Digital Approaches to Library History

Digital Approaches to Library History University of Loyola Chicago, May 30-June 1, 2014 Following "Libraries in the Atlantic World" (see review in previous issue of this journal), "Digital Approaches to Library History" is the second in a series of three meetings organized by Community Libraries, an international research network sponsored by the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council. Dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary inquiry into the cultural history of libraries from 1650 to 1850, these events share the broad goals of examining library history from a comparative perspective that attends to the diversity of state, social, and cultural contexts in which libraries have served as agents of community formation. As the papers delivered in Chicago demonstrated, the collection and circulation of books afforded by early modern libraries not only supplied the reading matter for enlightenment, evangelicalism, and revolution but in their material and organizational forms shaped meanings of community and practices of civil society. Of particular interest at the Chicago meeting were opportunities that digital technologies afford scholars in making library history visible in new ways to new publics--especially through the conversion of catalogs and circulating libraries into virtual databases. The benchmark for such projects is What Middletown Read, an online, searchable database of the circulation records from 1891 to t902 for the public library of Muncie, Indiana. In the conference's first session, James Connolly and Frank Felsenstein discussed the design of this project, while Lynne Tatlock explained how it enabled her research on the reception of German writing by American readers. In subsequent panels, Erin Schreiner addressed the New York Society Library's digitization of its late eighteenth-century records; Katie Halsey discussed project development related to loan records for Scotland's oldest free circulating library; Christopher Phillips described the creation of a similar database for a nineteenth-century subscription library in Easton, Pennsylvania; and Julieanne Lamond analyzed loans from the Lambton Subscription Mechanics and Miners Institute, one of seven low-cost, regional subscription libraries that form part of the long-running, ever-expanding online platform the Australian Common Reader. Digital projects such as those described above make it possible for scholars to discern and analyze patterns in the collection, circulation, and use of texts, ranging from individual practices (such as Aaron Brunmeier's discussion of women's borrowing habits from New York Society Library in the late 1700s) to the means by which private and commercial circulating libraries sought to promote their services to potential customers. Tom Glynn's comparative study of the Society Library and New York Mercantile Library showed that, whether built to support the training of ministers or to supply lower-cost access to reading matter, libraries helped determine how class shaped and was shaped by the development of print culture in early America. Whether drawn from late eighteenth-century subscription libraries, used largely by elites and their families, or later nineteenth-century circulating and public libraries catering to larger publics of middle and working class readers, circulation records offer a comparative view of the impact of print media on local reading practices. To understand library holdings no less than the use individuals made of them requires locating early American literary and intellectual history within both local and global geographies of exchange. In his study of donors to early American academic libraries, Brian Davidson demonstrated how examining the provenance of texts could illuminate the evolution of intellectual and religious life in New England toward a more pluralistic worldview, as when Thomas Hollis's eighteenth-century donations to Harvard Library began to change its Puritan orientation. …