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ALA’s Jubilee, 1926

September 26th, 2011
Drexel Institute, Philadelphia, site of ALA's 50th anniversary sessions 
The leaders of the American Library Association recognized the significance of its fiftieth anniversary in 1926 and celebrated accordingly. The primary site for ALA's annual conference, October 4-9, 1926 was Atlantic City, New Jersey, but arrangements were also made to have commemorative sessions in Philadelphia on October 6, the date that ALA was founded in 1876.  The attendance in Atlantic City was 2,224, the largest ever for an ALA conference. Of that number 1,200 traveled to Philadelphia for the commemorative sessions which took place at Drexel Institute (see postcard above).  They were treated to presentations by Richard R. Bowker and Melvil Dewey, two of the founders of ALA. America was also celebrating the sesquicentennial of the American Revolution with an International Exposition in Philadelphia in 1926 .  As it had at some previous world expositions, ALA sponsored an exhibit which was located in the Palace of Education and Social Economy at the exposition. Included in the exhibit was an eighty-foot map of the Cleveland Public Library system which was intended to demonstrate how a large public library served the public. Also in the exhibit was a printing press which printed out book lists and brochures which were distributed to exposition attendees. A model library included 2,000 adult books, 500 juvenile books, and 100 reference books. The ALA conference sessions in Atlantic City had an international theme with presentations by foreign librarians. It was at this conference that the concept of an international organization of library associations was brought forth resulting in what is now the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). Also at this conference ALA elected George H. Locke of the Public Library as its new president, the first and only time a Canadian has been elected president of ALA. The source for much of the information in this post is A History of the American Library Association 1876-1972 by Dennis Thomison (ALA, 1978).

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ALA’s 25th Anniversary, Waukesha, WI, 1901

September 24th, 2011
ALA's 1901 meeting took place in this hotel
1901 ALA conference attendees in front of State Historical Society, Madison, WI
Next month will mark the 135th anniversary of the founding of the American Library Association in Philadelphia in 1876. I thought I would take a look back at some of ALA's previous significant anniversaries in a lead up to that important milestone. ALA was 25 years old when it met at the Fountain Spring House (see postcard above) in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 1901. There wasn't a lot of hoopla at ALA's 23rd annual conference (there were no meetings in 1878 and 1884) related to its silver anniversary.  President James Carr did make note of the anniversary in the president's annual address and reported that there were now a thousand members of the association. That number included sixty-nine of the original charter members of ALA.  The Waukesha conference had the second largest number of attendees at a conference up to that time, a total of 454. The conference ran from July 3-10 and overlapped the Fourth of July which was kept free of general sessions. Monday, July 8th, was designated as "Madison day" and more than 300 attendees boarded a train for the Wisconsin Capital where they were met by carriages that took them on a tour of the city. A highlight of Madison day was a visit to the recently completed building of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin which housed both the Society's library and the library of the University of Wisconsin. A contemporary report of the ALA Waukesha conference was published in the July, 1901 issue of Library Journal. The image of the ALA conference attendees in front of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin building in Madison, WI is from the Wisconsin Historical Society Digital Collection (Image ID 45544). 

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Philatelic Research Award

September 21st, 2011
I call myself a library history buff in order to distinguish myself from library history scholars whose research is linked to their professional careers. In the world of philately very few individuals have their philatelic research linked to their careers.  Yet some very sophisticated research is undertaken by philatelists, and this research is honored in numerous ways by the philatelic community. The American Philatelic Society makes available a Research Award at each national level stamp show that it sanctions for the philatelic exhibit that displays a high level of original research.  I was pleased to be the recipient of that award at the Milcopex Stamp Show in Milwaukee this past weekend for my exhibit "America's Library - The Library of Congress".  Postal history is an aspect of philately that usually focuses on the postal history of a community or a specialized aspect of the postal history of a country. My exhibit on the Library of Congress begins to look at the postal history of an institution which in this case is a very complex organization that made heavy use of the mail to accomplish its mission. As with the library history scholar community I often feel like a fish out of water in the philatelic research community, so it's nice to be recognized for a small contribution to philatelic research.

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Longest Reference Request On A Postal Card

September 18th, 2011


The excellent staff of the American Library Association Library is always willing to respond to reference requests within the scope of the library's mission.  The Library responds to and shares some of those requests via its "Ask the ALA Librarian"  service. The Library staff might have been taken back, however, if they had received the lengthy request sent to ALA in 1912 by an Italian professor on the postal card shown here. Professor Adolphus Laura of the Royal Technical Institute in Cosenza, Italy breaks his request into five questions mostly related to "the classification of clippings, notes, index reruns, abstracts, correspondence and documents" and the Dewey Decimal Classification. He also ask if the Library can loan him "The Address of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes bearing on the getting at the essential contents of books 'with the least waste of time and labor' which was published in the Boston Daily Advisor on July 25, 1879.  Professor Laura's request written in neat cursive covers every inch of the back of the postal card and continues on the front of the card. I'm sure the ALA staff in 1912 responded diligently to Professor Laura's request, but not on a single postal card. 

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WI State Law Library 175th Anniversary Celebration

September 16th, 2011

 
Earlier in the week I was privileged to participate in the culminating event of a year long celebration of the 175th anniversary of the founding of what is now the Wisconsin State Law Library (WSLL). As I indicated in my presentation at the event, it doesn't get any better than that for a library history buff. The WSLL's approach to its 175th anniversary could be used as a model by other libraries approaching a significant anniversary. The WSLL's 175th anniversary activities are recorder on its website. The library, originally designated as the State Library, was established as part of the Congressional act which established the Territory of Wisconsin. A $5,000 appropriation was made to purchase books for use by the Territorial Legislature. This set a precedent for later territorial legislation that followed. The library narrowly escaped a disastrous fire in the Capitol where it was located in 1904. The WSLL's long serving librarian Gilson Glasier will be inducted into the Wisconsin Library Hall of Fame in November. The WSLL staff has put together a very nice timeline of the library's history. At the reception this week the staff had assimilated a number on neat artifacts from their history that were displayed for the guests. I'm the proud owner of five sections of iron shelving that were in the library when it was located in the Capitol (it moved out in 1999). Before most of the iron shelving was discarded, the library managed to salvage some very nice label holders that were reused on the attractive shelving the library has now. Their 175th anniversary logo is based on these label holders.
 
This article is being jointly posted on the Library History Buff Blog and the Wisconsin Library Heritage Center blog.

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