"The History of Libraries in the United States": A Conference Report

The Library Company of Philadelphia, America's first lending library, which was founded by Benjamin Franklin, hosted a conference on "The History of Libraries in the United States" from 11 to 13 April 2002. This invitational conference, organized by Kenneth Carpenter and Thomas Augst, was sponsored by Princeton University; the Center for the Book, Library of Congress; the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; the Council on Library and Information Resources; and the Bibliographical Society of America. James Green and his colleagues at the Library Company of Philadelphia handled local arrangements and sponsored two receptions for guests. Held at the Radisson Plaza-Warwick Hotel in Center City Philadelphia, the conference featured thirty scholars from both the United States and Europe and was attended by over 150 registrants. Nicholson Baker, the author of Doublefold, opened the conference on Thursday evening, 11 April, with a public lecture at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on aspects of the post-World War II history of the Library of Congress.

One major purpose of the conference was to stimulate new scholarship about libraries, librarians, and scholars. Although librarians and library historians have developed an impressive body of scholarship over the last several decades, the library has remained largely neglected by the traditional academic disciplines. Recent trends in interdisciplinary inquiry, especially related to the history of the book, have made this a timely moment to engage a larger audience in the history of libraries. In this spirit, the conference brought together both established and younger scholars from history, literary studies, librarianship, and other fields to explore the complexity of the library as an institution and examine the diversity of roles it has played. As the various conference papers and sessions demonstrated, the library is an artifact of our historical landscape that offers unique perspectives on important themes in the development of American culture: the history of leisure and work; the emergence of the professions; the formation of gender, class, and racial identities; the evolution of civic architecture; and the organization of knowledge and intellectual property.

The libraries that we today call "research libraries," which in the mid-nineteenth century were termed "reference libraries," have received relatively scant attention, with historical scholarship being almost entirely focused on individual institutions: the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library in the twentieth century, and particular academic libraries. Even in the case of major older universities, histories do not exist. This conference was a step in directing further attention to libraries that have shaped intellectual life, both in the earlier period when learned culture was located in the public arena and in the later when American universities, under the influence of German universities, began to become research institutions.

On the morning of 12 April, the conference began with a session on "Culture and Religion in Early American Libraries," chaired by Charles E. Rosenberg of Harvard. James Raven, from Oxford, presented "Moral Reading and the Cultural Dependency of Early American Libraries." David D. Hall, also of Harvard University, spoke about "Libraries and Learned Culture in Early America." Both Hall and Raven sought to establish a genealogy for the library within the larger contours of Anglo-American learned culture and transatlantic systems of book circulation.

Two subsequent sessions explored the mechanics of book collection and the formation of research libraries. Harold Shapiro, president emeritus of Princeton University, recounted the transformation of American colleges into universities, while Kenneth Carpenter, retired from the Harvard University Library, spoke about the internationalization of collections in various types of libraries. Neil Harris of the history department at the University of Chicago, in an extensive commentary on their papers, considered parallels and differences between research libraries and museums in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, thus emphasizing the desirability of considering the role of research libraries in broad cultural terms. Later in the day, John Cole of the Center for the...