Memories of the ALA Library History Round Table

What a delight to reflect on my experiences as a library historian and the role of the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association as I enter my eighty-fourth year.Though my serious interest in libraries began in high school and developed during college and graduate school, my official career began with a MLS degree from Berkeley in 1964 and an appointment as reference librarian and special collections bibliographer at Fresno State College. As a new member of ALA, my first annual conference was in 1967, when I attended the program session of the American Library History Round Table. The LHRT program session was on Monday, June 26, at 4:30 p.m.—not the best time, except for the committed. As I remember there were maybe fifteen to twenty people present, of whom I was conspicuously the youngest. The presentation on oral library history interested me less than the paper on Ida Kidder, “Pioneer Western Land Grant Librarian,” by W. H. Carlson of Corvallis, Oregon, and the paper on Mabel Ray Gillis, “California State Librarian” by Peter T. Conmy of the Oakland Public Library. This is probably because I was twenty-seven at the time, in my first professional position as head of special collections and reference librarian at Fresno State College library. I had just sent for publication my first-ever library history piece: a four-page illustrated insert for the October 1967 issue of the California Librarian, entitled “In Fair and Foul: Early Fresno Libraries.”As a doctoral student at Illinois (1968–1972), I found myself increasingly committed to the history of libraries that drew on my previous studies in history and literature. This resulted in a dissertation that studied the Association of American Library Schools (now the Association for Library and Information Science Education) and two other associations of professional schools in the United States and Canada. From 1971 onward I taught courses in the history of archives, books, and libraries regularly at the library school of the University of Texas at Austin until full retirement in 2006, thirty-five years in all.After defending my dissertation at Illinois, I attended the ALA conference in Chicago and participated in the round table’s twenty-fifth anniversary program session. In 1972, during the election of officers that followed the two papers, I nominated Michael Harris for chair. His election signaled a turning point from the founding leaders of the first twenty-five years to a new era of leadership and activity for the round table. Harris and his young colleagues began to serve as key players in the round table’s direction. Program presenters, for example, now included professional historians with related interests. Colleagues who assumed leadership in LHRT in the fifteen years after 1972, included, to name a few, Laurel Grotzinger, George Bobinski, Doris Dale, Susan Thompson, Budd Gambee, Phyllis Dain, Mary Niles Maack, Lee Shiflett, Robert Williams, Arthur Young, Robert Martin, Jim Carmichael, Wayne Wiegand, and Jane Rosenberg. All left their marks on library history and the LHRT.As a young library historian, I absorbed the enthusiasms I perceived from my colleagues. Meanwhile, in 1976 my school at Texas accepted responsibility for publishing the quarterly Journal of Library History, which began publication at Florida State University ten years earlier. The best printed treatment of the transition from the Florida State to the Texas years remains John Arvid Aho and Donald G. Davis Jr., “Advancing the Scholarship of Library History: The Role of the Journal of Library History and Libraries & Culture,” in Library History Research in America (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Center for the Book, 2000), pages 173–91. This was also published in Libraries & Culture 35 (Winter 2000): 171–91. The second half of this comprehensive essay describes the evolution of and change in the journal under my editorship.I suppose my goals for the journal, as expressed in editorial notes in early issues, were simply to make the organ look and be a more professional journal of cultural history, as stated in our self-description or mission statement: “Libraries & Culture is an interdisciplinary journal that explores the significance of collections of recorded knowledge—their creation, organization, preservation, and utilization—in the context of cultural and social history, unlimited as to time and space.” This seemed to elicit a good caliber of broad-range and international submissions and book reviewers. Things that made the journal distinctive and an attractive organ, besides the editor’s penchant for ampersands, included the bookplate on the cover with an explanatory essay inside, the space for notes and essays for miscellaneous smaller pieces, and the biographical paragraphs on contributors. These latter, if collected, would be a veritable who’s who of library history.The first issue under my guidance was volume 12, number 1, Winter 1977. As editor, I saw immediately that the journal and the round table could reinforce the mission of each to the benefit of both. In hindsight, I think that this was accomplished with more far-reaching results than any could have imagined. Four of these results were most notable in my view.First, as the elected chair of the round table for 1978–1979, I persuaded the executive committee to drop the American from the body’s name, so that it was known, as it still is, as the Library History Round Table. The reasoning was that the parent organization already had American in its name, so a repetition was redundant. The year after the ALA centennial commemoration in 1976, the Library Association of the United Kingdom celebrated its centennial as well. The LHRT authorized its chair, Budd Gambee (North Carolina), and chair-elect, Don Davis (Texas), to be official representatives to the association’s Library History Group, the British collegial group to the LHRT. This trip in the fall of 1977 was a memorable one for me, and it led to an exchange teaching year in the library school in Birmingham, England, in 1980–1981. In addition, interests and programming were beginning to reflect an international, rather than an exclusively American, flavor. The well-attended program session of 1979 in Dallas consisted of Daniel Boorstin, Librarian of Congress, on “The Library of Congress: Past, Present and Future,” and Ian Willison, of the British Library, on “Libraries and Scholarship, Past, Present and Future.”Second, under my leadership the round table began a periodic newsletter that brought issues and announcements of various kinds to the membership. This proved to be especially useful for communication in the years before the internet and online opportunities. This encouraged cooperation among library history colleagues. One of the results of this for me was the support of many round table folk in the preparation of the major reference work American Library History: A Comprehensive Guide to the Literature (1989), which Mark Tucker and I put together.Third, the Journal of Library History (renamed Libraries & Culture in 1988) under my editorship sought to make the widest possible appeal to library historians with various interests around the world to submit manuscripts reflecting their scholarly pursuits. One aspect of this international interest was establishing relationships with groups similar to the round table in other countries—the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Japan, and so on. My activity in the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, and especially its Library History Special Interest Group and its Round Table of Editors of Library Journals, supported these international links. They also furnished contacts for journal submissions, program speakers, and other publishing projects. One of the notable results of this growing global network was the Encyclopedia of Library History (1994), edited by Wayne A. Wiegand and Donald G. Davis Jr., that included entries by nearly 250 international contributors.Fourth and finally, my involvement in LHRT led me to promote and organize the regular series of Library History Seminars. The seminars were a spin-off of the Journal of Library History and its founder, Louis Shores. They had convened in 1961, 1963, 1968, 1971—and 1976, the first one in which I participated and read a paper. When my editorial duties began at Texas, I took responsibility for promoting and hosting the sixth Library History Seminar in Austin in spring 1980. This seemed to set the pattern for the next three seminars, which occurred at five-year intervals at the University of North Carolina (1985), Indiana University (1990), and the University of Alabama (1995). These seminars included support from the editorial board, the round table, and, in time, the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress. Plenary sessions featured noteworthy speakers, theme sessions, and a reception. Attendance grew to more than one hundred presenters and participants. Each of these seminars resulted in two special issues of Libraries & Culture (for indexing purposes) and a published, indexed volume. An interval of five years seemed a reasonable length of time for promotion, solicitation of proposals, organizing manuscripts, conference oversight, receipt of final manuscripts, and preparation for publication. The seminars seemed to energize the library history community with collegial fellowship and intellectual challenge.John Y. Cole, founding director of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress in 1976, soon became an enthusiastic supporter of the LHRT and the journal. He not only provided continual encouragement and vision, but also included the publishing ventures of the round table and the journal as a part of implementing the center’s mission. These included Library History Research in America: Essays Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Library History Round Table (2000), Books, Libraries, Reading and Publishing in the Cold War (2001), and Libraries & Culture: Historical Essays Honoring the Legacy of Donald G. Davis, Jr. (2006). These all appeared as issues of Libraries & Culture as well as single, hardbound and indexed volumes.With the declining health of my dear wife, Avis, the retirement of my longtime editorial associate and colleague, Bette Oliver, and a sea change in the Texas school’s administration, I retired in 2006, and the journal, along with other projects of mine, began to fade away. Over time, the journal ceased to be what I and others had hoped it would be. When I retired fully in June 2006, the new editor of Libraries & Culture became David B. Gracy II, a distinguished colleague of mine at Texas whose field was archival management and who had been a longtime associate editor of the journal. (Eleven local faculty members from a variety of departments in the liberal arts at UT–Austin held this title and served as an editorial board with quarterly meetings. Seven or eight library historians beyond the university served as an advisory board. This group always included a LHRT representative.)Gracy soon prevailed in his desire to make the journal’s title reflect his interests and renamed it Libraries & the Cultural Record. With Gracy’s retirement, another faculty member continued to edit the journal. Then, after several years, the title eliminated the word libraries altogether to become Information & Culture, largely fulfilling a goal of Andrew Dillon, dean of the renamed School of Information. On his leaving the deanship 2017, he assumed the editorship of the journal, the position he continues to hold. I think it is no secret to say that Dillon, who became dean in 2002, wanted to take the school in a new direction in which libraries and archival collections were only a minuscule (and a prosaic?) part of the universe of “information” as he thought of it. I had been interim dean in the latter months of 2001 and tried to work with Dillon in the transitional period, but with growing misgivings. He seemed to think that library history had no real place in an information school. I had increasing difficulty in getting my last two or three doctoral students through, the dean thinking that their topics should have found a home in another academic department. My courses were gradually eliminated in the years after my retirement. There seemed to be little room in the new progressive “I” school for the journal that I had edited for thirty years and was a big part of my academic career. Happily, it has been ably succeeded by the round table’s own Libraries: Culture, History, and Society. The seminars continue.In sum, my thirty or so years of close association with the Library History Round Table were the richest and most fulfilling of my professional life. My closest friends and colleagues derived from this source. I cannot name them all, but I must mention Mark Tucker, Wayne Wiegand, and John Cole as peers who encouraged me many times in innumerable ways.