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Libraries & Culture 39.2 (2004) 225-227



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Libraries to the People: Histories of Outreach. Edited by Robert S. Freeman and David V. Hovde. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2003. x, 245 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-7864-1359-X.

We live in an information age, yet pockets of people remain underserved because of geographic, socioeconomic, and cultural factors. Anyone who wants a deeper understanding of how people have addressed this challenge historically should pick up a copy of Libraries to the People: Histories of Outreach. This collection of essays grew out of two programs sponsored by the American Library Association's Library History Round Table in 1999. Divided into three parts and fourteen chapters, it emphasizes "the contributions of librarians and educators in the United States who have endeavored to extend services to populations that previously did not have access to a library" (2). This book brings to life librarians like Essae Martha Culver, who brought books to residents of Louisiana's bayou, as well as readers like Eddie Lovett, the impoverished Arkansas sharecropper who built a four-thousand-volume private library to share with his family and neighbors. In addition to essays about services to historically underserved groups such as African Americans, Native Americans, and readers behind bars, this work includes chapters that consider such innovative forms of outreach as open-air libraries and the use of radio to promote municipal reference service. Exploring programs and the people who benefited from them, Libraries to the People illuminates some of the many ways books, libraries, and librarians have helped diverse groups of people move from the margins to the mainstream.

Rather than presenting a survey history of library outreach, Libraries to the People provides snapshots of outreach efforts at intervals spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One theme emerging from part 1, "Benevolent and Commercial Organizations," is the challenge of providing library service to rural readers. Florence M. Jumonville examines the pioneering work of Louisiana Library Commission executive secretary Essae Martha Culver, who confronted the dual challenges of geography and racism as she worked to build a system of parish libraries that would reach geographically dispersed readers, many of them African Americans. The traveling library represents one vital form of outreach to rural readers. Anyone who has seen volumes from the Harper and Brothers' Family and School District Libraries (affordable collections of books made available to rural communities beginning in the 1830s) will appreciate Robert S. Freeman's analysis of this commercial venture. Reviewing their content, the economics of distribution, and the collections' intended purpose, Freeman argues that Harper and Brothers chose titles with readers, not profit, in mind. Seaboard libraries for American sailors represent yet another form of traveling library. David M. Hovde incorporates the voices of some readers into an essay that explores the efforts of groups such as the American Seamen's Friend Society, the United States Christian Commission, and the American Merchant Marine Library Association to provide seamen with access to books. These programs, he argues, provided an unacknowledged foundation for the American Library Association's World War I library campaign. [End Page 225] Much like Hovde, Paula D. Watson establishes a link between traveling libraries initiated by women's clubs and the public library movement. This well-researched piece also provides a useful table documenting the traveling library programs of women's clubs in thirty-eight states. Finally, Plummer Alston Jones Jr. examines the Americanization work of the ALA Committee on Work with the Foreign Born from its inception in 1918 to 1948. Like readers portrayed in earlier chapters, immigrants eagerly welcomed outreach services, which enabled them "to enter into the mainstream of American life" (106).

The second part of the book, "Government Supported Programs," considers service to groups such as prisoners, township residents, African Americans, and Native Americans. In a fascinating chapter entitled "Reachin' behind Bars," Larry E. Sullivan and Brenda Vogel provide a historical context for understanding current policies pertaining to prisoners and Internet access, arguing that "the nineteenth-century ethos of the keepers to control reading and information will frame prison libraries...

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