Category Archives: librarians

William Frederick Poole: pioneering indexer and librarian

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These days, municipalities all over the US have tax-supported public libraries. Public libraries, academic libraries, and others offer patrons indexes to help them find articles in periodicals. We have William Frederick Poole to thank for both. He first became famous for the first index to periodicals and later became a founding member of the American Library Association. For most of his career as a librarian, he advocated for public libraries.

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Anthony Panizzi and the first modern library cataloging rules

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Library cataloging rules might not sound very exciting, but they’re the only way you can find anything in a library. It’s not too much to claim that the history of library catalogs can be divided into periods before and after Anthony Panizzi (1797-1879). Modern library cataloging rules trace their origin to Panizzi’s 91 rules, published in 1841.

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Melvil Dewey: brilliant father of librarianship and mad man

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Melvil Dewey was born in 1851 in a part of New York known as the “Burned Out District.” It got the name from the evangelical fervor that led to so many religious reform movements. His parents shared that fervor. (Of course, they spelled his name Melville. He changed it later.) As a young boy, he had a passion both for learning and organization. He organized his mother’s pantry to make it more efficient when he was 5. At age 13, he bought an unabridged dictionary for himself, declaring it the most essential book. At age 15, he decided on a career as reformer, although he had no idea yet just what to reform. 

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Henriette Avram and the modern library catalog

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In the late 1960s, the Library of Congress started work on two major achievements. The massive National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints eventually reached 754 volumes and took 130 feet of shelf space. Computerizing library cataloging soon rendered it obsolete. Henriette Avram, who never went to library school, led the team that devised MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging). The primary purpose in developing MARC was to automate printing library catalog cards, but Avram and her team also intended it for libraries to be able to print their lists of  new acquisitions. The Library of Congress supplied card sets for its entire holdings to any American library that ordered them. That saved libraries the expense of cataloging those materials themselves. Avram did not envision putting the entire library catalog online and making cards obsolete, but her work made it possible. In fact, MARC enabled the online public access catalog, which saves so much time and space. Patrons had to visit the library at times when it was open in order to use it. Now, anyone with internet service can use the catalog and interact with it without leaving home. Or use it anywhere in the library without leaving where they’re working. The MARC … Continue reading →

School librarians revisited: grounds for hope?

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I wrote about the school librarian as an endangered species a few years ago. Has the trend started to change? In 2000, America’s public school faculties had more than 54, 000 librarians and media specialists. By 2015, that number had declined to fewer than 44,000, a drop of about 20%. About half of that decline has happened since the 2008 recession. The loss of school library positions eased somewhat in academic years 2012/13 and 2013/14, but then returned to the post-recession rate. Meanwhile, student enrollment has grown by 7%. Some districts have an even greater disparity. Denver, for example, saw a 25% increase in student enrollment at the same time it reduced the number of its school librarians by 60%. In general, schools that serve minorities and the less affluent have borne the brunt of the cuts. The schools, in other words, that have the most challenges with low reading scores and difficulties with information technology have shed the very people best prepared to help the efforts of classroom teachers. Some districts have had second thoughts.

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