Articles for 19 Feb

Fain
This article, focusing mostly on the immigrant in East Coast libraries, was fascinating. I was home in Chicago this past weekend and noticed striking similarities – as well as some contrasts – in the way librarians in the article seemed to work with immigrants and the way Chicago libraries did so. Fain notes deliberate attempts of librarians to attract immigrants, which held true in Chicago as well, but the superiority in tone in Fain’s article did not seem so apparent in the Chicago Public Library. Still, library focus in Chicago on the immigrant seemed to be highest in the World War II era, whereas it came earlier on the East Coast. In Chicago, looking through the annual reports of various library branches, the libraries seemed very eager to work with immigrants and invite them into the library – holding forums with relevant issues on Europe and American culture, providing speakers and leaders for various book groups in different languages, and offering advertisements and booklists of all new books received in foreign languages. The overall sentiment seemed much more positive in the annual reports than Fain’s article; nevertheless, as these sources are of a very different type from different perspectives, it is important to realize that such differences may be more natural in historical context.

In both New York and Chicago, children were the leading force of the immigrant-library relationship. Librarians at the northwest Chicago Toman branch would pass out mimeographed lists of foreign books to immigrant children in the library, in hopes that they would be passed on to the parents to come in and select on their own. Fain’s article indicates that assimilation of new immigrants was a national problem, while Chicago annual reports suggested that immigrant attraction was more for the library’s interest in maintaining adequate circulation and community presence – especially in areas with heavy immigrant concentration. Towards the end of the article, the excerpts about how the library impacted immigrants’ lives were fascinating. It is nice to see that despite some of the seemingly negative attitudes within the library, it was still able to serve its immigrant patrons and make a difference in their lives. In this way, the public library seems to be quite different than the national scene of immigration opinion at the time.

Pawley
The idea of actual access to libraries is an important distinction in ways libraries were historically able to serve patrons. In the beginning of the twentieth century, half of the Chicago population would have to walk miles after riding street cars, just to get to a library branch or deposit station. It was not until 1916 that a new, more accessible system was proposed to increase access. During Pawley’s scope of the article, Wisconsin’s method of accessing very rural patrons (in a state obviously much more rural and sparsely populated than a large, dense city like Chicago) was very innovative. The traveling library was able to act much like urban branch libraries today – better able to understand the specific community better than the large Main library. By understanding the demographic makeup of certain rural communities, libraries could better serve the needs of these residents. Although the structure of the public library may seem so simple today, the innovation and organization behind it throughout history is really quite astonishing. The work of Ms Stearns truly shows the hard work and thought that went into it.

In a time of rural isolation and a poor postal system, access to libraries for many Wisconsnites seemed impossible. Leaders in the traveling library movement saw them as a step to establishing permanent libraries – much in the way the branch library works today. Often stereotyped as less intelligent, these rural residents were very eager to receive library material once it became accessible, lending to the library’s traditional purpose of a “poor man’s university.” Still, private correspondence revealed that idea of what constituted “good” reading and the difficulty of making people read it. Despite such sentiment, the good intentions and helpful access provided by these library leaders was unrivaled. In a time when the library’s supposed goal seemed so important on the national scale, it was surprising to read about the petty political barriers Stearns faced as a progressive woman. Thankfully technology diminished rural isolation over the years, but Stearns truly was in innovator in the library access movement.

Molz & Dain
This article, though steeped in a historical era, seemed to have parallels to today. The two opposing camps of building book collections – on appealing to popular culture versus providing “good” books to diffuse knowledge – seems similar to today’s debate on the library becoming to commercial/capitalist. As the authors mention, public libraries have never really resolved this dichotomy. Once again, the article revolves back to this idea of the “ideal vs. reality.” Although the library professed that it was geared toward the concept of “service to everyone,” the reality was a bit obscured in that most library users were middle class and better educated. That is not to say there weren’t people within the library profession – like Lutie Stearns from our previous article – but on the whole there was a deep hole in library access.

The new statement better integrated the need of being unique to a given community. The branch library system was better able to provide this kind of service, as they had a more specific focus. Instead of trying to serve an incredibly diverse and large urban area, librarians could narrow the community down to specific neighborhoods. With technology butting in and money concerns facing the library, this emphasis on the patron as customer emerged. The demand vs. quality issue came up as well. Still, librarians’ being able to decide what is considered appropriate material brings up the issue of freedom/access to information and censorship. The library is very quick to shun censorship, but many of the debates within the library often indirectly lend to it. Ambivalence and new problematic dichotomies have arisen today with the digital world taking off, and undoubtedly the library will never be done facing new problems, but this article could give some historical insight into how one may deal with them.