Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies

Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy

In response to the perceived (by some) onset of an information society, historians have begun to study its roots and antecedents. The past is replete with the rise, fall, and transformation of systems of information , which are not to be confused with the narrower computer-mediated world of information systems . The history of systems of information—which for digestibility can be labeled information history —lacks neither scale nor scope. Systems of information have played a critical role in the transition to, and subsequent development of, capitalism; the growth of the state, especially the modern, nation-state; the rise of modernity, science, and the public sphere; imperialism; and geopolitics. In the context of these epochal shifts and episodes in human thinking and social organization, this essay presents a critical bibliographic survey of histories—outside the well-trodden paths of library and information-science history—that have foregrounded, or made reference to, a wide variety of systems of information.

Systems of Information: The Long View

Print becomes part of our everyday lives.In a period characterized by expanding markets, national consolidation, and social upheaval, print culture in America picked up momentum as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. Books, magazines, and newspapers were produced more quickly and more cheaply, reaching ever-increasing numbers of readers. Volume 4 of "A History of the Book in America" traces the complex, even contradictory consequences of these changes in the production, circulation, and use of print.Contributors to this volume explain that although mass production encouraged consolidation and standardization, readers increasingly adapted print to serve their own purposes, allowing for increased diversity in the midst of concentration and integration.In considering the book within larger social and cultural networks, the essayists here address the rise of consumer culture, the extension of literacy and reading through schooling, the expansion of secondary and postsecondary education and the growth of the textbook industry, the growing influence of the professions and their dependence on print culture, and the history of relevant technology. As these illuminating essays attest, the expansion of print culture between 1880 and 1940 enabled it to become an integral part of Americans' everyday business, social, political, and religious lives.

Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1945

The field of information science is constantly changing. Therefore, information scientists are required to regularly reviewand if necessaryredefine its fundamental building blocks. This article is ...

Conceptions of information science

Historians of American libraries and librarianship might hesitate to consult the wisdom of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as a guide for conducting research. However, the aforementioned quote does provide a useful context for this essay because historical investigations must go beyond what we already know. Research has to delve into the past to recapture the “unknown unknowns” that await our curious probing of dusty documents and forgotten files and help us make better sense of all that has gone before and serves as prologue for the present. This examination seeks to identify, summarize, and emphasize, where appropriate, those writings that appeared during 2008 and 2009 to assist us all in better understanding our shared library past.

https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=libcat_pubs

The Literature of American Library History, 2008–2009

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me to be pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrange

The Literature of American Library History, 2006–2007

����� ��� In the introductory note to a small collection of essays she published in the mid-1930s, Willa Cather observed that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.” 1 She was referring to the cultural divide that separated forever the cultural sensitivities of America before the First World War from the America just a few years after the war’s end. In looking over the historiography of American libraries, librarianship, and all its related cultural accoutrements, I have come to believe that the few years that bridged the recent turn of the century also served as a kind of dividing line, separating the writings and thinking about library history of the 1980s and 1990s from those of the first few years of our new century. It is not a hard and fast dividing line (more crooked than straight), but I think a number of important contributions relating to our historiographical enterprise appeared between 1998 and 2003 that signaled a shift in emphasis and direction for library historiography. 2

Edward A. Goedeken

Papers

The Literature of American Library History, 2008–2009

The Literature of American Library History, 2006–2007

Our Historiographical Enterprise: Shifting Emphases and Directions

The Literature of American Library History, 2003–2005