertaining to the in

stitution and the expertise unique to it, and to the final major component

forming my whole history of American librarianship?authority.

Authority represents the key to the plausibility of my hypothesis and

therefore needs some elaboration. It is intricately bound up with what I call an "ideology of reading," to which American librarians have subscribed

for centuries. I give ideology a simple definition here: a "belief system" that serves a group of people "on a

relatively permanent basis."3

Librarians did not create this ideology; they inherited it from European in

tellectuals like Sir Francis Bacon, whose words were often echoed in the

United States by such widely respected thinkers as Ralph Waldo Emerson.4

This ideology held that basically there were two kinds of reading?good and bad. Good reading led to good social behavior, bad reading to bad

social behavior. The goal of American librarianship was obvious?offer

library patrons only good reading; buy no bad reading. The simplicity of the statement, however, is deceptive. It helps to conceal

the direct source of authority for the library profession. In the United

States, who determines what "good reading" is? Perhaps a brief journey

through a part of early American library history will yield some clues.

For many years after their arrival in 1607 New World colonists from

England had little time for books and reading. Survival required attention

to more pressing practical matters. Securing food and shelter had to

precede attempts to improve cultural life. Most settlers in the New World

had a Bible, some a hymnal,

some a prayer book or two. In the pages of

these works colonists found the counsel and guidance they needed to help make some sense of the world around them. They allocated a

high degree of

authority to these sources, even if many could not read them.5

But some libraries did take root and grow in the New World. Practicing

professionals like ministers, physicians, and lawyers developed small work

ing collections to assist them in carrying out their duties. They selected

books for their personal libraries that promised sage advice. They judged the value of these books on how well they fulfilled that promise. Sometimes

these collections got a boost from external agencies with a specific goal in

mind. Thomas Bray, an

Anglican clergyman, made a serious effort to

establish literary centers for colonists at the turn of the eighteenth century. Between 1695 and 1704 he set up over seventy libraries, each of which con

tained much literature intended for Anglican clergymen and laymen. Bray

hoped these works would strengthen Anglicanism in the New World and

facilitate its spread. He made sure his libraries consisted of "good reading."6

By the early eighteenth century several European intellectuals were



101

beginning to ask interesting questions about human nature, and as the

frontier pushed back and a class emerged in the New World that concerned

itself less with religion and more with secular and vocational matters,

reading interests expanded. The American social library surfaced from this

mix of forces. It was most often a joint stock company in which members

pooled their resources to purchase a few hundred books, to which each had

access by means of limited borrowing privileges. Generally, social library collections represented the "good reading" for their time, as determined in

part by those influential European intellectuals and by the force of a

classical tradition. They included classic texts that had stood the test of

time: Plutarch, Shakespeare, Homer, Milton, and Dante. Most social

libraries were established and controlled by local propertied classes, who

found less value in religious treatises than the original settlers and more

value in philosophy, travel, and biography. The "librarian" of the social

library was responsible not so much for selection as for guarding the collec

tion and making sure library rules were

obeyed by all members.7

The social library experience in the United States had parallels in

academic librarianship before the Civil War. For more than two centuries

almost all American colleges in the United States offered a classical cur

riculum of preselected courses that students had to take. Faculty normally

required students to recite or memorize important passages from a class

text or to translate important passages from texts written in their original

languages. Thus, faculty determined "good reading," and college librar

ians did not contest their authority to determine that reading. Instead, academic librarians (who were mostly drawn from the ranks of the faculty

anyway) designed library practices that imitated instructional methodology. Because institutions and their instructors did not regard independent read

ing very highly, college librarians felt little pressure to build large collec

tions. Instead, they mostly guarded collections donated from estates of

deceased faculty members or alumni. And students did not really need ac

cess to these collections to complete course work satisfactorily; library

routines reflected this relative indifference. They were open for only a few

hours a day, only

a few days a week, and, compared to contemporary stan

dards, borrowing privileges for students were heavily restricted. Yet few

people complained.8

About the middle of the nineteenth century, as the United States began to experience a rush of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization,

community and national leaders became perplexed over what they saw as

potential threats to the social order. Some influential people suggested that

universal literacy offered a solution, and they pushed for reforms to ac

complish it. Naturally, formal education experienced the immediate benefits from this push to change the nation from an oral to a written

culture,9 but in its wake one can also find the origins of a public library




movement that convinced local communities to tax themselves for the pur

pose of providing good reading to local citizens free of charge. The rationale was simple and direct. Good reading led to good social

behavior. Bad reading, which many social reformers believed millions were

getting from romance fiction, French novelists, and tabloids like the Police

Gazette, inevitably led to bad social behavior. Providing free access to the

former would almost surely check, perhaps even reverse, the influence of

the latter. But what constituted the "good reading" that libraries chose to

stock? Since most of the reformers who pushed for the establishment of

public libraries were from white Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle- and

upper-class families, and since most of the people who staffed these libraries came from the same socioeconomic groups (i.e., possessed the same

"character"), the collections they built and supported naturally reflected

the cultural, literary, and intellectual canons they had found useful in con

structing their own interpretations of reality, in making sense of their own

worlds. The books they chose had given them counsel and guidance; conse

quently, they had already judged these works authoritative and wanted all

classes of society to benefit from exposure to them.

The influence of an ideology of reading is evident here, and librarians

definitely subscribed to it, but a close look at the question of who deter

mines "good reading" reveals that the authority for selection resided in

traditional canons that had served previous generations and that excluded

much of the newer, more controversial, and more popular literature. These

canons established norms against which new publications

were measured

for value and were found wanting. The intent of the public library com

munity was surely egalitarian; the result surely was not. For whatever

reason, millions continued to read romance fiction, French novelists, and

the Police Gazette, despite the availability of "good reading" free of charge at

the local public library. At this point, let me come back to the two components of the working

hypothesis I mentioned initially?institution and expertise. Chronologically we have arrived at an appropriate moment for their reintroduction: at

the beginning of the American public library movement, at the beginning of the transformation of American higher education from a classical cur

riculum to an elective undergraduate system and the introduction of

graduate education and professional schools, and at the beginning of

modern American librarianship. I feel safe in saying that an ideology of

reading was firmly cemented into the profession's subconscious by this

time, and that it deferred authority for determining "good reading" to ex

perts located outside librarianship. I also feel safe in saying that the "char

acter' '

of library community members was drawn from a socioeconomic

group that had assimilated these canons and that was unlikely to contest

their validity.10 So what was left for librarianship that allowed it to claim



103

uniqueness in the fast-growing world of new professions if the natures of

collections and staff were being determined elsewhere?

I think the answer is institution and expertise. The public library evolved

into an institution that needed efficient management and a series of systems

that allowed employees or patrons to maximize use of the authoritative col

lections it housed. Thus, the library science that emerged to address the im

mediate needs of librarianship in the United States in the late nineteenth

century generally embraced two practical concerns: the "science" of ad

ministering an institutional bureaucracy and an expertise unique to the in

stitution being administered.

This, in my opinion, constitutes the unique configuration that librarian

ship in the United States assumed in the last quarter of the nineteenth

century, a configuration that, for the most part, it maintains to the present

day. Libraries collected "good reading," but "good" was determined out

side the library profession. Libraries were staffed with the right people, but

certifying staff members for work also took place outside the library. Here let me introduce a corollary to my hypothesis that may account for

the gender composition of the American library profession (eighty percent female, twenty percent male),

a circumstance that also had its origins in the

late nineteenth century. Because "good" reading was already acknowledged

by people of the "right" character,11 women were "allowed" (and often

encouraged) to enter the ranks of librarianship in numbers way out of pro

portion to most other developing professions. The reason was simple. The

established male-dominated power structure sensed little threat from an

institution collecting the "good reading" that the establishment itself had

determined to be authoritative. As long as the women who staffed these in stitutions were of the right character (i.e., from the right families, perhaps

liberally educated to conventional cultural, intellectual, and literary canons

at Wellesley, Radcliffe, Mount Holyoke, and so forth), there was no reason

to withhold support from the institutions under their care.

In fact, most Progressive era reformers considered this practice a form of

efficient management. After all, women could be hired to do the work at

much lower salaries than men. This became a standard pattern in small- to

medium-sized libraries, but in the larger institutions, where the top ad

ministrative jobs required more skill, more intelligence, an ability to make

decisions, and a firm hand of authority, male-dominated boards generally thought it wiser to hire men as directors. This practice quickly stratified the

large library institutional bureaucracy by gender. At most large libraries, directors were male, cataloguers female, and reference librarians about an

even split between the sexes. Men working the career ladder in librarian

ship generally advanced through public services more often than technical

services; women seldom advanced out of either.

Large public libraries had the visibility; small- and medium-sized public




libraries had the numbers, and, as a result of their collective profile in com

munities throughout the country, by the beginning of World War I public

librarianship projected itself as a female-dominated profession mostly con

cerned with managing public library institutions and applying an expertise

unique to their efficient operation. Academic librarianship imitated these developments. The mid-nine

teenth century had witnessed two important events that dramatically changed higher education. The first was the publication of Charles

Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, which challenged scores of established

theological certainties (many of which librarians themselves had learned in

the classical curriculum) and posited the tenets of a scientific method of in

quiry calling for efforts to collect facts and study them without prejudice. The second was the passage of the Morrill Act of 1862, which determined

that public lands be set aside in each state to subsidize "at least one college where the leading subject will be, without excluding other scientific and

classical studies ... to teach such branches of learning as are related to

agriculture and the mechanic arts ... in order to promote the liberal and

practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and pro fessions of life." Powerful land grant colleges like the Universities of Wis

consin, Michigan, and California grew as a result of this act; they were

strengthened by a second Morrill Act of 1890.l2

That strong research libraries developed on these campuses in response

to this mix of forces is not surprising; but again we must locate their direct

source of professional authority. As with the classical college, university

faculties retained the right to determine the "best reading." As always,

they assigned some of these readings in their classes. But by the late nine

teenth century they were also organizing into disciplines (and national net

works established by disciplinary boundaries) that created standards of

scientific inquiry evident in the journals and scholarly presses they set up and for which they wrote, and upon whose editorial boards they sat. As a

result of a greatly expanded system of scholarly communications, and

because research libraries had a responsibility to collect its products,

university faculty members could generally assume that their students had

access to the *'

good reading'' that had weathered a prepublication filtering

process run by peers in the academic culture in whom they had confidence.l3

Thus, members of the academic culture continued to determine quality; members of the research library community were charged to obtain quantity and to impose some order on that quantity. Research librarians brought no serious objection to this set of circumstances?they were not trained to

object. Generally they were college graduates?they had been "certified"

to know what the "good reading" was and the standards by which to judge it. They

were much more concerned with how to manage an institution



105

being inundated with an increasing number of products generated by the

scholarly communications system.

This professional emphasis on institution and expertise is also echoed in

three essential support agencies in American librarianship: library educa

tion, library associations, and the library press. A cursory analysis of

library school development in the United States, for example, adds

credence to this hypothesis. Library school curricula were structured to

develop and augment skills in two general areas: administration and exper

tise. Library school students generally had to take a certain number of ad

ministration courses (one of which was often a core course) and also choose

among several cataloguing and reference courses (both

areas were generally

represented in a core curriculum). Then, depending on where professional

aspirants wanted jobs in the library profession, they selected other courses

like special collections, social science bibliography, and branch librarian

ship. Thus, library education served the demands of the institution employ

ing most of its graduates, and those institutions generally demanded skills

in administration and library expertise. They did not demand authority for

determining "good reading." For that, library professionals had scores of

collection guides and booklists of recommended reading that relied upon the authority of others who had built national and international reputations as experts in subject

areas.

Associations provided national, regional, and state voices for the library

profession. At the center was the American Library Association. In Politics

of an Emerging Profession (1986), I structured a narrative history of ALA be tween 1876 and 1917 around its motto?"The Best Reading for the Greatest

Number and the Least Cost." My research convinced me that most of ALA's efforts in this four-decade period centered on

expanding library ser

vices ("for the Greatest Number") and making them more efficient ("at the Least Cost"). Relatively little conference time (where most of the association's work took place) specifically addressed "The Best Reading."

Almost none was spent identifying that literature.14

From its beginnings the American library press also emphasized institu tion and expertise, although a substantial fraction of its income has been

generated by collection guides and booklists of recommended reading that reflect contemporary cultural, intellectual, and literary canons that are

created and defended outside librarianship. For the most part, however, the library press addressed demands made by the library institutions and the library professionals who bought its products. Its market calls for atten

tion to institution and expertise, so it seeks manuscripts that help librarians

manage and run their institutions more efficiently.

Professional magazines like Library Journal, Wilson Library Bulletin, and American Libraries (formerly the Bulletin of the American Library Association)




deliver general news to the profession. A major share of that news centers

around the library institution and the expertise needed to run it. These

general magazines are supplemented by specialized journals like Library

Quarterly, College and Research Libraries, and RQ which report the results of

professional research. Most of this research, however, has been applied to

problems specific to institutional administration or to institutional exper tise. Very little deals with conceptual issues that may be of relevance to

sister professions or that might benefit from relevant research in the learned

disciplines. Over the years the American library press has reflected a pro fession that has generally been introspective. In my opinion, it still does.

Discerning readers are probably already aware that I have not even

touched on national, school, or special libraries of all sorts. I apologize for

abbreviating attention to these three important types of libraries. Suffice it

to say here that I see no serious deviation from the patterns I discussed

previously. Authority?the "good reading" every library seeks to collect?

is wielded outside librarianship. Institution and expertise preoccupy most

of the time of the practicing library professional in each type of library. But now permit me to summarize. I think the major forces operating

within the development of librarianship in the United States are clear. I

believe librarianship has been circumscribed by an ideology of reading that

inherently limits its authority in the society in which it operates. Regular adherence to this ideology automatically delegates to others the determina

tion of what is ''

good reading''; it also vastly underestimates the mental

baggage readers bring to a text that significantly influences the messages

they get from it.15 This set of curcumstances is reinforced by the character

of the people chosen for employment in professional library positions in the

United States. Currently library school applicants must hold a liberal arts

undergraduate degree with a predetermined minimum grade-point average

and often a predetermined minimum score on the Graduate Record Ex

amination. Ostensibly students who meet these standards know "good

reading" and the conventional standards against which to judge new

publications. After graduation from library schools the vast majority of

professionals assume positions in existing library institutions where they

put into practice their newly acquired skills in administration and/or pro

fessional expertise. Many join professional associations to hone those skills

and to help them climb the professional ladder. Most read the professional literature to keep

current in the latest developments and research.

Few question the authority base of the collections for which they have a

social responsibility. For that portion of the 250 million citizens in the

United States who regularly use libraries (about ten percent), librarianship as currently practiced works reasonably well. Patrons find counsel,

guidance, and useful information in the objects of cultural, intellectual, and

literary authority the library has chosen to collect. But for that vast majority



107

of Americans who do not use libraries?those who seek counsel and guid

ance in sources and services that libraries do not collect and/or provide?it does not work well. In fact, for them it does not work at all.

But I do not disparage this situation. I readily acknowledge that over the

centuries millions of people, myself included, have had their lives enhanced

by contact with library materials. My purpose is not to criticize librarian

ship in the United States. I only intend to describe its development as I see

it. Nor will I deign to offer solutions, because I am not sure I have stumbled

onto any problems. I do think, however, that my hypothesis helps explain

why the profession of librarianship lacks the kind of power and authority commanded by other professions in the United States. I also think it helps us understand why American libraries have generally been considered

marginal institutions when compared to other social services provided by the state. Those are two facts of American library history

we cannot escape,

no matter how rosy we paint our past.

Notes

1. Some of these ideas have been discussed elsewhere. See "Perspectives on

Library Education in the Context of Recently Published Literature in the History of Professions," Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 26 (1986):

267-280; "The Socialization of Library and Information Science Students: Reflec

tions on a Century of Formal Education for Librarianship," Library Trends 34

(1986): 383-399; and "The Research Library, the Ideology of Reading, and

Scholarly Communication, 1876-1900" (paper delivered at Libraries and

Scholarly Communication in the United States: The Historical Dimension?An In

terdisciplinary Conference, 31 October 1987, Library of Congress, Washington,

D.C). 2. Some of these can be found in Wayne A. Wiegand, "American Library

Association Executive Board Members, 1876-1917: A Collective Profile," Libri 31

(1981): 153-166; Wayne A. Wiegand and Geri Greenway, "A Comparative

Analysis of the Socioeconomic and Professional Characteristics of American Library Association Executive Board and Council Members, 1876-1917," Library Research 2

(1980): 309-325. The nineteenth-century definition of "character" among profes sionals is discussed fully in Paul Mattingly, The Classless Profession: American Schoolmen

in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1975). 3. I have taken this definition from Martin Seliger, Ideology and Politics (New

York: Free Press, 1976), p. 120. The concept of professional authority is carefully defined in Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic

Books, 1982), part 1. See also Thomas L. Haskell (ed.), The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

4. See, for example, Sir Francis Bacon, "Of Studies," in Samuel Harvey

Reynolds (ed.), The Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Francis Bacon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890), pp. 341-344; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Culture," in

The Conduct of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), pp. 129-166; and "Books," in Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), pp.

189-211). 5. For examples of the multiple functions that the Bible served in seventeenth




century New England, see David Cressy, "Books as Totems in Seventeenth

Century England and New England," Jo urnal of Library History 21 (1986): 92-106.

6. See Charles T. Laugher, Thomas Bray's Grand Design: Libraries of the Church of

England in America, 1695-1788 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1973). Scores of "good reading" titles are also listed in John C. Van Home (ed.), Religious

Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery: The American Correspondence of the Associates of Thomas

Bray, 1717-1777 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 7. Standard histories of the social library include Jesse Shera, Foundations of the

Public Library: The Origins of the Public Library Movement in New England, 1629-1855

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); and Haynes McMullen, The Founding of Social and Public Libraries in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois through 1850, Occasional Paper no. 51 (Urbana: University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science, 1958). See also Edward Stevens, "Relationships of Social Library Membership, Wealth, and Literary Culture in Early Ohio," Journal of Library History 16 (1981): 574-594; and Wayne A. Wiegand,

" 'To diffuse usefull knowledge and correct moral prin

ciples': Social Libraries in the Old Northwest, 1800-1850," in Paul H. Mattingly and Edward W. Stevens (eds.), A History of Education in the Old Northwest, 1787-1880

(Athens: Ohio University Libraries, 1987), pp. 85-95.

8. Standard histories of the classical college library include Louis Shores, Origins

of the American College Library, 1638-1800 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1934); Arthur T. Hamlin, The University Library in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); and Orvin Lee Shiflett, Origins of American Academic

Librarianship (Norwood: Ablex, 1981). 9. These developments are discussed in depth in James Soltow and Edward

Stevens, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic

Analysis to 1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). See also Robert

Wiebe, Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967) for a seminal

synthesis of the solutions to the problems perceived by reformers as they sought to

address what they believed were threats to the social order.

10. For evidence, see titles cited in note 2.

11. Gerda Lerner makes a forceful case about the influence of male domination of

cultural, intellectual, and literary canons in her Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Ox

ford University Press, 1986). 12. These developments are discussed in depth in David Ricci, The Tragedy of

Political Science: Politics, Scholarship and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1984); Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Theodore S. Hamerow, Reflections on History and

Historians (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 13. A more contemporary example of the influence that this prepublication filter

ing process has on perpetuating existing canons and posing obstacles to the creation

of new ones is evident in Elazabeth Flexner's experience with a manuscript that

later became Century of Struggle: The Women's Movement in the United States (Cam

bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). See Carol Lasser, "Century of

Struggle, Decades of Revision: A Retrospective on Eleanor Flexner's Suffrage

History," Reviews in American History 15 (1987): 347-348.

14. Wayne A. Wiegand, Politics of an Emerging Profession: The American Library

Association, 1876-1917 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986). 15. See, for example, Jane P. Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: From For

malism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Susan R. Sulieman and Inge Crossman (eds.), The Reader in the Text: Essays on

Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Judith



109

Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977); Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader: Reader

Response Criticism (London: Methuen, 1987); and especially Wolfgang Iser, The Act

of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Com

munities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). See also Janice Radway,

Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), for a recent attempt to evaluate a traditional

nonlibrary literary genre through the eyes of the regular readers of that genre.



libraries at times of cultural change || the development of librarianship in the united states

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