Libraries and Scholarly Communication in the United States

This is a selection of papers from a 1987 conference of the same title. While the emphasis is on academic libraries, we are reminded of the crucial role of public and private libraries. Included are a survey of past research and stimulating ideas for future work, by Phyllis Dain; Wayne Wiegand's look at the role an ideology of reading played in the slow entry of academic libraries into scholarly communication in the 19th century; and a case study by Mary Niles Maack on the impact on African studies of collection inadequacies in U.S. and African libraries. Insightful reading for librarians working with research collections. Recommended. Library Journal

This book does a fine job of identifying the formal contributions of U.S. libraries to scholary communication since the middle of the nineteenth century. Several chapters go a step beyond that by capturing in lucid articulation library and scholarly phenomena that too often are elusive and ambiguous. Library Quarterly

In recent years, scholarly communication has become a concern of historians and sociologists interested in ideas and intellectual systems and in the social and institutional contexts in which ideas originate and are diffused. In this new intellectual history, attention id focused on the librarians who, in their effort to adapt to a new world of information technology and information overload, are inescapably aware of their historical legacy of buildings, collections, catalogs, methods of operation, and intellectual assumptions. Study of the historical dimension of the role of libraries and librarianship in the scholarly enterprise offers insights into the genesis of current problems and can inform plans for the future. Although library historians have created a growing body of useful works, including books and articles that relate library history to the mainstream of social and intellectual history, many questions remain to be investigated.

The papers in this volume, which present the results of such inquiry by senior scholars in the field, were selected from presentations at an interdisciplinary conference held at the Library of Congress, Libraries and Scholarly Communication in the United States: The Historical Dimension, at which library historians and practitioners, social historians, and others concerned with the creation and communication of knowledge were brought together to reflect upon some of these questions. The conference was organized to consider the contributions of...read more...