The Academic Library in the United States: Historical Perspectives

Each year many readable and informative books are published that fail to generate a sense that they needed to be written. The opposite is true of The Academic Library in the United States: Historical Perspectives, edited by Mark McCallon and John Tucker.This edited volume is readable and highly informative, and it fills a huge gap in the monographic literature through its stereoscopic focus on academic library history and its historiography. Though books on US academic library history do exist, such as Hamlin's The University Library in the United States (1981) and Kaser's The Evolution of the American Academic Library Building (1997), none combines the topical scope and historiographical emphasis accomplished in this volume by these editors, who bring to bear their considerable experience in both academic libraries and writing of library history.The volume is framed by the editors' introductory chapter exploring strengths and weaknesses of academic library historiography and a concluding chapter by Jean-Pierre V. M. Hérubel proposing methodological improvements for future practice. Between these framing chapters the editors provide a chronological sampling of writings, each prefaced by a brief contextualization. The framing chapters, prefatory materials, and bibliography for further reading comprise about 40 percent of the book, leaving 60 percent for the assembled readings. The anthologized pieces range over topics including collections, librarianship, scholarly communication, and faculty status, with authors such as Michael Harris, Beverly P. Lynch, and Wayne Wiegand. The selections are all well worth reading and provide fascinating information about the past of academic libraries in the United States.Yet it is only through a holistic reading that this book's unique richness emerges. The framing materials and selected readings alike raise themes and issues that persist across decades, some as yet still unresolved. A case in point is the awkward positionality of librarians within academia. This refrain strikes up repeatedly throughout the volume and appears as early as page 4, when McCallon and Tucker proffer their book as something to help librarians overcome a "distinct disadvantage" in communicating with other members of the academy.1A similar status awkwardness between academic libraries and parent institutions is equally discernable. Many authors detail various ways that academic libraries have responded to salient changes in higher education, but with scant reflection on the implications of that dependent dynamic. A plaintive undertone often emerges in the absence of direct analysis. If one were to tender a metaphor for this relationship, the academic library might be viewed as the symbiont of its host institution. One might even picture the mutualist relationship between the pilot fish and the whale shark. The shark gets help with parasite control, and the pilot fish gets to eat. When the shark feeds particularly well (as academia did immediately after World War II), the pilot fish grows; but when fodder becomes scarce (as state monies for academia shrank starting in the 1970s), the pilot fish feeds less well. Yet at no point anywhere in this relationship is the pilot fish actually the whale shark or the whale shark the pilot fish. Though there is tolerance, and mutual benefit, and though the direction of their joint travel is tied to the whale shark's course, at the end of the night they are still two different species with different aims and priorities. In reading this book one gets the clear sense that many of the pilot fish engaged in writing academic library history harbor a deep yearning for closer union with the whale shark.In their introductory chapter, McCallon and Tucker foreground two important questions regarding who writes academic library history. One question—the dubiety of disciplinary expertise—again invokes the awkward status of librarians in academia. Most such histories have been written by practicing librarians or faculty and students in library/information science programs, and few of these have a terminal degree in history. Hence they are perceived as lacking the rigorous training and validating "union card" of a PhD.2 The other question is one of epistemic distance. Librarian-historians largely derive their perspectives from direct engagement in professional practice. What is more, their primary audience is academic librarians. In this sense academic library history is "insider" history. The editors respond to both problematics with their view that academic librarians are so substantially grounded in interdisciplinarity that their insular histories can and do bear the weight of scrutiny.3Ample examples in the book provide grounds for leaving both questions open. In one prefatory section, for instance, the editors praise an award-winning article by Scott Bennett, titled "Libraries and Learning: A History of Paradigm Change." Though it is not included in the volume itself, if one reads the article, one will find no mention of Thomas Kuhn or his thesis of paradigm change. A trained historian would not have leaned on Kuhn rhetorically without at least some explanation of its aptness to the subject. Bennett's article is excellent in many ways, but it also betrays the nature of its authorship by ending as an advocacy piece for ways libraries should shape their services.4 Such patent advocacy is evident throughout the book in both the selected chapters and the editors' own contributions, and its presence cannot help but elicit questions about requisite epistemic distance. In their own contributions, for instance, McCallon and Tucker provide multiple examples of value-laden language, including "our high calling," "monuments of hope," and "furthering a cultural design that is consonant with the most positive values of our history."5 Repeated use of the pronoun our is itself quite telling. McCallon and Tucker's volume will serve as a great catalyst for exploring these historiographical questions more deeply.Fortunately, rather than leave such explorers to their own devices, the book concludes with an outstanding chapter by Hérubel, "Historigraphical Futures for Library History: Conceptual Observations for Future Historians." Hérubel has written on this topic previously (e.g., Hérubel 2004; Buchanan and Hérubel 20116) and here suggests ways in which historians might expand their scope and deepen analyses by adopting different methodologies. These include interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches leveraging extant fields such as academic history, information history, and cultural studies.McCallon and Tucker concede in their introductory chapter that academic library history will likely remain in the hands of those practiced in the fields of librarianship. Hérubel comes to the same conclusion but prescribes a way forward, calling for greater self-reflection on the part of such librarian-historians. One philosophical subfield, not mentioned by Hérubel, that might offer help in conducting such self-reflection is virtue epistemology.7 It calls for individuals to examine their own habits of knowing—questioning, for instance, why one claims to know something, and questioning the process and habits that have brought them to this claim. For insiders writing insider history, such reflection might help identify tendencies to view and represent the past as a substrate for prescriptive agendas. Whether or not current or prospective librarian-historians adopt any of Hérubel's suggested methodological paths, it will be incumbent upon them to exert greater self-reflection to avoid writing histories that tacitly mirror their professional activities and desiderata.McCallon and Tucker identify several key audiences for their book. These include academic librarians and administrators; campus administrators and disciplinary faculty; library science program faculty and deans; and those inclined to write academic library history. I would go farther and say that this is important reading for all academic librarians in order to better understand their institutional positionality. But most of all I would venture to say that it is essential reading for all any librarian-historian engaged in writing academic library history. It may be just the catalyst they need to become more self-aware and analytic in their practice.