The Development Of Public Library Services To The Young

By Author: Porter Black
Total Articles: 54
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There had been some survey-based research on the field of librarianship previously, primarily in the form of the 1876 study Public Libraries in the United States of America. This report was compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Education, under the leadership of Charles Coffin Jewett, librarian and assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and William Jones Rhees, chief clerk of the Smithsonian. They sent over 10,000 letters to postmasters or librarians in order to D&G Jewelry ascertain where public libraries existed, what form of institutional organization they took, and how many volumes they held. Many librarians had contributed to that report as informants in the gathering of statistical information about the numbers and types of libraries in the United States that constituted the bulk of the two-volume report.

Papers in that report consisted of two kinds of content: one was numerical information regarding how many libraries of various types existed and the size of their collections; the other was information about library practice, consisting of ...
... expert opinions written by librarians in well-known libraries, all of them male. Papers that provided statistics regarding numbers of libraries and collection sizes included such chapters as Cephas Brainerd's "The Libraries of Young Men's Christian Associations" and Frederick B. Perkins's 'Young Men's Mercantile Libraries." Papers of the second form were prescriptive, written by librarians and based on their expertise as practitioners. The authors of papers such as "Public Libraries and the Young" by William Fletcher and "Reading in Popular Libraries" by Justin Winsor were well-known figures in the field, and they did not include empirical evidence to Tiffany Jewelry support their arguments. These two forms of evidence, numerical statistics and professional expertise, were typically separate in librarians' early discourse .

There was one paper based on replies to a questionnaire that appeared before Hewins's 1882 report. This was the article "The Spread of Contagious Diseases by Circulating Libraries" written by William Poole and published in Library Journal in 1879. Poole used a survey to query "medical and sanitary experts of established reputation in different parts of the country" regarding whether books could spread infection [26]. Based on the collected evidence of medical experts' opinions, he concluded that libraries were not a significant risk in the spread of disease. There is no direct evidence to link Poole's 1879 article with Hewins's 1882 report, and there are significant contrasts between the two documents. Unlike the Reading of the Young reports, Poole's study was not systematically repeated over time. In addition, Poole was consulting experts outside of librarianship rather than investigating the state of practice within librarianship. By contrast, Hewins and other women made repeated surveys over a period of sixteen years and distributed their questionnaires to working librarians in order to document the development of public library services to the young.