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20 Chapter 1 Roger Fry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art were publishing texts about how museum education had transformed the exhibition and display of museum objects and had changed the experience of going to a museum.14 By this point the status of museums and libraries as institutions no longer produced the same kind of controversy. Instead, the maturation of these spaces was completed through the process of their professionalization. As specific types of educational training and expertise became increasingly required to work in and write about these spaces,museums and libraries sought to embrace their new status as professional organizations. Formerly politically charged institutions,they became anxious to shift the public perception of their relationships with the political and the economic worlds. Publicly they were increasingly perceived as symbolic and stable cultural (as opposed to political) spaces.15 Their symbolic value as institutions was in large part a result of their founding as political institutions. Ideals that had been abstracted from their specific histories, including the arguments surrounding the importance of their early development, still clung to them but in a new and vague form.The original meanings of the terms of the postrevolutionary political debates about social control and national spirit in the library had over time become obscured and were replaced only by a sense that libraries and museums were both central symbols of democracy. Professionalizing Late Nineteenth-Century Culture The professionalization of the museum and the library helped to cement ideas about them in the mind of the public.16 In his essay “The Profession,” published in the first issue of the American Library Journal, Melvil Dewey, who had spearheaded the founding of both the journal and the American Library Association (ALA) that year, and whose ideas would later play a direct role in educating Nella Larsen and Marianne Moore,announced that the new era of librarianship had arrived: The time has at last come when a librarian may, without assumption, speak of his occupation as a profession. . . . It is in the interest of the modern library, and of those desiring to make its influence wider and greater, that this journal has been established. Its founders have an intense faith in the future of our libraries, and believe that if the best methods can be applied by the best librarians, the public may soon be brought to recognize our claim that the free library ranks with the free school. . . . The time was when a library was very like a museum, and a librarian was a mouser in musty books, and visitors looked with Women and the Mutual Development of Museums and Libraries 21 curious eyes at ancient tomes and manuscripts. The time is when a library is a school, and the librarian is in the highest sense a teacher, and the visitor is a reader among the books as a workman among his tools. Will any man deny to the high calling of such a librarianship the title of profession?17 Dewey’s call to professionalize the library made the library new, and it seemed to do this at the expense of the museum.Yet this remaking of the library also demonstrated that the process of professionalization involved an effacing of history. By making the library new, Dewey was altering—or even purposefully erasing—the library’s previous history.He established a clear line of demarcation between what he wanted remembered about the library’s dusty pre-1876 past and its modern, gleaming post-1876 future. His notion was a powerful one. Generally, historians have agreed with Dewey’s assessment. “The Profession,” an often-quoted essay, has been used as a sound bite to illustrate the clear distinction between two eras in library development.18 Certain aspects of Dewey’s pronouncement,however,were misleading.By claiming that the pre-1876 library was premodern, he was focusing necessary attention on his singular vision for the future of the field, but he was also ignoring the past. He made no mention of the important place the library had occupied in the early nineteenth-century debates about the making of the nation and the relationship between free and continuing education and democracy ; nor did he discuss the arguments made by mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals both for and against the establishment of the public library as an American institution.This critique is not meant to challenge Dewey’s importance to the library profession—his roles in founding the American Library Association, the Library Journal, and the first library science...

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