Agents of Universal Learning: A Librarian’s Education Before the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT An overwhelming majority of writing on librarian education’s historical development focuses solely on the nineteenth-century accomplishments of Melvil Dewey and the founders of the American Library Association (ALA). Claiming a fundamental difference in levels of social consciousness, historians separate early librarians from those from today as different species and avoid fully investigating librarian education’s rich progression over the last several centuries. Early librarians had social consciousness woven into their instruction and emphasized a library as an institution for social mobility at every opportunity. Rather than viewing Dewey as the originator of librarian education, this article positions him within a longer continuum of developments, showing how his reforms built on (and sometimes erased) prior advocacy for librarian education.