What We Wrote About and Who We Were: Historical Writings in JLH/LandC, 1966-2000

When studying the work of the Masters, I watch the working of their minds.

—Lu Chi, Wen Fu

It has been said that the mansion of history contains many rooms. If this is so, then we can safely assume that the room devoted to the history of libraries and librarianship is one of the smaller ones, probably back in a corner somewhere. But despite its size, our little room contains a great deal of interesting intellectual furniture constructed painstakingly over the past several decades by a small cadre of historians—some amateur, some trained—dedicated to the task of explicating our library past. One of the major vehicles for sharing our research has been the venerable journal Libraries & Culture and its predecessor, the Journal of Library History. Ever curious about how we communicate what we know about our lively discipline, I decided to take a closer look at JLH/L&C from its inception in 1966 through the end of the century to discover what kind of historical topics were explored within its pages. ¹

This essay does not pretend to be definitive but is instead an effort to produce a broadly constructed picture of what topical areas our little community of scholars has deemed worthy of investigating since the mid-1960s as reflected in the pages of the Journal of Library History and Libraries & Culture. For those who have paid close attention to our literature, this exercise will tell them little new; for others, it may prove informative. If nothing else, it provides a snapshot of where we have been, who we are, and perhaps where we are going as historians of libraries and librarianship.

Founded by Louis Shores and Wayne Shirley in 1966 at Florida State University, the quarterly Journal of Library History spent a decade in Tallahassee before migrating to Austin, Texas, where it has been ever since. ² Of course, the creation of the JLH was just one in a long line of historical journals that have appeared since the modern formation of history as a professional academic endeavor began developing in the latter part of the nineteenth century. ³ And although the monograph is the primary vehicle for historians to communicate their research, the journal retains its position as a significant platform for sharing historical conclusions. As such, the journal enjoys a widespread popularity for quick dissemination of smaller studies from which larger book-length works may later appear. The intellectual direction of a discipline or subdiscipline can often be determined by a close examination of the literature that appears in its primary journal. ⁴ Therefore, to better understand how library history has evolved, I have sought to analyze the topics that have graced the pages of the JLH/L&C over the past thirty-five years to discover patterns of scholarship.

My methodology was relatively straightforward. Beginning with the first volume of the Journal of Library History (1966) and going through the end of volume 35 of Libraries & Culture (2000), I examined the items that appeared in the articles section of each issue. Technical notes, book reviews or review essays, and other types of communication were not considered. As Donald G. Davis Jr. noted in an editorial soon after taking over the editorship of JLH in 1976, articles were deemed scholarship that most often consisted of "carefully developed papers, reports, and essays based on original research and primary resources." ⁵ Limiting my review to this type of material enabled me to efficiently determine the most significant research that was being published in JLH/L&C.

Tables 1 and 2 represent a topical and chronological summary of the articles. Table 1 shows the breakdown for articles with American history subjects, and table 2 reflects internationally oriented articles. Each table is further divided into three subsections, the first representing the period from 1966 to 1979 and the other two comprising the...