Enduring Visions of Instruction in Academic Libraries: A Review of a Spirited Early Twentieth-Century Discussion

Some of the most enduring, and engaging, questions within academic librarianship are those about students and research skills. The vocabulary employed for discussion has evolved, but essential questions—what skills do students need to be taught, who should teach them, and how?—have persisted from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first. This article examines current and historical aspects of these questions, with special focus on an extended early twentieth-century debate between librarian John Cotton Dana and Vassar College history professor Lucy Maynard Salmon about who should provide library instruction: librarians or professors?