Articles for 29 Jan

Quincy
I think the rhetoric and tone of this article provided some interesting insights into the library world at the time Quincy was writing. Obviously in the very early development of the public library, the values portrayed by Quincy no longer seem relevant in today’s library institution, or really in the society at large. Today’s library – while certainly a culturally important place – is not seen as the “savior of society” like many library elites portrayed it in Quincy’s day. This “gift of literature to the masses” portrays the library as expanding popular education to help the lower class citizen rise up. Not surprisingly, Quincy’s attitude is very Carnegie-esque: the library will only help those who will help themselves, and those are the only people that deserve the elite’s help anyway. Additionally, the internal-ness of the library profession, which we have somewhat discussed in class, seems apparent in Quincy’s writing. He discusses that a great advantage is not the number of books circulated, per se, but “the fact that exhaustive catalogues guide the student to just the book he wants; he is not compelled to swell statistics of circulation…” Granted, today an efficient catalog system and access to it is a simple part of every library, but the bureaucratic processes had a larger importance to Quincy than they do today.

He outright protests that the number of books a library circulates should not measure its “usefulness to the community sustaining it” (399). While “silly, and even immoral” publications may be useful for historic purposes, Quincy finds no use in people reading “immoral” fiction, going so far as to provide medical “proof” of its detrimental effect: “physicians versed in the treatment of those nerve centers… declared [romantic literature] to be a fruitful cause of evil to youth of both sexes.” Now, even Quincy seems to be acknowledging leading librarians who disagree with him, but library values definitely are different in this sense. He proclaims a library’s duty to citizens paying taxes not to provide such dangerous literature to its residents. The library in this era was much more open to censorship (specifically judging what was considered “good” literature), which it adamantly opposes today. At the end of the article, he states “unlike other public charities, the free library is equally generous to those who have and to those who lack.” In reality, just from what we have read thus far, this seems untrue. The library’s superiority complex has shone through in the historic writings and in the discussions we have had in class. Those of lower classes rightfully so did not feel welcomed in the library, and this probably detracted from their use.

Shera
Shera’s overall discussion of library development brought up some interesting points. This element of the private sector in the public library stuck out to me when he discusses the dependence on the “psychology of the generous native son.” Discussing how these youth would go back to donate money to his home town, and also the money received from Carnegie grants and other such donations, make the public library not simply a public institution in its origins. Aside from the purely private library, the public libraries too had privatized elements. In communities where tax money enough would not be sufficient to start a library, the private sector really helped out in this regard through private charity and donation within the public realm. The social importance of libraries was clearly recognized by such donors, and of those working within the library profession. Although perhaps overstated at times, the importance of the library in fostering education to citizens and the “awareness of the need for universal educational opportunity” was a foundational value and goal of the early public library, even if such hopes were not excessively optimistic.

Other interesting factors relating to the library founding that Shera mentions are religion, morality, and the church. While the church itself influenced the need for such public libraries as outgrowths of demand from their own, the morality question seems to me to have occurred more within the library once it was founded, not necessarily as a cause for its creation in the first place. Either way, as Shera mentions toward the end of the article, for any of the libraries to grow once founded required community leadership, a role provided by some of the earliest librarians. It is interesting to note that some of the great men who donated to the libraries actually did not have a significant influence within the library itself. As Shera mentions, they were known in other fields, and leadership had to come out of somewhere within the community.

Williams
I really liked the initial set up of this article. He structures it like a political science model and demonstrates the importance of empirical proof to solidify any kind of claims. At first, he identifies the problems and shortcomings with the currently literature and sums up his argument. However, I was surprised as the paper came to an abrupt end. The article begins how must social science research papers would start, but only the beginning of such models are included. Usually, a discussion of previous literature’s weak spots is just the beginning to set up the author’s own model/claim. Unfortunately, Williams never goes on to assert his own argument or offer any solutions to the problem he lays out. It almost seems like a cop out; he presents this problem and effectively demonstrates the weaknesses, but provides no insight or alternative of his own. In his “conclusion” he simply says that “what is now required… is to construct and test statements that explain the interrelationships and relative importance of these and other variables…” Essentially, he leaves the problem for someone else to figure out. In this sense, I can’t help but question the piece’s usefulness to the scholarship in general?