"Crises" in Scholarly Communications? Insights from the Emergence of the Journal of Library History, 1947–1966

This study examines the first ten years of the journal now known as Information & Culture. Founded in 1966 as the Journal of Library History, the Journal has been shaped according to the values, habits, and competencies that its contributors brought to changing circumstances so as to transform the Journal into an erudite interdisciplinary publication distant from its beginnings as a compendium of entertaining vignettes and didactic notes on the writing and uses of library history. The article authors use historical perspectives to frame various crises in scholarly communications, which are treated chronologically as they confronted the Journal, drawing on archival sources, secondary sources, interviews, participant observation by Gonzalez, and close reading of the publication to construct a narrative about the Journal in its relation to higher education, scholarly publication, and professional and disciplinary developments in librarianship and companion fields under the increasing influence of technology on these fields. The authors interpret characters, actions, and settings through the sociological lens of Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of social field, habitus, and multiple forms of actual and metaphorical capital.