Master's thesis in history, Hunter College. / This essay will analyze how library organizations, such as the American Library Association, and individual librarians responded to the pressure placed on libraries during the McCarthy era to deal with alleged subversion. Although libraries have always been the target of censors, it was during the first decade of the Cold War that those Americans most fearful of Communist subversion swept up large numbers of their fellow citizens in a crusade to rid libraries of Communist influence. That effort by the self-proclaimed “loyal Americans” to save libraries put more than just library collections under the microscope. The librarians themselves were scrutinized to ensure that they harbored no troubling past or present connections to radical political groups. Pressure groups examined library services closely as well, keeping an eye out for subversion in library exhibits or making sure that controversial books were only available by request, not on open shelving.

Inaugurated by legislation in 1850 the municipal public library had by the end of the First World War become a common feature of urban life. The research and writing of public library history has been myopic; the subject has received little attention from historians working in broader fields. Inadequate methodological and theoretical assistance has been sought from those non-library historical investigations relevant to public library development. Public library history has been characterized by a tendency to chronicle. Recent work has acknowledged the importance of context; but the latter explains only 'how' and not 'why' public libraries emerged. Theories of public library history are lacking. This study presents a theory of development based on the symbiotic relationship between cultural and material pursuits. It is suggested that the Victorian, Edwardian and First World War public library aimed to help deliver social stability by diffusing humanistic culture and by assisting individual and national economic prosperity. These ostensibly divergent preoccupations achieved a high degree of compatibility within the context of the local municipal library. It was an institution which at once emphasized the importance of community and spiritual refreshment; yet sought to promote self-help individualism and tangible gain. Via the medium of the public library humanistic culture was seen to possess material externalities; the intention being to advance industrial capitalism whilst ameliorating its dehumanizing effects. The method employed to support this theory is to identify points of intersection between public library growth and recent debates in wider history. Attention is paid to discussions of emergent class consciousness; economic decline; middle class 'failure'; technical education; social control; the social origins of architecture; and the emergence of the professions. Underpinning the thesis is an exploration of the philosophical origins of the public library in terms of the tension between utilitarian and idealist thinking.

As the New York Public Library entered the post-war era in the late 1940s, its operations fell under the zealous scrutiny of self-styled ‘redhunters’ intent upon rooting out library materials and staffers deemed un-American and politically subversive. The high point of attacks upon the New York Public Library came during the years 1947-1954, a period that witnessed the Soviet atomic bomb, the Berlin airlift, and the Korean War. This article charts the narrow and carefully wrought trail blazed by the library’s leadership during that period. Through a reading of materials in the library archives, we see how political pressures were perceived and handled by library management and staff. We witness remarkable examples of brave defense of intellectual freedom alongside episodes of prudent equivocation. At the heart of the library’s situation stood the contradictions between the principled commitments of individual library leaders and the practical political considerations underlying the library’s viability. As a general rule, the New York Public Library did not hesitate to acquire materials considered subversive by pressure groups, but the library frequently struck a course that sought to avoid controversy when possible.

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The study examines the first forty years of a humanities journal, Libraries & Culture (hereafter Journal). Founded in 1966 as The Journal of Library History, its contributors shaped and reshaped the Journal according to the values, habits, and competencies that they brought to changing circumstances. Over a period of forty years marked by administrative, managerial, financial, editorial, and technical challenges, the editors transformed the Journal into an interdisciplinary and erudite publication distant from its earliest beginnings as a compendium of entertaining vignettes and didactic notes on the writing and uses of library history. This study considers salient points of transformation during the life of the Journal, highlighting issues associated with various crises in scholarly communications. Key issues confronted by the Journal include the now familiar dilemmas over journal pricing structures, subscription cancellations, bibliographic control, prestige surveys and citation rankings, pressures on authors to publish, peer-review, and modes of dissemination. Historical and sociological contexts frame the resolutions of these dilemmas that are treated chronologically as they erupted in the trajectory of the Journal. The historical investigation draws on archival sources, secondary sources, interviews, participant observation, and close reading of the publication to construct a narrative about the Journal in the context of 1) changing priorities in higher education; 2) challenges faced by university presses and scholarly publication in general; and 3) professional and disciplinary developments in librarianship. The characters, actions, and settings of the history are interpreted through a sociological lens, crafted from a beginner’s understanding of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s concepts of social field, multiple forms of capital, capital conversion, and habitus form the interpretive frame for the narrative. The choice of Bourdieu’s heuristic approach implies a broader interest in framing scholarly communications as value negotiations among sets of players in interdependent social fields. The players struggle not just to preserve their positions in the production and dissemination of scholarship, but also contend with others in powerful social fields--state governments, university hierarchies, and markets--about the creation of cultural capital and the power to define what is legitimate knowledge. / text

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This thesis is about librarians and librarianship. Questions asked in the thesis are how the librarianship developed between 1475 and 1780 and what the core and the main tasks of the profession were. There is also the question whether the profession is built on a common basis to rely on and if it is characterized by unique knowledge. The history of the librarian is divided in three parallel ongoing parts, the practical, the visionary and finally the personal, the librarians own attitudes. The practical area is characterized by the practical work, as cataloguing, classification, care of books, shelving and protecting the documents in different ways from several possible threats. The work is dictated by the employer. The visionary part complements and develops the methods of library work being established in the practical area, the librarians themselves formulate their thoughts of libraries and librarianship, defines the roles of libraries in society, in education and research. The librarians think about the content of the work and the future of libraries. These two areas done, another dimension is born. That is the ethics of the librarianship, how to behave and how to act towards library users and this dimension puts the librarian in the centre. There have been signs of this before but the completion is done in 1780 by Cotton des Houssayes. His speech opens the future for the librarians to come. The time period covers 305 years from 1475 until 1780. Starting point for this research about the librarian is 1475 because in that year pope Sixtus IV appointed Bartolomeus Platina as librarian of the Vatican library. The bull of 1475 is an official document that describes the librarian as a librarian and that he is told what to do, where to do it, how to do it and why. Jean-Baptiste Cotton des Houssayes, appointed in 1780, sets an end to this period with his speech to the General Assembly of the Sorbonne university in Paris. His speech completes the creation of the librarian. It is also the starting point of something new in librarianship. The common tasks of the librarians investigated, reveal what can be regarded as the essence of librarianship. From the practical area, the employers gave the librarians their tasks, executed at different places in different kinds of libraries. From the area of visions, the librarians built their visions as a continuum of the experiences from the practical work. New areas like the role of the librarian, the goals for the library itself and the librarians as the executors and pathfinders for the future. More of theory became a natural part of the librarianship. The last area of the development of the librarian is to adopt ethical aspects of their profession. This dimension is a self-reflecting attitude important to the librarians themselves. / <p>Akademisk avhandling som med tillstånd av samhällsvetenskapliga fakulteten vid Göteborgs universitet för vinnande av filosofie doktorsexamen framläggs till offentlig granskning kl. 13.15 torsdagen den 10 juni 2010 i hörsal C203, Högskolan i Borås, Allégatan 1, Borås.</p>

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Jag har i detta arbete undersökt och analyserat hur fyra drottningar synliggörs i 12 svenska historiska läroböcker i ämnet historia.   Syftet med uppsatsen har varit att undersöka hur fyra drottningar framställts i svenska historiska läroböcker under en tidsperiod mellan åren 1900-2010. Frågor som ställts är i vilka sammanhang drottningarna synliggörs och sker det en förändring med tiden? Kan en ändrad genusmedvetenhet urskiljas hos författarna? Vilka skillnader i framställningen som regenter finns det? Hur förändras styrdokumenten och blir de mer genusmedvetna med tiden?   Resultatet av analysen av de läroböcker som har granskats är varierande, det kan ses en ökad genusmedvetenhet med tiden i läroböckerna, samtidigt som drottningarna i allt större grad ges mindre plats i böckerna med tiden.

This two-year master thesis in Library and information science, explores how femininity is created within the librarian profession year 1900-1930 in Sweden. By using three Swedish female librarians as case studies I study how female librarians responded to norms for women within the profession. I also ask if the librarians were able to break these norms or if the standards for women formed how the librarian profession was shaped.The thesis has a queer theoretical framework and uses hermeneutic methodology together with Judith But-lers performativity theory and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks deconstruktivism. Queer theory and hermeneutic methodology can be used on historical sources to gain new perspectives and still be aware of the ideals and norms that existed within the historical period. I use “woman” and “femininity” as socially constructed gender categories that changes according to the context they are created within and in relation to.My main source material consists of articles and letters written by the librarians together with a rich materi-al of women’s rights history and Swedish public library history. By using the female librarians own words I try to get a first-hand perspective, described by the women who worked and lived as librarians during the first dec-ades of the 20th century. They worked in an important and ground-breaking time for public libraries and wom-en´s self-sufficiency.My thesis shows that the female librarians used different pronouns and adjectives to describe their profes-sion depending on which context they spoke or published their texts. Greta Linder, Hildur Lundberg and Maria Larsen used different strategies to survive within the profession. In some cases, it was important to emphasize the category “woman”, but in many cases their professional identity as librarians was of greater significance. As self-sufficient and unmarried librarians, they could create other possibilities than within the limited space that existed for married women.