>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Edward Widmer: Good
afternoon, everyone.
I'm Ted Widmer, the Director
of the John W. Kluge center,
and I'm about to ask you to
turn off your cell phones,
but I just remembered
I need to do it myself.
So I'm going to take care of that.
And then, I want to say
what a huge pleasure it is
to introduce Wayne
Wiegand, our speaker today.
I'm relatively new to the
Library, as all of you know,
and it's been such a pleasure
to begin to learn the history
of the Library of Congress
and to think about libraries
in this country and in our world.
I had been in the Library about
one hour on my orientation day
when John Cole, who's with
us today, gave his history
for all the incoming employees.
And I listened rapt with fascination
and I'd been trying to read
about the library -- our library
-- in my not very ample free time.
But I feel lucky a second time
because Wayne Wiegand has been here
for a lot of my time here and the
work he's doing in relationship
to the history of libraries
in this country could not be
more topical or more timely.
I won't preempt his talk to
you today, but I just want
to say he's really taking a
historical topic and bringing it
in a very relevant way to
ongoing social concerns.
And if he won't tell you in his
talk today, I want to mention
that he's giving a talk on April
25th in Richmond, Virginia,
the James Branch Cabell Library,
entitled "Open These Hallowed Doors:
The Desegregation of Public
Libraries in the American South."
And I believe that's his next book
project; is that right, Wayne?
But he's here today to talk
to you about the history
of school librarianship
in our country.
His talk is entitled, "How Long, Oh
Lord, Do We Roam in the Wilderness?:
A History of School Librarianship."
He is the F. William Summers
Emeritus Professor of Library
and Information Studies and
Professor of American Studies
with a Ph.D. from Southern
Illinois University in 1974
with numerous scholarly
publications in both history
of libraries and American studies.
His books include books "Books on
Trial: Red Scare in the Heartland,"
which came out in 2007 with
University of Oklahoma Press,
coauthored with Shirley A. Wiegand,
and named Book-of-the Month
Club for November, 2007.
And addition to "Books on
Trial," he has authored
over 70 scholarly articles and many
publications relevant to the history
of text technologies,
including "History of a Hoax:
Edmund Lester Pearson,
John Cotton Dana
and 'The Old Librarian's Almanac,'"
"Politics of an Emerging Profession:
The American Library Association,
1876-1917," "An Active Instrument
for Propaganda: American Public
Libraries During World War I,"
again, very timely, and
"Irrepressible Reformer:
A Biography of Melvil K. Dewey."
I added the K because
I remember that initial
because I once saw it spelled out
and it was, I believe, Kossuth.
He was named after the Hungarian
freedom fighter, Lajos Kossuth.
I forgot to mention, he's the
University of Florida in Tallahassee
and he also has served on the
faculty at the School of Library
and Information Studies at
University of Wisconsin-Madison
where he cofounded and served
as Co-Director of the Center
for the History of Print
Culture in Modern America.
I could read many more
of his accomplishments,
but I think I would
cut into his time
and you all came here
to hear to him.
So without further ado,
please welcome Wayne Wiegand.
[ Applause ]
[ Whispering ]
>> Wayne Wiegand: Should
I predecease her,
I've left my wife specific
instructions
about what to do with my remains.
I told her, cremate me, take
my ashes, hide it in a book,
and donate it to the Library
of Congress so I can spend it
with my friends in perpetuity.
I've decided to modify
those instructions.
I'm going to ask her to divide my
ashes in two, half going into a book
into the Library of Congress.
The other half going
into a book to be donated
to the John W. Kluge
Center because I've had
so much fun here the
past several months.
Thank you, Ted.
Thank you, Dan.
Thank you, Travis.
Thank you, Callie.
Who am I missing?
Mary Lou. Thank you all.
Do look for the book after
you read my obituary, okay.
People love school libraries
for a whole bunch of reasons.
Some are obvious.
In her autobiography,
"Speaking Truth to Power,"
Anita Hill remembers a seating
system her grade school teachers
crafted to reward achievement.
Gradually moving high-achieving
students
who finish their assignments
early from seats located
on an inner-schoolroom wall to seats
located on an outer wall where,
under the windows, teachers had
placed the schoolroom library.
After finishing her assignment
ahead of her 4th grade classmates,
Hill recalled, she loved the
freedom to simply reach out
and pull whatever I wanted from
the shelf without leaving my seat
or drawing attention to my idleness.
She specifically mentions
Encyclopedias, geography,
and history books, and
Nancy Drew Mysteries she
and her friends frequently shared.
Her recollection reflects a thirst
for information, a love of libraries
and the voluntary reading
they enabled.
Some reasons people love
school libraries are not
so obvious, however.
In response to an exam
question about library as place
for a course I taught
at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison years ago, one
student wrote that in the mid-1980s,
his high school librarian was
being pressured to remove titles
about homosexuality
from the shelves.
At the time, he was a
sophomore struggling
with his own sexual identity and
he wanted and needed those books.
Then, something unusual
happened, title by title,
the librarian reported the books
lost, thus satisfying parents
and school superiors protesting
their presence in the collection.
But, my student reported, somehow,
he and his gay friends soon
discovered these lost books had
actually been misshelved
behind others
in a remote part of the library.
There, they could access the
books freely and all understood
that any book taken
from the collection,
which need not be checked out
since they were officially lost,
had to be returned
to the same place.
The collection as still
there, intact,
and including a few newer donated
titles, the day he graduated.
Now, school library history is
full of anecdotes like this.
And I could recount a number
of them over the course
of my remarks this afternoon.
But what I really want to
do is to get at the essence
of school librarianship so
you understand the world
of control under which it operates.
Let me explain my title.
"How Long, Oh Lord, Do We
Roam In the Wilderness?"
It's a biblical passage and
it was the title of an article
by Marilyn Miller who
taught me when I was
in library school back in the 1970s.
She was a fairly well-known
figure in American librarianship,
particularly school librarianship.
And she was one of those
referred to as the "grand dams"
or the "grand dames," a group of
women who took hold of the world
of school librarianship
early in the 20th Century
and literally crafted the contours
of school library practice.
Her title comes from
her frustration.
She had just gone through the great
society programs when the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act had
provided millions of dollars
to school libraries that
literally doubled their number
across the country and
quadrupled their collections.
That's one of the measures libraries
use to indicate impact and growth.
But as the Nixon administration
withdrew funds from the Elementary
and Secondary Act titles,
she noticed that there
wasn't a replacement
of that money with local funds.
She was also frustrated
with the fact
that the American Library
Association,
the major professional
association that governs --
functions as the Nation's
national library voice --
was not very friendly
to one of its divisions
in which she was operating,
the American Association
of School Librarians.
And at the time, they were actually
contemplating leaving the American
Library Association, perhaps
joining with some division
in the National Education
Association.
So she was frustrated.
And that's why I take it
as my title because I want
to address the issue of, where
does school librarianship fit?
Now, when it comes to theories,
I happen to be promiscuous.
I will consort with any theorist
I think will give me a framework
that helps me explain what
I'm finding historically.
As a youth, I went through my
providential period, and then,
of course, as an undergraduate
in any University
of Wisconsin institution in the
1960s, I had my Marxist period.
My wife often refers to
that as my red period.
But what I find most comfortable
with this particular project
is the concept of discourse.
What do I mean by discourse?
Most scholars trace the concept to
French philosopher, Michel Foucault.
And as Wikipedia explains,
humanities
and social science scholars, in
particular, harness this concept
to describe, not only a
culture's formal way of thinking
that can be expressed
through language, but also,
a social boundary that defines what
can be said about a specific topic.
I took that concept of discourse,
added to it the word "professional"
in order to define what I perceived
to be a professional discourse
which functions like a big
intellectual sandbox, plenty of room
to play with ideas, but one
nonetheless that has limits,
a social boundary, if you will, in
which leaders employ a formal way
of thinking to educate and
enlighten members of a profession
who implements what they
learn to improve service
for the public's greater benefit.
For school libraries,
that translates
into the services they institute and
maintain, the collection, spaces,
and resources that
they make accessible.
The roots of contemporary school
library discourse trace back
to Benjamin Franklin whose first
order of books for the new Library
of Congress -- Library
Company of Philadelphia
in 1732 emphasized useful knowledge
-- that's a term that comes directly
out of the enlightenment -- useful
knowledge, but ignored fiction.
By the time the American colonies
declared their independence in 1776,
western nations were rapidly
industrializing under capitalism.
Unlike their rural counterparts,
industrial workers found their day
divided not by sunrise and sunset
and their year not by seasons, but
by a clock their employers used
to determine when work occurred.
To capitalists, work time was always
more important than non-work time
which evolved its own set
of descriptors including
leisure or recreation.
Capitalists consistently privileged
useful knowledge generated
to improve work above any
information considered leisure.
School libraries serving
the information interests
of formal education naturally
mirrored these priorities.
Western states operating
within capitalist economies also
privileged work information,
but to that added public information
and stories the state regarding
so essential to the social order
that they constituted a canon
relevant literature, fiction
and non-fiction, to be
communicated to citizens
and taught in schools and colleges.
School libraries serving
state interests also collected
and preserved these kinds of
public information and stories,
but they performed
these tasks within a set
of discursive formations.
What are these discursive
formations?
Well, I'm going to show you
the portrait of a person
who has probably had more influence
on your life than you realize.
That's Melvil Dewey, crafter of
the Dewey Decimal Classification.
Ninety-five percent of
the school libraries,
as well as public libraries, use
the Dewey Decimal Classification.
As a matter of fact, in the
late 1890s, he was a competitor
for the position of
Librarian of Congress
and I'm thinking the only reason he
didn't accept it if it was offered
to him was because he had a
private club in Upstate New York
that he wanted to develop and he
was only going to spend nine months
of the year working here.
At any rate, you can be sure that
if Melvil Dewey had been Librarian
of Congress, the collection here
would have been Dewey Decimal
Classification scheme.
Now, Dewey was a student at
Amherst College from 1870 to 1874
and so he went through the Amherst
curriculum, he went through --
became acquainted with
Amherst teachers.
In 1873, he took a part-time job
to help out with his finances
in the college library
and loved what he saw.
But he thought this library
was not well-organized.
So how to best organize it.
He shopped around for other
classification systems
and fell upon a system
that was developed
at the St. Louis Public School
Library by William Torrey Harris,
who later became Commissioner of
Education for the United States.
Harris had built his
scheme on two sources.
One, ideas of Sir Francis Bacon who
had argued that the three faculties
of the human mind, memory,
imagination, and reason,
produce three categories of
learning, history, poetry,
and philosophy, each of which
could be further subdivided.
And two, the ideas of GFW Hegel
who inverted Bacon's order
to give a more prominent role to
philosophy and from which the rest
of the structure follows.
From the philosophy, the
science containing all sciences,
Harris saw a natural structure of
knowledge progressing to theology,
the science of the absolute,
government, philology, nature,
including mathematics, physics,
chemistry, and the natural science,
the useful and the
fine arts, and finally,
geography, biography, and history.
That Dewey largely tapped Harris's
structure as the broad blueprint
for his own decimal scheme,
in order, they are philosophy,
theology, sociology, philology,
natural science, useful arts,
fine arts, literature, and
history, is hardly debatable.
But in defining and identifying
the hierarchy of divisions
and sections he created beyond that
structure, Dewey looked elsewhere
for guidance, and particularly
to the Amherst college faculty,
the courses he took, and
the textbooks he had.
So, I passed out a copy of the
Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme
in its broad way, and I'm
going to show you how he picked
up things from his textbook.
If you look at 1 --
[ Silence ]
137, which is -- excuse me, 130,
which is labeled on the 23rd Edition
of the Dewey Decimal Classification,
parapsychology and occultism,
for him, this was known
as temperaments.
Okay. Temperaments.
And he subdivided the temperaments
based on a theory he got
out of his textbook that somehow,
human emotions were
determined by body fluids.
And so what particular
body fluids were flowing
around in your body determined
what kind of temperament you had
and that was cemented
into the 137 section
of the Dewey Decimal Classification
Scheme when he came to the Library
of Congress, which was in the
Senate building at the time,
in 1876 to copyright his scheme.
Now, that scheme very well reflects
the white Anglo Saxon Protestant
patriarchal culture
in which he existed.
And why do we have 23 editions
of the Dewey Decimal
Classification Scheme?
Because it's been a constant
effort to address the biases
and prejudices built
into that scheme.
For decades now, I have been
trying to encourage scholars
to do a social history of the Dewey
Decimal Classification Scheme.
All one has to do is
look at, for example,
how W. E. B. Du Bois's book, "Souls
of Black Folk," has been treated
over the course of those 23
editions to see some element.
I also have a paragraph
here on Native Americans.
Vestiges of systemic racism continue
to plague most western
cultural institutions.
Libraries are simply
institutions that tell a story,
said Winnebago Tribal member
in Huntington Park, California,
public librarian, Michael
McLaughlin,
in a 2005 "Native American
Times" article.
It is the community
that decides what
that story is and how it is told.
To McLaughlin, it was clear,
librarianship's practices
placed Native Americans
at a distinct advantage
in the story.
Libraries told about them.
For example, neither the Library
of Congress nor the Dewey Decimal
Classification adequately addresses
the histories and contemporary
realities of American
Indians. Neither had a
category for tribal sovereignty
that enjoyed equal status with
other systems of government.
Similarly, while Picasso and
Monet were classified as art,
Indian sand paintings, pottery,
and basketry were classified
as crafts and primitive art.
And while Protestantism and
Catholicism found comfortable niches
in religion, Indian spiritualism
was found in mythology,
folklore, and other religion.
In short, McLaughlin concluded,
every American Indian perspective,
accomplishment, or
cultural belief practice
or material product according
to these classification systems,
is of a subordinate
or inferior nature.
So the Dewey Decimal Classification,
one footing in this set
of discursive formations
I'm describing,
has built into it a momentum --
excuse me, an inertia
which resists change.
And I would ask each
of you, first of all,
how many of you have had public
school library experiences
as a child, young adult?
Okay. A number of you.
And my guess is, the what you --
how you receive my remarks will
be conditioned by the experiences
that you had in those
school libraries.
Ask yourself, if you were
first exposed in school
to the Dewey Decimal
Classification System,
is that how you perceive
the organization
of knowledge at this point?
How much influence has that
had on your subsequent life?
Now, let me move to this one.
And this photo is going
to stay up for a while.
What you see here is Dewey in
the middle of his first class
of library school students
at Columbia College in 1887.
There's a story here.
Dewey became librarian at Columbia
College in 1883 and he always wanted
to start a library school.
So he began organizing it,
began soliciting subscriptions,
began encouraging people to
apply in the fall of 1886.
What he didn't tell his superiors
was that he was going to admit women
to this school on the
all-male campus.
Once the Board of Overseers found
out, they refused to allow him
to use school facilities.
So what he did, instead, was went
across the street from campus
and opened up his school in
a storeroom above the chapel.
This is a picture of
the individuals there.
Now, notice the gender composition.
Dewey's a male, a couple
of males on the left side.
But the rest happen to be females.
And they all knew they were
there under unique circumstances.
It really wasn't a certified
school within the Columbia system.
I call it a bootleg school.
But here is where I think most
of the professional
discursive formations that we
in librarianship operate
under today took root.
And let me explain how that works.
First of all, because Dewey
could not determine --
he could not allow his students
to take course elsewhere,
he tapped into a set of
Saturday morning public lectures
that Columbia faculty
were expected to deliver.
In the fall of 1886, he asked
those lecturers to deliver lectures
on the best books and scholarship
that was emerging from their fields.
You may recall between
1870 and 1900 was when most
of the professional
associations to which many
of you now belong emerged --
American Historical Association,
American Political
Science Association,
American Sociological Association,
American Economics Association --
each of which established a journal
in which reviews were a
major part of that activity.
So what Dewey asked
his students to do,
females could attend Saturday
morning public lectures,
was go to specific lectures and
take notes so they would find
out what was the best literature
in each of these individual fields.
Where's the locus of authority?
It's not the library student nor the
librarian determining what is the
best book or article in the
literature, it is the professional
in that particular
discipline doing so.
So those library school students
learned very early that's how you
determine what is the
best literature.
You look to the professional
experts outside librarianship.
That was one component
of their curriculum.
Another component, Dewey brought
in a number of library luminaries
to inculcate what has become known
as the library faith,
or the library spirit.
That word pops up a lot in
library literature and still pops
up on occasion as those of you
read it regularly can attest.
It's built on a Jeffersonian
concept.
In order for democracy
to function properly,
it needs an informed
citizenry, Thomas Jefferson said.
And librarians simply extended it.
In order to be in informed
citizenry,
libraries are essential
to democracy.
Makes a great deal of sense.
Added to that, particularly
at this time,
comes Andrew Carnegie donating
his millions of dollars
for nearly 1700 public library
buildings across the country
and that whole Jeffersonian
principal public library library
faith got juiced with a whole
lot of growth all at once,
late 19th early 20th Century.
About the same time, John Dewey
is positing his progressive theory
of education which is looking not
at kids as adults to be waited for,
but as children who
have central concern.
Okay. So you have first, the
Dewey Decimal Classification
as one element in this
discursive formation.
You've got the curriculum
where the indirect authority
of librarianship is
practiced by external experts.
Then, you've got the library
faith, and to that, then,
Dewey actually added a core.
First, teach cataloging
and classification,
including subject headings.
Subject headings do carry the same
kinds of biases and prejudices
and privileges that the decimal
classification scheme does.
To that, add management.
How do you manage a public -- a
school -- a library at this point?
There wasn't a whole lot
of literature on that,
so a lot of internship kind
of activities took place.
But always, the angle was, how to?,
because you already the
justification for why coming
out of the library faith.
Now, I want to also note here in
the management of the library,
Dewey happened to have started an
organization called the Library
Bureau in 1881.
And the Library Bureau,
I'm willing to guess,
there is probably Library Bureau
furniture scattered hither and yon
about the Library of
Congress, if I'm not mistaken.
It's that beautiful quarter-sawn
oak that is so sturdy,
under which generations of wads of
gum have been stuck for decades.
At any rate, if you think
about a library room,
there's a central command post.
It's built into the circulation desk
and you have a person
staffing that desk.
Well, having told you about
this particular picture
and the gender composition of
that picture, you can well imagine
that the likelihood of the person
occupying that desk is going
to be female and because she must
staff that desk and there are users,
clients, all around her, should some
upheaval occur in a remote corner
of the library, she cannot leave
her command post which was built
into the architecture
of the library.
So what does she do?
Sssh [Hush Noise].
You see the beginning
of the stereotype
of Marian the librarian emerging
from the very architecture
and the furnishings of the library.
Another one besides
management is reference.
That's kind of gone out of hand.
We're not calling it
reference so much anymore.
The direct line from reference
in the late 19th Century to 2017,
we now call it information literacy.
And finally, bibliography.
It was very important for
library school students,
these people you see here,
to learn bibliography.
And if you look at the emergence of
the printed works of the late 19th,
early 20th Century, you see
these discursive formations
in evidence everywhere.
Let's just go back to reference.
You remember, "Reader's Guide
to Periodical Literature,"
those of you over the age of 25?
Now, the same kind of biases,
prejudices that manifest themselves
in the classification schemes
also manifest themselves
in "Reader's Guide to
Periodical Literature"
which never indexed a periodical
like the "Chicago Defender"
that went to a quarter
million African Americans.
Nor did it ever index
"Colored American" which went
to about equally as many.
So for an individual who wanted to
look up a topic on African Americans
in the 1930s, go to a
school library and get their
"Abridged Reader's Guide,"
two of the major organs
of communication aren't
being indexed there.
If it's not indexed, librarians
are not inclined to purchase them
because there's no
bibliographic access to them.
Or, a series of bibliographies.
When the Chicago World's
Fair started in 1893,
ALA had a huge booth and they
had a new publication called the
"Catalog of ALA Library."
It identified 5,000
books recommended
for any beginning library and
that was important because that's
when Carnegie was starting
to give out his money
and they needed instant collections.
What Dewey had his students
do was comb the reviews
of the American Historical Review,
the American Economics Review,
etcetera, all those
periodicals being put
out by the professional disciplines
for the best works, mark them,
and include them in
"Catalog of ALA Library."
This became a tradition and out of
it came in the early 20th Century
"Children's Catalog"
which recommended the
best books for children.
Or course, didn't include any
Horatio Alger or subsequently,
Nancy Drew, or subsequently,
Goosebumps.
In essence, catalogs like
"Children's Catalog" cemented a
particular set of literary canons
into existence and quinquennially,
these books would pop
up at school libraries, school
librarians would then take them
to their card catalog,
and the materials in the
"Children's Catalog" they
did not have were marked
for potential acquisitions.
The materials in the "Children's
Catalog" that were not in the
"Children's Catalog" were
marked for what we call
"weeding" in the librarianship.
So over the years, these
bibliographies became very powerful
and they include bibliographies
like the
"Elementary School Library Catalog,"
the "Junior High School
Library Catalog,"
the "Senior High School Library
Catalog," which had a tendency,
in part, to homogenize
collections nationwide.
So another discursive formation.
What makes school librarianship
unique, however,
is that the women you see here
seized upon a vacuum of authority
for children's literature.
In the late 19th Century, as
John Dewey's progressive theory
of education took root, the world
of children's publishing began
to emerge and grow significantly.
No one was ready to take that
on in terms of evaluation
and so public school and
school librarians seized it
as their locus of authority.
Now, all of the --
I have to say all --
well, I'll say, nearly all of
the individuals who were part
of that group looked like
these people here, white,
middle class females who were
educated in particular ways
to like particular
kinds of literature.
They evolved a set of canons that
those bibliographies reinforced
that looked askance at what the
popular literature of the day was.
And all of those books tended
to celebrate the white Anglo Saxon
Protestant Patriarchal culture.
Come the 1950s, 1960s, and I'm
just going to stick with this world
of children's literature, right now.
Come the 1950s, 1960s,
and the feminist movement
and the civil rights movement, a
woman named Nancy Larrick began
to look at these literatures
and say, hey, wait a minute.
I don't see any black faces
in children's literatures.
They're not getting an
analysis of how black kids live
and black kids aren't getting an
analysis of how black kids live.
She went back to the school library
and said, hey, wait a minute.
The females who are depicted in
this literature are generally
in subordinate positions to males.
The active ones are males,
the passive ones are females.
So having come to know that,
the school library people began
to recognize that they had
cemented into existence
in their literature
collections the very biases
that they wanted to fight against.
I don't think they ever said,
you know, we've made a mistake.
And, come the 1980s, post-Stonewall,
there began to be a recognition
of differences in sexuality.
So those are the three footings
of the discursive formations
of school librarianship discord.
But I'm going to add a fourth one.
And that is, the commitment to
intellectual freedom and opposition
to censorship that
finds its rhetoric
in what's called the
Library Bill of Rights.
The Library Bill of
Rights was passed
by the American Library
Association in 1939.
The word "race" is included in it.
And it came as a result
of observations
of the Nazi party burning
Jewish books in Nazi Germany.
"Grapes of Wrath" being banned
in schools and libraries
across the country, 1939, 1940.
And Chinese librarians
saying, please help us
after the Japanese had
conquered China in the 1930s
and began burning their libraries.
So Library Bill of Rights.
To it, the school librarians
in the early 1950s added the
School Library Bill of Rights
which modifies it for
particular school librarianship.
But the Library Bill of
Rights, even though it sounds
like it's got the force
of law, has no teeth.
If anyone in this room
chooses to challenge a book
in the local school library and is
a powerful figure in local politics,
the librarian has two choices,
potentially lose her
job or fight you.
If the librarian chooses to fight
you, no one will come to her aid
to pay for the legal
expenses required to do so.
So the Library Bill of Rights,
though it sounds good and is part
of the library rhetoric,
doesn't have teeth to it.
Publicity helps, of
course, but once again,
the locus of authority is elsewhere.
Just like, what are best
books is allocated to others,
the locus of authority in
the school library resides
with the school system.
It could be the principal,
could be the superintendent,
could be very vocal
members of the public
who bring their issues to attention.
So these are the constraints
under which school
librarians have operated
since the late 19th Century.
School librarianship itself is
largely a 20th Century phenomenon.
It wasn't until compulsory education
made more and more people come
to school, until high
schools became commonplace
that school librarianship took root.
And for every generation of school
librarianship, it has been females
who have been the leaders.
They were the ones who established
within the American
Library Association early
in the 20th Century that
later became a division
of the American Library
Association in post-World War II era
that then threatened to leave
the American Library Association
because the leaders didn't think
that they were operating properly.
So how long do we roam
in the wilderness?
I would argue, that's your home,
the wilderness because you're caught
between the world of librarianship
with its discursive formations
and the world of education
where the real power is.
In order for school librarians to
be participants in the practice
of education, they're
the ones who have to go
to the education community and
tell them, hey it's working
out just fine, we can contribute
to the educational process.
That's one of the things I
found out while I was here.
But let me just finish with,
that's not all there needs to be.
There is no holy book in which
God says what a library should be.
A library is what
people make of it.
Now, two years ago, I published
this book, " Part of Our Lives:
A People's History of the
American Public Library"
for which I thank the National
Endowment for the Humanities
for the fellowship that
allowed me to do it.
In that book, I discovered
by listening to the voices
of the people who used public
libraries that they use it
for three main reasons,
A) information access.
And in librarianship, we're
all about information access.
I'm not disparaging that all.
B) The library as a place.
More than a third place, as Ray
Oldenburg would describe it.
It's a place where community
gets constructed in a whole bunch
of different ways through a
whole bunch of different forums
through the space it provides.
And C) through the
social nature of reading.
We often think of reading as
a solitary act, and it's not.
It combines us with other people.
And I think -- let me
just give you some --
[ Rustling of Papers ]
Recent research in
neuroscientific --
recent neuroscientific research
has demonstrated how narrative
in fiction activates
particular parts of the brain,
including the sensory
and motor cortexes.
In her summary of this research,
Annie Murphy Paul notes, the brain,
it seems, does not make much of
a distinction between reading
about an experience and
encountering it in real life.
In each case, the same
neurological regions are stimulated.
One researcher, she reports,
found that fiction offered readers
the opportunity to enter fully
into other people's
thoughts and feelings.
Another saw substantial overlap
in the brain networks used
to understand stories
and the networks used
to navigate interactions
with other individuals.
In particular, interactions in
which we're trying to figure
out the thoughts and
feelings of others.
Other researchers suggest
reading fiction is an exercise
that hones our real
life social skills
and that regular fiction
readers seem to be better able
to understand other
people, empathize with them,
see the world from
their perspective.
Fiction, notes Keith Oatley, is
a particularly useful simulation
because negotiating the social world
effectively is extremely tricking
requiring us to weigh up
myriad interacting instances
of cause and effect.
Just as computer simulations
can help us get to grips
with complex scientific
problems, so novels, stories,
and dramas can help us understand
the complexities of social life.
Do y'all remember what the Dewey
Decimal Classification System does
with fiction?
It ignores it.
Fiction has been the
bastard stepchild
of library collections
for 150 years.
But let me give you two
experiences of reading fiction,
particularly popular fiction.
After her father died in 1963,
9-year old Sonia Sotomayor
buried herself in reading
at her Broncs library in
the apartment she shared
with her mother and her brother.
Nancy Drew had a powerful hold on
my imagination, she remembered.
Every night, when I finished reading
and got into bed and closed my eyes,
I'd continue the story with me in
Nancy's shoes until I fell asleep.
Her mind, she noted, worked in
ways very similar to Nancy's.
I was a keen observer and listener.
I picked up on clues.
I figured things out logically
and I enjoyed puzzles.
I loved the clear, focused feeling
that came when I concentrated
on solving a problem and
everything else faded out.
Every single female Supreme Court
member read Nancy Drew as a kid.
Nancy Drew never shows
up in the bibliographies
of school library collections.
Last example.
In 1984, President Ronald
Reagan wrote the daughter-in-law
of Harold Bell Wright whose
best-selling 1920s religious novel,
"That Printer of Udell's,"
Reagan read
as an adolescent in Dixon, Illinois.
Shortly after reading the book,
he declared himself
saved and was baptized.
The novel's protagonist Reagan wrote
Wright's daughter-in-law 60 years
later, served as a role
model that shaped his life.
It's likely that copy of "That
Printer of Udell's" Reagan read came
from the Dixon Public Library
which he visited twice weekly
in the early 1920s often reading
on the Library's front steps.
So, you've got the discourse
of school librarianship.
It's an intellectual sandbox in
which you can play with a whole lot
of stuff, but it's got boundaries.
And I would argue, if you look
toward the social nature of reading,
if you look towards the library
as place and don't be bound
by the discourse of
school librarianship,
history would suggest there
are some opportunities
out there to be seized.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
I'll be happy to take questions.
Whoops. Excuse me.
Oh, I -- one thing -- I
almost knocked your --
while here, I have been checking
the obituaries of the Grande Dames
and every generation
of female leaders
of the school library profession.
And I am absolutely struck with
how many of them are lesbian.
I think women who shared
this evangelical belief
in what libraries could do, who were
same sex, found a comfortable place
to practice librarianship
-- to practice a profession.
Now, I need more information.
I need to interview
individuals who are my age
because Marilyn Miller was
one of those individuals --
the one who wrote, "How Long, Oh
Lord, Do we Roam in the Wilderness?"
And I need to interview more to
see if indeed that the number
of what were called "Boston
marriages" at the time,
the number of Boston
marriages exceeds the norm
for the population at large.
Okay. So. Yes?
>> that there was a
-- oh, excuse me.
Hi. Thank you.
You had said that a
researcher had said
that the brain does
not make a distinction
between a fictional
narrative and real life.
Who was the person who said that?
>> Wayne Wiegand: What you can do is
email me and I'll send you the cite.
>> Oh, okay.
>> Wayne Wiegand: Yeah.
I took this from a "New York
Times" Sunday morning paper article
and this Annie Paul Murphy cited
several scholars who were working
on social neuroscience reading.
And that's what I'd
have to give you.
I can't remember.
Keith Oatley is the name
that comes particularly
to mind, but there were others.
There are a number of these
research experiments going
on around the country.
We live in an age where the
education profession is being
pressed towards testing
and measurement.
In that kind of an environment,
school libraries don't
prosper very well.
So the discoveries by social
neuroscientific scientists may not
directly apply to the current
situation unless we come
up with enough funding to restore --
I live now in the State
of California
where the State has made a
decision that schools don't have
to employ school librarians.
So if school librarian --
school libraries exist,
they're usually held open
by volunteer parents.
Dan?
>> You made a number of comments
about how the classification system
tends to solidify a particular sort
of intellectual bias and
that may change over time.
But I don't think you've
addressed the question of,
is that a good or bad thing?
And if it's a bad thing,
are there --
is there some way of dealing with
that and eliminating the bias?
>> Wayne Wiegand: It's
an inevitable thing.
No. There is -- all you can
do is keep paying attention.
At least, that's what
history tells me.
23 editions of the Dewey
Decimal Classification Scheme.
I think the Library of Congress
subject headings identified
homosexuality as a sexual perversion
up until the middle of the 1970s,
you know, and so pressure's
brought to bear and changes occur.
This summer, thanks to the National
Endowment for the Humanities
which gave me a summer
stipend, thank you very much.
I will be going to the
University of Illinois where one
of Dewey's best students went.
Huge library system that
still uses the Dewey Decimal
Classification Scheme.
It's too expensive to change.
They can't possibly do it.
So that's built into
the inertia to change.
>> I Had a question about --
you suggested several times
about the marginalization
of fiction in school libraries.
But I was a school librarian
here in D.C. for seven years
and I would suggest
it's not the library
that is marginalizing fiction.
It is the educational curriculum.
>> Wayne Wiegand: Sure.
>> And their desire always to have
children only reading non-fiction.
>> Wayne Wiegand: I'm not
going to debate with you.
My youngest son and his
wife are well-healed.
They own a $4 million home on top
of a hill in suburban San Francisco
and across the street is the public
school to which my grandson goes.
Shortly before -- last
time I was visiting home,
they held a fundraiser for the
library which was a Jay Gatsby kind
of thing, pictures of my
son in a Jay Gatsby uniform,
pictures of my daughter-in-law
in whatever she wore
-- Jay Gatsby's Zelda.
Yeah. Okay.
All right.
So anyhow, they raised $100,000
that evening for the school library.
That library's going to have that
fiction because it's well-supported.
So you're right.
Where education, and that's
the locus of authority
for the school library, it's
what the curriculum dictates.
Most states have bibliographies that
they send out to school libraries
from which school librarians
select materials.
I don't know if your state did.
California does.
They still do it.
So that already restricts
the universe of possibilities
in some respects unless
you can get extra money
to buy the materials you want.
Now, my son's -- my grandson's
school is radically different
from the school located
in downtown Oakland
to which poor kids [inaudible].
The school library in one
is significantly different
than the school library
in the other.
So it's tied to funding, too.
Yes?
[ Whispering and Commotion ]
Oh, sorry.
Brenda, just a second.
>> Sorry. Sorry.
>> Wayne Wiegand: I think you
need to get the microphone first.
>> Sorry. Thank you very much
for this fascinating lecture.
I have three short
intertwined questions.
The first follows on the
question of fiction and its place
in the Dewey Decimal System.
You mentioned that it has
been ignored over the course
of 23 editions and I was curious
what the relationship of fiction
to literature may have been
because there's an 800
class titled literature,
and I've always been interested
in the tacit separation of fiction
and literature in some
bookstore layouts for instance.
I would be interested in
knowing how this plays
out in library classification.
Related question has to do with --
>> Wayne Wiegand: Can
I answer one at a time?
>> Yeah, yeah.
Sure.
>> Wayne Wiegand: I'm old now and
I may forget the first one you ask.
>> Sure.
>> Wayne Wiegand: When you open the
"New York Times" book
review this Sunday morning,
I'm willing to bet a month's Social
Security check that you're going
to see the words, serious
reading four of five times.
>> Right.
>> Wayne Wiegand: You
know where that started?
In the early 19th Century when
the publishing industry began
to recognize that women were
becoming increasingly literate
and that they wanted a
particular kind of fiction,
the publishing industry
began to supply it.
And largely, they were romances.
Well, in the male-dominated
reviewing media,
they would review these materials
and they'd call it
"mere" reading, m-e-r-e.
Whereas, opposed to the other kind
of reading was, "serious" reading.
Now, that phrase has come
down to us to the present day
and it has baggage, obviously.
So what you see addressed
in the 800s is what cultural
leaders regard as "serious" reading.
>> That's very helpful.
It's amazing how that term,
"mere reading" [inaudible] women.
>> Wayne Wiegand: The journey
towards today includes mind candy,
trash, and it all fits
into that, you know,
recreational reading just isn't
as important as useful knowledge
or information that
computers can manipulate.
I'm not disparaging that, mind you.
It's just -- and Sonia Sotomayor,
she found Nancy Drew compelling.
>> Right. Which justifies
the importance of fiction.
Yeah. So the related question
had to do with the classification
of languages and literatures that
are essentially outside the pale
of the west, broadly
speaking, as other --
other languages, other
literatures, and what you had to say
about how classification
centralizes certain forms --
or centers certain forms of
knowledge and marginalizes
and implicitly subordinates others.
So I was curious about that as
well because the architecture
of libraries sometimes
mimics this kind
of architecture of classification.
Even here at the Library
of Congress,
you have the main reading
room where a certain vision
of the West is centered and then,
the other rooms are satellites
and often the architecture of
those rooms reflects, you know,
a kind of pantheon also
of Western thinkers.
So you go into the African
Middle-Eastern studies,
African Middle-Eastern reading
room and you look up and you see,
you know, Darwin and, you know,
Mozart and Bacon and so forth.
>> Wayne Wiegand: If
I may interrupt.
>> Yeah.
>> Wayne Wiegand: And if you
look at the school library walls
of the 1930s in Birmingham,
Alabama, you've got Robert E. Lee.
If you look at the school library
walls in Madison, Wisconsin,
at the same time, you've
got Abraham Lincoln.
>> That's fascinating.
>> Wayne Wiegand: The walls
demonstrate the cultural priorities
of the locality.
So I'm sorry to interrupt you.
That was a teachable moment.
I thought I'd seize it.
>> Great. We have time for one more.
>> Wayne Wiegand: Brenda's
got to get a question here.
She came all the way from
Alexandria, Virginia.
>> Wayne, in the course of your
research, what did you discover
about the ways in which
and the degree
to which municipal
funding played a part
in the operation of
school libraries.
>> Wayne Wiegand: Yeah.
School libraries depend almost
entirely on local funding.
It's like 95 percent.
The only time that there was a
significant change was in those war
and poverty programs coming out
of the Johnson era and that's
when they just literally
doubled in number
and quadrupled in collections.
And there was a whole
bunch of money available
for other media kinds of things.
But it's directly tied
to local funding.
You live in a poor district,
you're generally going
to have poor school libraries.
You live in a wealthy
district, you're generally going
to have good school libraries
staffed by professionals
who ask questions and
participate in the instruction.
Am I done, now?
Okay.
>> Edward Widmer: I want to just
invite you all to a talk next week
at the same time, Timothy Breen
who is another senior chair
here at the Kluge Center.
We'll be talking on
new interpretations
of the American Revolution.
So please join me in thanking
Wayne Wiegand for his talk today.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.