Community Libraries: Connecting Readers in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Liverpool
Department Name: Sch of History
Abstract
This Research Network will investigate the cultural history of libraries at the dawn of the modern age. The recent upsurge in interest in the history of reading has opened up numerous new interpretative avenues for scholars. Libraries, book clubs, and reading circles have attracted particular attention, as scholars seek to recover the physical, administrative, and cultural environments in which reading took place. Yet such research has tended to be conducted within disciplinary boundaries, without fully embracing the interdisciplinary and boundary-crossing potential of Library History, and rarely employing international or comparative perspectives to reach a broader understanding of the relationship between libraries and the communities that host them.
In the two centuries before the passage of the Public Libraries Act in the UK in 1850, libraries proliferated across the UK, Europe and North America on a bewildering variety of organizational models, none of which were 'public' in the modern sense. Libraries emerged to serve particular communities, reflecting the specialist demands of military garrisons, emigrant vessels, prisons, schools, churches, mechanics institutes, factories, mills, and informal networks of medical men and lawyers. Libraries were part of the newly emerging leisure industry, with books available for hire from smallscale operators in inns, taverns, banks, railway stations, and coffee houses, and from the sprawling city circulating libraries associated with the rise of the novel. Subscription libraries, library societies, book clubs, and other proprietary institutions provided a forum for conversation, debate and sociability, and made a key contribution to the spread of new political ideas.
These libraries were not 'public' in the modern sense, supported by the taxpayer and lending books free of charge to the whole community, but they were a crucial part of an Enlightened 'public sphere'. They served different communities, providing a space where civic, religious, political, and commercial values converged and overlapped. They developed as communities in their own right, shaping the intellectual horizons of members, and signaling a range of collective identities that expressed concepts of cultural belonging and difference. The Network will examine how different types of library interacted with local, national and international communities of readers. We will assess the contribution made by libraries to the circulation and reception of print of all kinds, and to the forging of collective identities amongst discreet groups of people. The Network has broader implications for social and gender history, encompassing not only the exclusionary tactics employed by libraries of different kinds, but also the potential for social mobility that access to literature opened up for certain sections of society. In the process, the research will inform current debates about the role of public libraries in shaping communities and promoting social mobility through literacy today.
Since they emerged in Britain, North America and continental Europe at around the same time, libraries offer tremendous potential for comparative history that has yet to be fully exploited - with territories adopting distinctive organisational models, yet consuming a remarkably similar canon of international bestsellers. The Network will assess the emergence of libraries in comparative perspective, asking how far models of library provision and administration were disseminated, discussed, imitated, and challenged as they travelled between different social environments and political regimes. In particular, the Network will assess the explanatory power of the Atlantic paradigm for library history, asking how far Atlantic libraries were distinctive from libraries elsewhere in the world, or whether a global perspective is more useful in explaining the emergence of different models of library provision.
In the two centuries before the passage of the Public Libraries Act in the UK in 1850, libraries proliferated across the UK, Europe and North America on a bewildering variety of organizational models, none of which were 'public' in the modern sense. Libraries emerged to serve particular communities, reflecting the specialist demands of military garrisons, emigrant vessels, prisons, schools, churches, mechanics institutes, factories, mills, and informal networks of medical men and lawyers. Libraries were part of the newly emerging leisure industry, with books available for hire from smallscale operators in inns, taverns, banks, railway stations, and coffee houses, and from the sprawling city circulating libraries associated with the rise of the novel. Subscription libraries, library societies, book clubs, and other proprietary institutions provided a forum for conversation, debate and sociability, and made a key contribution to the spread of new political ideas.
These libraries were not 'public' in the modern sense, supported by the taxpayer and lending books free of charge to the whole community, but they were a crucial part of an Enlightened 'public sphere'. They served different communities, providing a space where civic, religious, political, and commercial values converged and overlapped. They developed as communities in their own right, shaping the intellectual horizons of members, and signaling a range of collective identities that expressed concepts of cultural belonging and difference. The Network will examine how different types of library interacted with local, national and international communities of readers. We will assess the contribution made by libraries to the circulation and reception of print of all kinds, and to the forging of collective identities amongst discreet groups of people. The Network has broader implications for social and gender history, encompassing not only the exclusionary tactics employed by libraries of different kinds, but also the potential for social mobility that access to literature opened up for certain sections of society. In the process, the research will inform current debates about the role of public libraries in shaping communities and promoting social mobility through literacy today.
Since they emerged in Britain, North America and continental Europe at around the same time, libraries offer tremendous potential for comparative history that has yet to be fully exploited - with territories adopting distinctive organisational models, yet consuming a remarkably similar canon of international bestsellers. The Network will assess the emergence of libraries in comparative perspective, asking how far models of library provision and administration were disseminated, discussed, imitated, and challenged as they travelled between different social environments and political regimes. In particular, the Network will assess the explanatory power of the Atlantic paradigm for library history, asking how far Atlantic libraries were distinctive from libraries elsewhere in the world, or whether a global perspective is more useful in explaining the emergence of different models of library provision.
Planned Impact
The Network will engage library professionals, charitable bodies, public library campaigners, journalists, policy makers, and other stakeholders in an historically-informed debate about the relationship between libraries and communities, and about the social meaning of reading.
This proposal comes at a critical time for the future of public libraries in the UK. The current economic climate has unleashed acrimonious debates about efficiency savings, funding cuts and library closures - but these debates hide a more fundamental problem. In their current configuration, public libraries are plainly not working. The number of children and young adults who read regularly has declined sharply as television, film, video games, and the internet have come increasingly to dominate their lives. With libraries failing to reach young people, our country is in the grip of a crisis in social mobility - with entire generations excluded from the ability of books to change minds and lives.
Against this background, libraries have become a potential target for councilors required to make cost savings in straitened economic times, competing for an ever-narrowing slice of the public purse. In this harsh environment, libraries need to adapt to survive:
- utilizing the support of community volunteers to administer borrowing and stock shelves;
- extending their 'offer' by providing meeting spaces, connecting the digitally unconnected to the internet, and offering local government and other services;
- co-locating with schools, medical practices, and shopping centres;
- and joining forces with philanthropists and private firms offering library services commercially.
There has been considerable resistance to these sorts of reforms, but every one of them is deeply ingrained in the public library's historical DNA. The Research Network will take the current upheaval in public library provision as an opportunity to reassess the relationship between libraries and communities - looking back beyond the foundation of rate-supported public libraries in 1850 to consider what might be learnt from other models of library provision, administration, and culture. Our conclusions will form the basis for a collaborative paper submitted to the website History & Policy following the culmination of the Network, to be accessibly written for a broad audience, with the policy implications of our research clearly outlined. To achieve maximum impact, the policy paper will be circulated to the Policy Provocation Working Group on Community Libraries (chaired by the University of Liverpool) for consideration by local and national government (see Pathways to Impact).
Non-governmental stakeholders in library provision will be encouraged to take an active part in the Research Network. Foremost amongst these, The Reader Organisation is a charity and social enterprise based in Liverpool that is committed to changing lives through literature. Gathering an increasingly dynamic national and international profile, The Reader Organisation is committed to rethinking the idea of the community library, envisioning a future library "where books and people are at the heart of reading communities" (http://thereader.org.uk/new-reader-libraries/). The Arts Council took over responsibility for supporting and developing the libraries sector from the MLA in October 2011, and has launched the Libraries Development Initiative to ensure that libraries continue to play a central role in communities. The Carnegie Trust has recently renewed its investment in the question of library reform, having this year published a report on Public Libraries Services in the 21st Century, while a number of other third sector bodies have vested interests in the question of community libraries - such as the Scottish Book Trust, the National Literacy Trust, and the Association of Independent Libraries, as well as campaign groups like the Public Libraries News website.
This proposal comes at a critical time for the future of public libraries in the UK. The current economic climate has unleashed acrimonious debates about efficiency savings, funding cuts and library closures - but these debates hide a more fundamental problem. In their current configuration, public libraries are plainly not working. The number of children and young adults who read regularly has declined sharply as television, film, video games, and the internet have come increasingly to dominate their lives. With libraries failing to reach young people, our country is in the grip of a crisis in social mobility - with entire generations excluded from the ability of books to change minds and lives.
Against this background, libraries have become a potential target for councilors required to make cost savings in straitened economic times, competing for an ever-narrowing slice of the public purse. In this harsh environment, libraries need to adapt to survive:
- utilizing the support of community volunteers to administer borrowing and stock shelves;
- extending their 'offer' by providing meeting spaces, connecting the digitally unconnected to the internet, and offering local government and other services;
- co-locating with schools, medical practices, and shopping centres;
- and joining forces with philanthropists and private firms offering library services commercially.
There has been considerable resistance to these sorts of reforms, but every one of them is deeply ingrained in the public library's historical DNA. The Research Network will take the current upheaval in public library provision as an opportunity to reassess the relationship between libraries and communities - looking back beyond the foundation of rate-supported public libraries in 1850 to consider what might be learnt from other models of library provision, administration, and culture. Our conclusions will form the basis for a collaborative paper submitted to the website History & Policy following the culmination of the Network, to be accessibly written for a broad audience, with the policy implications of our research clearly outlined. To achieve maximum impact, the policy paper will be circulated to the Policy Provocation Working Group on Community Libraries (chaired by the University of Liverpool) for consideration by local and national government (see Pathways to Impact).
Non-governmental stakeholders in library provision will be encouraged to take an active part in the Research Network. Foremost amongst these, The Reader Organisation is a charity and social enterprise based in Liverpool that is committed to changing lives through literature. Gathering an increasingly dynamic national and international profile, The Reader Organisation is committed to rethinking the idea of the community library, envisioning a future library "where books and people are at the heart of reading communities" (http://thereader.org.uk/new-reader-libraries/). The Arts Council took over responsibility for supporting and developing the libraries sector from the MLA in October 2011, and has launched the Libraries Development Initiative to ensure that libraries continue to play a central role in communities. The Carnegie Trust has recently renewed its investment in the question of library reform, having this year published a report on Public Libraries Services in the 21st Century, while a number of other third sector bodies have vested interests in the question of community libraries - such as the Scottish Book Trust, the National Literacy Trust, and the Association of Independent Libraries, as well as campaign groups like the Public Libraries News website.
Publications
Towsey M
(2015)
'Store their Minds with Much Valuable Knowledge': Agricultural Improvement at the Selkirk Subscription Library, 1799-1814
in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
| Description | Developed: The principal aim of a research networking grant is to develop a network of like-minded scholars from a variety of relevant disciplines with a shared interest in the main research theme (in this instance, the history of libraries in the long eighteenth century); to use the network to generate momentum in pushing the boundaries of the field further, and to investigate new questions and problems of central interest to the field; to promote the work of network members amongst the network itself, and to a wider audience (both academic and non-academic); and to develop plans for collaborative work in the future. With these broad aims in mind, the networking grant has been an unqualified success, with the three colloquia organised by the network and subsequent research programming drawing together more than 80 colleagues from four continents and from a very varied list of disciplines including History, English Literature, Modern Languages, Architecture, Law, Library and Information Science, Digital Humanities, Computing and Sociology. Arrangements have been put in place to guarantee the continuing life of the network beyond the period of the grant (ended March 2015), built around a jiscmail email group to disseminate new work and calls for papers and publications, and the website, which will continue to host relevant blogs, work-in-progress, and a range of research and teaching resources. The email list has helped us generate conference panels and roundtables for a large number of major international conferences, including the Association of Digital Humanities Organisations (held in Sydney, July 2015), the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Montreal, October 2014), the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Los Angeles, March 2015), the International Enlightenment Congress (Rotterdam, July 2015), and the Society for the History of Authors, Readers and Publishing (Montreal, July 2015). These conference panels and roundtables have allowed us to continue conversations initiated in the course of the grant and share them with other scholars with like-minded interests, and continue to push collaborative thinking about pedagogical practices and research approaches in new directions. This work has been developed still further in a symposium organised by members of the Network at the New York Society Library in January 2016, which helped mark the launch of the NYSL's newly developed digital resource 'City Readers', and featured panel sessions on pedagogical uses of the digital resource, and on work-on-progress arising from the eighteenth-century origins of the Society Library (a membership library founded in the eighteenth century, which played a central role in establishing New York's place in the new nation in the 1780s and 90s). The network and the subsequent research programmes have helped develop a number of ambitious applications for further funding in this are; see the next section for planned developments in the future. Discoveries: As well as establishing a dynamic infrastructure for taking work in this field to the next stage of development, the network grant itself established a number of central working hypotheses about how libraries operated in the Atlantic World in the long eighteenth century. These will drive the arguments of the edited collection in preparation, and further work of network members: (1) The network documented the diverse range of community libraries created on a variety of organizational models that proliferated over the two centuries before the emergence of the Public Library movement in Great Britain and the United States in the 1840s and 50s. Publicly-funded Public Llibraries have been so successful on both sides of the Atlantic that they not only put most of their predecessors out of business, but also have largely effaced our knowledge of alternative models for library structure and operation. In recovering these models, the network makes a timely intervention in current debates about the survival of libraries at the start of the twenty-first century, by elucidating variant (and largely forgotten) funding models, ways of encouraging community investment in the library, and an appreciation for the dynamic nature of library culture, which has long adapted itself to changing environments in order to satisfy people's perennial need for knowledge, self-improvement, and sociability. (2) The network sought to place, for the first time, the emergence of community libraries within an Atlantic context. Histories of libraries are too often delimited by local, regional, or national boundaries (such as the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland or American Libraries Before 1876). Yet the books collected and consumed in early community libraries belie the limitations placed upon them by scholars. Books made their way into community library collections from around the Atlantic World. They moved across different national and linguistic areas through a library culture underpinned by commercialism, philanthropy, and associationalism. Community libraries played an important - and to date largely unrecognized - role in shaping Atlantic social networks, political and religious movements, scientific and geographic knowledge, and economic enterprise. (3) The network assembled studies of a broad range of libraries - subscription, circulating, mercantile, religious, collegiate, private - in a variety of Atlantic communities - bustling seaports, colonial plantations, sleepy rural towns, and rising manufacturing centres - revealing their commonalities and differences over time. The field of library history has remained wedded to the micro-historical case study; by forcing these various types of library into conversation with each other, the network has shed fresh light on important questions about the origins of various forms of libraries; how ideas about library culture, administration, and book collecting were disseminated to new communities, new territories, and new linguistic contexts; and why they emerged unevenly in different national contexts. (4) The network takes seriously the role played by libraries in the creation of individual and communal identities. We argue that libraries have a distinct role to play in shaping modern identities through the circulation of texts, the fostering of sociability, and the building of community-based institutions. Yet access to these libraries often required some form of material, social, or religious capital in order to access the books. Libraries that explicitly did not - such as those aimed at labourers and apprentices - were often founded and managed by social elites, who tended to control book selection and the conditions under which books could be borrowed. In this and many other ways, community libraries reflected and helped constitute the values of the communities they served. The three published outputs I have attached to this grant in ResearchFish represent my own reflections on some of these emerging conclusions, and both serve to suggest where the work of the network might go in the future in further broadening out the reach and significance of this field. It should be noted however that the work of a Research Network is not primarily to produce research outputs, but to facilitate collaborative working and generate new ideas. As of February 2020, members of the network in three separate continents have between them been awarded grant funding in excess of £3 million for further collaborative research arising from matters discussed in the research network and in this report form. This includes a grant of £842,709 made by the AHRC towards a project led by Professor Mark Towsey (the current reporter) as PI, as well as a separate grant of equivalent value awarded by the same research council to a project led by network members at the Universities of Stirling and Glasgow. |
| Exploitation Route | Further publications are planned by members of the network working alone or in collaboration with each other; most important of these are a paper for the History and Policy website on the policy implications of the research, and two special issues, the first on digital approaches to library history, and the second on pedagogical uses of library history. The work underpinned research undertaken by the PI on a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship held in 2015, which also allowed me to extend further some of the non-academic impact activities of the original network. In accordance with one of the principal aims of the original grant application, the network has helped establish collaborations to build towards more ambitious and substantive research projects in the future. These have included an application for an AHRC standard grant worth c. £1 million that was successful. The resulting project led by Professor Mark Towsey (PI) with network members Dr Matthew Sangster (Glasgow), Dr Kyle Roberts (American Philosophical Society), Dr Laura Miller (West Georgia), Dr Lynda Yankaskas (Muehlenberg), Professor Norbert Schurer (Long Beach) and Professor Simon Burrows (Western Sydney University) as Co-Investigators will run from October 2020 to September 2022 and will involve a major new study of subscription library holdings in the Atlantic World, with outputs to include a major new database of library holdings (to be interoperable with other major resources of historical bibliometrics, including Burrows's French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe database) producing important new insights into the role of libraries and reading in community formation in different parts of the Atlantic World, the dissemination of radical new ideas of the Enlightenment and Revolutionary era, and the influence of European texts in the Anglophone world (both translated and in the original language). Importantly, the approach underpinning the Towsey/Burrows project will be scalable to other types of library in this period, and to other national and language zones. Towsey/Burrows are already exploring ideas for an application with Professor Norbert Schurer (University of California: Long Beach) for a sister project on commercial circulating library holdings; adaptations have also been mooted already for work using the same digital platform on Jesuit libraries in Spanish America; circulating libraries in the Netherlands and the Dutch Atlantic; and private libraries in eighteenth-century Britain. Further projects are also in development, particularly those involving ECR members of the network. Network members have applied (or are planning to apply) for Newton International Fellowships, Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships, and Marie Curie Fellowships, while Towsey was invited to become CI on a funding application to the Leverhulme Trust (unsuccessful) of Bishop Richard Hurd's unique surviving library at Hartlebury Castle, which would have included digital approaches, major new research on private libraries and the history of reading, and significant impact and public engagement programmes around the surviving library space at Hartlebury. In all of this work, and much else besides, the network originally funded by the AHRC provides invaluable support and advice. The network provides steering group/advisory board members for all of the projects named above, while the connections made with non-academic institutions and audiences through the auspices of the network grant have already - and will continue - to be vital in engaging a wider public in the results of the research. A key example of this is the 'Knowledge is Power' exhibition at Liverpool's Victoria Gallery and Museum, which has been designed to be easily scalable and adaptable for other libraries in other civic settings, on either side of the Atlantic. The 'Knowledge is Power' approach to disseminating the research and engaging the public could lead to wider uses in the future; the exhibition is already being used by the Reader Organisation as a setting and inspiration for the shared reading groups they offer, and has helped change how curators at National Museums Liverpool think about eighteenth-century Liverpool; it formed one of the central focal points of the AHRC-funded 'Reading Communities: Connecting the Past and the Present' public impact and engagement event in Liverpool on 10-11 March 2017, with the Open University as PI and UoL as project partner; it could also be used to inform architectural walking tours, local historical societies and enthusiasts, and schools groups in understanding the historical origins of reading habits and library culture. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| URL | http://communitylibraries.net |
| Description | The network grant has impacted on non-academic audiences in a number of ways, deepening public understanding of the history of libraries and the history of reading habits, and establishing long-term connections between academic researchers and colleagues in other sectors. (1) In the first place, the network attracted a large number of non-academic partners and contributors, including research libraries (the Newberry Library, Chicago; Dr Williams's Library, London; Marsh's Library, Dublin), independent libraries (the Liverpool Athenaeum, New York Society Library, Innerpeffray Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia), and reading activities (the Reader Organisation, Liverpool; Sheffield Reads), who attended colloquia and follow-on research programming, and who continue to contribute to discussions around the central research questions. Their participation has helped deepen public understanding of the history of their institutions, and others like them, and of the contemporary resonances of historical reading practices and library behaviour. The network has demonstrably helped change how many of these institutions and groups think about their history; e.g. a team of researchers from the charity and social enterprise Sheffield Readers gave a paper at the third colloquia linking oral histories of c20 Sheffield library goers, with research on Sheffield's c18 libraries inspired by the work of the network. They have now written up their work, providing a unique contribution to the 'Before the Public Libraries' edited collection which is nearing completion. (2) For some of these institutions, the work of the network has had a still more tangible impact. The New York Society Library has used insights from the research to inform the design and presentation of a new digital resource launched in January 2016 focusing on the eighteenth-century circulation records of the library, and the reading habits of its member. A symposium jointly organised by the library and members of the network workshopped pedagogical uses of the digital resource, and shared work-in-progress research inspired by the network on aspects of the Society Library's history to a public audience of 60 people in New York's Bibliography Week. This helped raise awareness amongst the membership and community at large of the vital contributions made by the library to the city's and the nation's history, while also changing how audience members and librarians thought about the historic books in the collection, by revealing how those historic books were once part of ordinary life, and played crucial roles in shaping how people thought and acted on the great debates of the age about Revolution, Slavery, Religion and Political Constitutions. (3) The work of the Network has also impacted on public understanding of the Liverpool Athenaeum. Network members wrote in support of the Athenaeum's successful application for Heritage Lottery Funding in 2015, and have thereby helped secure the funding that will help raise awareness of the important historical collections held by the library. Following connections built up by the network, Mark Towsey (PI) has assisted the Athenaeum's library committee in two central public engagement projects; the first is the 'City of Libraries' exhibition, which ran from December 2015 to June 2016 (see below); the second is an annotated edition of the first minute book of Athenaeum to be published by the Records Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, for which Towsey will serve as co-editor. Thus the network is helping to raise awareness and deepen public understanding of this important survivor of eighteenth-century library culture. (4) The Libraries in the City exhibition ('Knowledge is Power') was launched at Liverpool's Victoria Gallery and Museum in November 2015 and ran to June 2016. The network's research, together with my own research subsequently funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, fundamentally informed the design of the exhibition; together with the then gallery director, I had responsibility for selecting most of the exhibits, including many exhibits that the non-academic partners were not previously aware of, and I wrote much of the commentary and interpretative material. In the process, I shared several key aspects of my research with the non-academic exhibition partners, the Liverpool Athenaeum and the Liverpool Medical Institution, enhancing public understanding of their collections and the history of their own institutions. The exhibition itself has also been an effective vehicle for engaging a broader public of museum visitors in my research, and I have given a number of gallery talks to illustrate the exhibition further. Finally, the exhibition has unexpectedly allowed me to enhance my connections with the Reader Organisation (RO), a charitable social enterprise promoting shared reading. My research brings vital historical perspectives to the work that the RO does in advocating shared reading groups; the RO held weekly reading groups in the exhibition space themed around 18th-century material, and my work continues to feed into the RO's development of an international Centre for Reading at late Georgian Calderstones Park in South Liverpool. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2014 |
| Sector | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal,Policy & public services |
| Description | Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic |
| Amount | £842,708 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | AH/S007083/1 |
| Organisation | Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 09/2019 |
| End | 09/2022 |