Wayne A. Wiegand - American Public School Librarianship: A History

American Public School Librarianship

A History

WAYNE A. WIEGAND

Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore

2021 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Johns Hopkins University Press

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Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wiegand, Wayne A., 1946 author.

Title: American public school librarianship : a history / Wayne A. Wiegand.

Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020045457 | ISBN 9781421441504 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781421441511 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: School librariesUnited StatesHistory.

Classification: LCC Z675.S3 W68 2021 | DDC 027.80973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045457

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Photo on page : Courtesy of the Western Michigan University Archives and Regional History Collections.

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To the memory of

Jean Elizabeth Lowrie,

19182014

President of the American Association of School Librarians, 19631964

President of the American Library Association, 19731974

Founder and First President of the International Association of School Librarianship, 19711977

Director, Western Michigan University School of Librarianship, 19631981

and

Valued Mentor

One of the benefits of historical research is that it is cumulative: research on one project often leads to another and thus helps to ground the second project. Thus, the funding that supported the first should also be acknowledged for the second, even though it was not specifically awarded for the latter project. For grants that fit that category, I thank the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of WisconsinMadison for a fellowship in the spring semester of 1998 that enabled me to undertake research for Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 18761956 (2011), which shows up in this books coverage of the cooperative arrangement between the Sauk Centre, Minnesota, public library and school system; the New York Public Library for a Short Term Fellowship in October 2011; the National Endowment for the Humanities, which gave me a Fellowship for University Teachers in 20089; Dean Larry Dennis of Florida State Universitys College of Communication and Information Studies, who agreed to match the NEH fellowship so I had a complete year for nothing but research; and the American Library Association for a Diversity Grant I used in May 2012 to research newspaper databases at the Library of Congress.

For grants that specifically funded research for the present project, I would like to thank the Spencer Foundation for a fellowship in the fall semester of 2000 that jumpstarted this project, and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, for awarding me a Distinguished Visiting Scholar position that enabled me to exploit the librarys rich resources and services from January through May 2017. And to fund two months research in the summer of 2017 in the American Library Association Archives at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, I thank the American Library Association for awarding me a Gale Cengage History Research and Innovation grant and the National Endowment for the Humanities for awarding me a Summer Stipend.

Projects like this cannot be accomplished without the help of archivists and librarians. My thanks to librarians at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of WisconsinMadison, and at the latter especially Michele Besant of the School of Information Library, where I screened thousands of early twentieth-century public library annual reports describing cooperative arrangements with local schools; librarians at Florida State University; librarians and archivists at the Library of Congress, where I mined most of the databases listed in my bibliography of primary sources; archivists at George Washington University in Washington, DC, where the archives of the National Education Association are located; and archivists at the American Library Association Archives at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (special thanks to archivists Cara Bertram and Anna Tramell).

My thanks also to Chris Dodge, who compiled the index (the fourth time he has done this for me) and provided proofreading assistance; Johns Hopkins University Press, the anonymous readers, and especially my editor, Kyle P. Gipson, who showed enormous patience with a sometimes fussy author and certainly made this into a better book; former students and colleagues with whom I have discussed ideas and conclusions that have found their way into this book; and Doug Zweizig, who reviewed for historical accuracy the section in on Library Power. Last but never least, thanks to my wife, Shirl, who read through the entire manuscript with her usual critical eye and with whom this year I am celebrating fifty-five years of marriage.

Several paragraphs extracted from my previous publications appear in this book, including material on the Bryant Library of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, which is from Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 18761956 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011); and material on adolescent responses to reading serial fiction taken from Part of Our Lives: A Peoples History of the American Public Library (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) and Sanitizing American Library History: Reflections of a Library Historian, Library Quarterly 90 (April 2020): 10820. All of these publications have graciously given me permission to reuse bits and pieces of these previously published materials.

All royalties for this book will be donated to the Dr. Jean E. Lowrie Global Lecture Endowment, which helps fund the International Association of School Librarians annual Jean E. Lowrie Lecture and the Florida Book Awards annual Jean E. Lowrie Older Childrens Literature Award Endowment. The Florida State University Foundation manages both endowments.

American Public School Librarianship

Can I get a library pass? Over the past 120 years, millions of American K12 public school students have asked that question probably billions of times, yet we still know little about the history of public school libraries, which over the decades were pulled together and managed by hundreds of thousands of school librarians. This book is the first comprehensive attempt to recount that history. As I sit at my desk in 2020, there are more than 80,000 American public school libraries being managed by 88,500 full- and part-time school librarians, almost all of whom have little knowledge of the history of their profession beyond their lifetimes.