The Librarian and the Library: Why Place Matters

Convocation address delivered 9 December 2000 at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Texas at Austin.

When I first received the invitation to give a convocation address focused on the current state of public libraries, I found it easy to say yes. The research that culminated in Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890­1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1995) has, over the years, taken me into dozens of public libraries and put me into contact with at least that many public librarians. The experience has usually been memorable. More than once I have arrived unannounced at the loan desk of a small public library, explained my project to the librarian, and requested the materials I would particularly like to consult: original plans of the building, period photographs, the minutes of library board meetings from 1901--not exactly run-of-the-mill library resources. To my delight, the public librarians I encountered were unflappable in the face of such demands. In Union City, Indiana, the librarian essentially said, "No one has ever asked those questions before, but I've always thought that someone might someday, so I've been compiling this scrapbook of primary sources. Here."

As if that were not enough, this busy and able librarian also colluded in my project to document myself in front of each of my case-study buildings. In this instance, I wanted to cavort among the library's Corinthian columns--a maneuver that required some dexterity six feet above ground level. And although she let me know that she spent a good deal of time trying to prevent her young readers from succumbing to the almost irresistible lure of this classically detailed jungle gym, she snapped my picture anyway. In short, my Carnegie library experience has instilled in me a profound admiration for the members of your profession--for their intelligence, skill, and open-mindedness. And I experience a little thrill when my librarian friends refer to me as an honorary librarian.

But as I sat down to write my comments, it also began to sink in just what I had taken on--agreeing to address an audience of real librarians, people who are undoubtedly better informed than I am about the issues currently facing public libraries. And these issues are complex indeed, given that in some circles the very term "library" seems to have become for some a synonym for the phrase "moribund storehouse of outmoded information." I am overstating this, of course, but something has certainly gone awry when august library schools close their doors, when many that remain expunge the word "library" from their titles altogether, and when leaders in the profession suggest that the only way to save librarianship is to abandon the library.

So I have decided to stick with my strengths as an historian and to offer you some reflections on the past that might inform our thinking about the present and the future. I start with the observation that public librarianship has always been intertwined with the library as a physical space. Indeed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was impossible to discuss the profession without also discussing the place. In part, this was because librarians understood that without the authority to determine the library's spatial arrangements, their aspirations to professional status were doomed. From the moment the American Library Association was founded in 1876, library architecture was the focus of keen interest, with William Poole and others condemning the double-height book-storage rooms and other beautiful--but unworkable--library arrangements concocted by our most prominent architects. In fact, library donors ignored these complaints until the very end of the nineteenth century, when Andrew Carnegie put his money where librarians' mouths had been, winning himself a place of honor in library school curricula that he does not typically enjoy in social history programs.

Control over the physical space of the library continued to...