History of libraries, including the development of public libraries in the American Gilded Age and a discussion of technology.

2. CHAINED LIBRARIES
Chained library in Chelsea Old
Church, photograph by Colin Smith
• Librarianship today is in some ways “American,” but of course libraries
predate America
• Chained libraries had their most important books chained to shelves or
lecterns to protect them
• Jenny Weston with Universiteit Leiden calls them “the world’s first
public libraries.
• First “public” library in England, in Lincolnshire, had many of its books
chained.
• Surviving chained libraries typically date from the fifteenth to
seventeenth centuries.
• Typically Spartan spaces intended solely for reading and study.

3. THE AMERICAN PUBLIC LIBRARY
• Necessary democratic institution or public gathering
space?
• 1876: First federal report published on American public
libraries.
• American Library Association also founded in 1876.
• 1956: Library Services Act provided federal funds for
public libraries.
• Popular fiction accounted for about three quarters of
circulating material.
• Wiegand’s study concluded that libraries primarily
served as central spaces for community and diffusion of
cultural norms rather than as the vaunted role of keeping
citizens informed about politics.

4. GILDED AGE (1870–1900)
• Early public librarians saw their job as uplifting or educating the populace, opposed to “mass” or
“low” culture.
• Early branch libraries, extending what we discussed last time about mobile libraries.
• By the 1890s, events such as concerts and exhibits began being held in libraries, and children’s
librarianship had its beginnings.
• Early librarians, as indicated by Alexis McCrossen, were deeply concerned about the moral influence
of their institutions and about the possibility of libraries being taken over by “loafers”
• While McCrossen focuses on urban libraries and Wiegand focuses on rural, both depict the library as
an institution that came to be about mass culture rather than high culture, due apparently is its tax-
funded and therefore public nature.
• We might conclude that this is the effect of the transformation of the library from private to public
institution: It necessarily caters to the public and to public taste, though librarians to this day
continue, rightly or wrongly, in efforts to shape that taste.

5. Photo by Rockwood
Makerspace Build your own
Skateboard Camp

6. THE CATALOG
BOOKS TO CARDS TO COMPUTERS
Photograph by Regina Hartley
Photograph by Mamsy (CC Attribution 2.0 Generic)

7. HISTORY OF THE CARD CATALOGNix, L. T. (2009, January 21). Evolution of the library card catalog. The Library History Buff.
http://www.libraryhistorybuff.org/cardcatalog-evolution.htm
• When library catalogs were printed in books, the catalog went out of date before it could be printed.
• In 1791, the revolutionary government of France creates public libraries and librarians begin writing
inventories on the backs of playing cards.
• “Slip catalog” proposed at Harvard in 1840 by Thaddeus William Harris.
• In 1860, John Langdon Sibley, also of Harvard, proposes a card catalog for public use.
• By 1886, Melvil Dewey’s own supply company provides both cabinets and cards.
• In 1901, the Library of Congress began offering pre-printed cards to libraries.

8. CATALOGS
Smithsonian Magazine declared the card
catalog officially dead in 2015 after OCLC
stopped offering printed cards.