CILIP | Library and Information History Group: 'You might need it again'

'You might need it again'

An article published in the Library Association Record by John Crawford, Chair of the LHG

In the late Malcolm Bradbury's novel, Dr Criminale, the eponymous and aptly named hero is quoted as saying, 'You know the old saying: never forget the past, you may need it again in the future'.[1] This implies that the past has lessons to teach us which we may not even be aware of. Clearly history does not repeat itself as events are never quite the same in both a historical and a current situation. However certain broad themes can be identified over a surprisingly long period. As the 1990s showed, political instability in the Balkans, which has been a problem since the 1870s and set off a world war, has not gone away. The factors which caused crises over a hundred years ago are still there.

In the less dramatic world of library history the same situation can be found. In completing my Ph.D. thesis,[2] I found that, in Scotland, similar attitudes to the organisation of publicly available libraries survived for a period of almost two hundred years. Publicly available libraries in Scotland developed and flourished primarily in market towns and villages from the 1740s onwards. An organisational culture grew up of small libraries, which had little contact with one another, locally administered by local people. The management culture was amateur but not amateurish. The coming of rate supported libraries in the late nineteenth century merely reinforced this system of thought since they mainly served quite small towns. The arrival of the county libraries after the First World War offered the possibility of larger administrative units, absorption of smaller units by larger ones and burgh and county co-operation. These ideas were anathema to the burgh librarians who were still opposing them as late as the 1960s, a decade ironically, in which the old small scale world finally faded away.

I have been pondering the past lately, and its implications for the present, for highly practical reasons. I work in a 1992 university with a mission to attract hitherto underrepresented social groups in higher education. We currently live in a skills-based educational culture, a consequence of the computer revolution of the 1980s. Higher education has had to respond to this by promoting the teaching of vocational 'relevant' skills over traditional academic subjects which 'only make you think'. It is essential that we all learn these skills for, as the government keeps reminding us, the only alternative is economic decline. Since the present government came to power in 1997 the agenda has been lifelong learning, continuous re-education for a knowledge based economy, and my university, Glasgow Caledonian University, is active in promoting lifelong learning. As I sit through meetings about planning lifelong learning I begin to wonder if we have been through all this before and the answer is - Yes - several times.

What nowadays is called lifelong learning was originally known as the diffusion of useful knowledge among the working classes and there was even an organisation to promote it, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded in 1826, to provide cheap, educational literature for the masses. The idea of useful knowledge encompassed the new engineering skills which the industrial revolution had generated and was a product of the utilitarian, skills-based, educational system which was being promoted at the time to include groups, hitherto excluded from that system. The twin ideals of social inclusion through education and the inculcation of new skills has surfaced periodically ever since. The public library movement from the 1850s onwards, with its ideal of providing 'improving literature' for the working classes, is another example. The university extension movement of the late 19th century, which led to the creation of the civic universities of the 20th century is yet another. Perhaps the best modern example is the Open University. All these initiatives have tried to include hitherto under or unrepresented groups in some stage of the educational process and they have all to some extent been successful, although probably none has achieved all its aims. What they have probably all done is to recruit elites within the target group, usually drawn from the upper working class. Although it is early days yet the limited evidence available suggests that the elite recruited this time around will be composed mainly of women. Not much work has been done on gender issues in library use but what there is suggests that women make more use of the services provided than men and are more willing to articulate a need for support.[3] This is not exactly good news for already hard pressed higher education library staff but it will not greatly surprise those of us who work in universities with nursing contracts.

Perhaps then library history has messages for our times. Today it fits more happily into modern historiography than it did when I studied it as a student. Then I was uncomfortably aware that the dramatis personae of library history were pretty small beer, compared with the titanic figures of political history. Since then we have seen the rise of social history: 'a lively, argumentative and powerful field, combining the insights of Marxism, anthropology, sociology and annaliste mentalite [French cultural history] to produce an understanding of the everyday lives of past peoples'.[4] Now we also have black history, feminist history and gay and lesbian history, all using a much wider range of sources than would have been considered appropriate forty years ago. Clearly we are among friends.

So if library history has lessons to teach us, and a role in modern historiography, what place does it have in the profession as we prepare for unification with the Institute of Information Scientists? The Library History Group of the Library Association is a forum for considering these issues. So, what does the Library History Group actually do? We organise conferences to generate new library history material and facilitate discussion. Last April we ran a successful conference at Croydon on the theme of '150 Years of the Public Library in Britain and around the World' which attracted attendees and contributors from both Britain and abroad. We have had two successful joint conferences with the [German] Wolfenbuttel study circle in library history and we plan another this year. The Under One Umbrella conferences are an important opportunity for us because they are a chance for Group members to attend presentations that they might not otherwise be able to get to. We manage and edit the successful journal Library History which has just gone from two to three issues a year because of the increased volume of material being submitted. Some of our committee members are editing a three volume history of libraries in the British Isles to be published by Cambridge University Press during the coming decade. We have just finished improving and extending our website. Please visit it at www.la-hq.org.uk/lhg.htm. We maintain an electronic discussion list lis-libhist with over 300 members which you can visit at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/lis-libhist.html and we also run an annual essay competition for the best article on library history published each year in the British Isles. We produce a newsletter regularly. We welcome Group members at our committee meetings as observers and we have a rolling programme of meetings in historic libraries around the country which our members in different localities can attend. We have recently decided to admit non LA members to the LHG in the hope of involving other types of historian in our work.

We have also been giving some thought to our future. Should we remain an independent specialist group or link up with other specialist groups with a historical interest? The Rare Books Group and the Local Studies Group are the obvious candidates. We have debated the pros and cons of amalgamation and independence ourselves but have had limited success in involving other groups in the debate, despite attempting to generate a discussion via lis-libhist. However it is clearly the case that the Library History Group has concerns which are of wider than just historical significance. A key one is the disappearance of our specialities from Information Studies Department syllabuses. Many Information Studies Departments now teach only post graduate courses with the result that hard choices about content have to be made. Not only has library history disappeared but subjects once considered 'core', like classification and cataloguing, are also vanishing. If a range of specialist groups have similar concerns why does the Library Association not have a forum to air them? At LHG committee meetings we sometimes find ourselves discussing issues which other groups probably discuss as well. Why is there no forum to exchange experiences and discuss possible common solutions? An Email discussion list would be easy to set up and an annual meeting of branch and group chairs would be a possibility. These would be valuable planning tools.

From the perspective of library history I think the LA as it changes needs a lively debate which reviews its past and plans its future. To find out what members want the ideas I have suggested above would be useful but I think, in addition, that the LA should carry out a wide ranging membership opinion survey. The results of this will give it the authority it needs to plan for the future in the name of its members.

The LHG is trying to improve communications with its members and spread the debate about the value and relevance of library history in Britain today. Indeed we ask the question which every generation should ask anew: What is library history? William Munford and Thomas Kelly, in their day, presented a very constitutional library history in which the fight for, and the creation of, legislation and its consequences were examined in detail. How library history could be integrated into a wider social and cultural background received rather less attention. But even then, Paul Kaufman the American library historian and 18th century specialist, was ferreting into membership of subscription libraries and looking at how their members operated in a wider society. Today we have related sub disciplines like book history, information history and the wider world of the history of communications to ponder. Like the present, the past is constantly changing through the development of new knowledge and interpretations. If you have any view to express and want to contribute to the debate why not send a message (and join if you have not already) to lis-libhist, now relocated from Mailbase to JISC.

Footnotes

[1] Bradbury, Malcolm. Dr Criminale. Penguin, 1992. p. 133.
[2] Crawford, John C. 'Historical models of library provision: the example of Scotland', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Glasgow Caledonian University, [1993].
[3] Hull, Barbara. Barriers to libraries as agents of lifelong learning. Library and Information Commission Research report 31, 2000.
[4] Arnold, John H. History: a very short introduction. Oxford University Press, 2000. p.114.

Updated: 14 July 2006