Contributions in Librarianship and Information Science – serie

Wiegand examines the development of ALA from 1876 to 1917 in this masterful tale. He looks at the issues that existed during those years, the conflicts, and the changing characteristics of ALA's Executive Board, and succeeds in giving us a particularly revealing picture of the nature of the profession. He analyzes the three elements of Dewey's motto, `The best reading for the largest number at the least cost,' and how they characterized ALA's development as the leaders sought to accomplish those goals. Wiegand makes his points carefully in this story of a `struggle to accommodate shifting pressures and power groups within the world of librarianship. This is a perceptive, reliable recounting of our early history, and will stimulate a great deal of discussion. Wiegand's book deserves a wide audience. Wilson Library Bulletin

As fast-paced technical changes are transforming the field of information science, this book explores in depth the early stages of the field through the history of the American Society for Information Science (ASIS), which began in 1937 as the American Documentation Institute (ADI). ADIs early years coincided with the period when the organization, communication, and retrieval of information began to undergo critical changes. At this time, its appointed members represented the scientific and scholarly elite of the country. ADI offered innovative services that allowed research workers to obtain published information from remote sources and initiated a new channel for distribution of unpublished data. Only in the early 1950s did ADI become a membership organization. Examining this period, Irene Farkas-Conn raises important questions: How did the ADI come about? Did its founding signal the beginning of a new profession? Was it then, or still now, a technology-driven organization? Bringing together her knowledge of organizations, insights gained from interviews with key actors, and analysis of archival collections and private papers, she reconstitutes the emergence of the field as the history of ASIS is covered.Beginning with a detailed survey of the post-World War I period that preceded the creation of ADI covering topics such as the impact of national science, the introduction of microfilm for dissemination of scientific and scholarly information, copywright and documentation in the mid-1930s, she leads up to a discussion of the establishment and early years of the institute. The next sections covering World War II and the post-war period bring out the tie between the organization of wartime research and development and scientific communication, which contributed to the winning of the war. The concept of a Scientific Information Institute that would embrace bibliography, announcement, and distribution of scientific work, which Watson Davis developed in the 30s, was being realized in the postwar period when the cumulated results of wartime research had to be made avaliable to the public under presidential order. The remaining chapters chart international interests, restructuring of the institute, and the role of government and the profession in a changed society. The book includes a selected bibliography embodied in the endnotes and an index.

At the end of the 20th century, college and university libraries face enormous challenges and opportunities. As campuses move into the information age, the mission and role of the library is being redefined. While the amount of information libraries need to acquire continues to increase, the resources available to do so are insufficient. Moreover, administrators need to assess the relationship between the library and the computer center, as both fight for limited resources.This book offers academic administrators and librarians a better understanding of the issues facing the library during this time of change and the role of the library in the evolving campus of the future. Chapters are written by expert contributors, who reflect a range of perspectives and experience. The authors treat such current and emerging issues as the future of printed material in the library, the role of the library in instruction, the library and the larger campus community, the training and development of personnel for the future, library expenditures at a time when technology quickly becomes obsolete, and the future of academic libraries.

Today's rapidly evolving information-based society demands that public libraries implement planned, proactive, and innovative change to meet patron needs. Rapid, widespread, and substantive change and innovation in public librarianship depends on the ability of public librarians to share in the exchange of new ideas, regardless of the size of their communities. This book explores how managerial innovations are generated and disseminated among public librarians.To examine how new ideas are created and spread among public librarians, the volume focuses on the case of the dissemination of a particular innovation, a set of techniques developed and promoted by a national professional association, which allows public librarians to engage in user-oriented planning, community-specific role setting, and self-evaluation of library performance. This case study is placed within a larger context of classical models of the diffusion process and the literature on organizational change and innovation. Drawing on her findings, the author offers suggestions to facilitate public library change.

Librarians develop myths to explain themselves to society and to generate support for their profession. Since the last quarter of the 19th century, the prevailing myth has been the myth of the library as place. Confronted with social change, librarians are searching for a new myth. They are abandoning the myth of the library as place and are adopting uncritically the assumptions and values of the myth of the electronic library, with profound consequences for the future of librarianship.This book examines the assumptions and values of the myth of the electronic library, compares them with the myth of the library as place, and explores the meaning of the library as a place, alternatives to the information society, the role of the librarian in a therapeutic society, and the politics of librarianship. It concludes with a set of propositions with the objective of encouraging librarians to assess critically the role of libraries and librarianship in the context of social change and, especially, to debate more fully the implications of the myth of the electronic library for librarians and the users of the library.

Information technologies are having a profound impact on the ways libraries are providing traditional services. This book identifies emerging technologies and assesses their impact on two distinct yet interdependent entities, library service and library education. While other publications identify technologies and speculate on applications, this volume focuses on the impacts of information technology on several aspects of librarianship.The book first delineates emerging technologies and their impact on reference services and bibliographic instruction. It then discusses the resultant restructuring of reference services and the relationship between librarians and patrons. Bibliographic instruction is presented as a new paradigm based on the imperative that no faculty member should teach and no student should graduate without being fully information literate. The work also discusses staffing, organization, and financial support, and the structural and political placement of the library within the parent organization.

The decade prior to World War II was a time of intense introspection on the part of librarians. There was considerable controversy over whether librarianship constituted a science in any proper sense of the term. Education for librarianship was undergoing close scrutiny and reform. Issues related to federal aid, adult education, and rural library development were unresolved and subject to heated discussion. In the late 1940s the Public Library Inquiry was conceived to study and document the conditions, achievements, and weaknesses of public libraries and librarianship. For the next 40 years, the Inquiry set the tone and agenda for professional discourse about the purpose of the public library.This book examines the professional and political ideology that informed and sustained the Public LIbrary Inquiry. The volumes of the Inquiry, while representing the results of research on the status of the public library and librarianship, also reveal a remarkably consistent ideological position that united them in a way perhaps unintended by their creators. Inherent in the Inquiry's discourse are particular notions and assumptions about the nature of American democracy, the public library, and relations between them. The Inquiry also reflects, in its recommendations, particular professional values that define what the public library's purpose ought to be if the library is to contribute meaningfully to a democratic culture, and gain social recognition of that contribution.

Since the mid 1980s academic libraries have established minority residency programs in an effort to increase the representation of librarians of color in their institutions. Now more than a decade later, these programs continue to be developed. Essays written by librarians of color who participated in residency programs, and administrators whose institutions made the programs possible, remind us of the continuing need for diversity in academic libraries.