The Rich Potential of American Public School Library History: Research Needs and Opportunities for Historians of Education and Librarianship

Although the American public school library is one of this nation's most ubiquitous educational institutions, we know very little about its history. For the past century public school libraries have provided service to tens of thousands of schoolteachers and administrators and millions of K–12 users of both sexes and of all creeds, races, ethnicities, and classes. In recent years students annually averaged 1.5 billion visits to school libraries, about one and a half times the number of visits to state and national parks. On those visits they checked out and read billions of books, listened to millions of stories, accessed thousands of computerized databases, and constructed millions of reports and papers on hundreds of thousands of topics that they later submitted for academic evaluation.¹

Public school libraries are everywhere American public schools exist. Statistics demonstrate conclusively that they have been used by most Americans sometime in their lives. But to what ends? For what purposes? As of this writing no comprehensive book-length history of the institution is available to help identify the multiple roles it has played in elementary and secondary education over the generations. Nor is there an adequate scholarly body of historical literature available to guide leaders planning the school library's future.

It is not difficult to prove these statements. A literature search of relevant databases and standard library history bibliographies conducted in December 2005 generated a two hundred–item bibliography of published and unpublished secondary sources on the subject that could justifiably be called "definitive."² After 1965, in fact, librarianship has seen very little substantive historical literature—published or unpublished—on the American public school library. That was when most graduate programs in library and information studies (LIS) accredited by the American Library Association (ALA) dropped requirements to write master's theses. In addition, dissertations on American public school library history also diminished after 1985, when LIS doctoral programs began to focus much more attention on libraries as information institutions (with "information" almost always linked to and defined by newer information technologies).

As of 2006 very few scholars were working on American public school library history topics to help the nation's education community identify the school library's multiple roles, establish a baseline of historical data that would provide perspective to leaders planning its future, or outline historically based theoretical frames to ground the construction of policy. The public school library profession itself does not recognize the value of deepening its own historical understanding. For example, in an essay entitled "Research in School Library Media for the Next Decade" published in the spring 2003 issue of Library Trends on the theme "Research Questions for the 21st Century," author Delia Neuman failed to cite any need for historical studies in school librarianship.³

What little literature exists, however, does offer hints of the public school library's place in the broader arena of American library history. The American public school library is largely a twentieth-centuryphenomenon, although its origins can be found in school district libraries of the mid-nineteenth century. By 1900 many newly established elementary and (especially) secondary schools had entered into agreements with local public libraries to supply the extracurricular and independent reading needs of their students. At the end of World War I, however, the National Education Association (NEA) was pressing for more direct control over school library collections. It advocated the creation of separate libraries to be acquired, staffed, and organized by the school system specifically for teachers and students and specifically in support of the school curriculum.

In the 1920s the NEA developed standards for elementary and secondary school libraries, and shortly thereafter some state and local governments began funding school library supervisors, issuing school library handbooks, and publishing recommended reading lists. The Depression and World War II interrupted growth, but in postwar America school libraries expanded their collections to include nonprint media. As a result, many transformed themselves into "instructional media centers" or "school library and media centers." Then came the Great Society legislation of 1965, including...