librarians

Librarians were bookkeepers during this era in library development. A librarian’s duties included keeping track of loaned books, dusting, and making sure the library was open at least one afternoon a week.

In 1815, Congress bought Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of 6,478 books to create the Library of Congress. Today, the Library of Congress has over 120 million items in its collection.

Most librarians were male during the early part of this era. The first record of a female library worker is in 1856. Shortly thereafter, women began to flood the profession, due to its social acceptability as a job for a woman outside the home.

The American Library Association was formed in 1876 and formal library education begins to spread throughout the country. Columbia University created the first formal library school in 1887.

Beginning at the end of the last century, libraries took on a morally upright social reform agenda. They believed that a person’s life could be changed if introduced to the reading of morally proper and educational material.

In 1941, the first African American Ph.D. in Library Science, Eliza Atkins Gleason, writes a dissertation that brings to light the inequity of public library service in the south for African-Americans.

The academic world saw an sharp increase in students pursuing higher education. The G.I. Bill of 1948 helped many young men to afford a college education.

OCLC (Ohio College Library Center) is formed in 1967, creating for the first time a shared cataloging network. This begins early library computer automation. By the mid-nineties, an overwhelming majority of all libraries use an online catalog.

In 1969, the Department of Defense and scientists create ARPANET, the “genesis” of the Internet. By the 1970’s, academic and business libraries were performing online reference services at a high cost.

In 1991, the National High Performance Computing Act of 1991 was passed. The goal was to create an “information Highway”. Funding from the act helped create the worldwide web/internet that we know today.

The information explosion continues as books, journals, and electronic formats are being published at steadily increasing rates.

Librarians have been at the forefront of recent legislation concerning information. Librarians often testify in court as experts in information policy.

Some recent examples include the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and the Digital Copyright Act.

Libraries and librarians have always been leaders in introducing and teaching the public new technology whether it be providing an automated catalog, introducing people to computers, or creating indexes and guides to internet resources.

More than ever, libraries and librarians are important to education for selection and evaluation of information no matter what form. We are the link between quality, unbiased information and our patrons.

*You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library.*	--Ray Bradbury
Information is the currency of democracy.	--Thomas Jefferson
Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.	--Walter Cronkite
There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.	--Andrew Carnegie
*Libraries are essential to the functioning of a free society; libraries are the great symbols of the freedom of the mind.*	--Franklin D. Roosevelt
*Be careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, "What will it do with you?"*	--Ralph Waldo Emerson
*You come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.*	--Ralph Waldo Emerson
*What is more important in a library than anything else--than everything else--is the fact that it exists.*	--Archibald MacLeish
In my early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which is where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared toward it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncataloged item, your good librarian has a ferret's nose.	--Catherine Drinker Bowen U.S. Biographer

Did you Know?

Reference librarians in public and academic libraries answer 7 million questions a week.

On average, academic libraries receive less than 3 cents of every dollar spent on higher education.

There are 3,658 academic libraries in the United States; 16.2 million students enter the buildings weekly. If they all lined up, single file, the line would stretch from Boston to San Francisco.

American academic libraries have approximately 878.9 million print volumes in their combined collections.

St. Jerome is the patron saint of libraries.

Americans go to school, public, and academic libraries twice as much as they go to the movies.