From Club Room to Carnegie Library traces the extent, influence and development of book lending provision in nineteenth-century Ulster. This innovative survey starts with the neighbourhood book club that met at an inn or in a member's house, then examines how enterprising business owners diversified to lend books for a fee, before going on to explore the range of organisations that added book lending to their activities and finishes with the establishment of the public library service which was financially assisted by Andrew Carnegie. Within these investigative chapters criteria have been devised and applied to focus on the purpose, occurrence and location, book consumption and membership of these facilities. For the first time information from diverse secondary literature has been critically analysed and pertinent data expressed in tabular form to collate and therefore reveal extant knowledge marshalled under the relevant criteria. The tables, included as extensive appendices, are an integral part of the research. The primary sources, some unique to this research, have been explored to expand the number of book lending facilities, widen the geographical coverage and discover more about the people who established and used the facilities. The information thus gained has also been tabulated so this new information is also in accessible format. The final chapter combines the secondary literature and the primary research to develop a detailed account of this educational and recreational practice, to discover patterns and provide statistics about book lending practices that to date have been vague or avoided altogether. From Club Room to Carnegie Library is a unique examination of book lending practices which takes the subject to greater depth and covers a longer time frame than previous work on the topic.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:673815 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Emerson, Pamela Margaret |
| Publisher | Ulster University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0015 seconds