The Politics of Public Library History by A. S. Popowich

Since its inception, the role and function of the public library has been hotly debated. The English Public Libraries Act, passed in 1850, was the initiative of men who sought to improve the lot of the lower-classes through education and “the diffusion of useful knowledge” [1]. This parochial view of the role of the public library has not entirely disappeared and, it could be argued, such a position may be an inherent, if unspoken, part of the idea of modern public libraries (Black, 2003). Williams (1981) offered three different conceptions of the public library development, corresponding roughly to neutral, benevolent, and repressive social contexts. Recent research suggests that, far from the library being a benevolent, if parochial, institution committed to social progress and democratic ideals, the public library hides repressive structures of domination beneath a discourse of benevolence or neutrality (Black, 1996, 2005). The “myth” of neutral professions is widespread in “contemporary liberal, pluralist, capitalist” democracies (Jenson, 2004, p. 1), and the true nature of the public library hides behind this myth.

In North America the tension between the discourse and the underlying reality has taken the form of an ongoing debate over “social responsibility” in librarianship. This debate engendered interest in the social aspects of library history, culminating in Alistair Black’s important re-evaluation of library history, A New History of the English Public Library (1996) and The Public Library in Britain, 1914-2000 (2000). The foundation of Black’s interpretation of library history is the work of Michel Foucault, which Black uses to expose the “archaeology” of public library discourse. Foucault’s approach is useful for such an exposure, but his distrust of any totalizing theory of emancipation (Hacking, 1986) leads to a theory of social institutions that rejects the possibility of positive social change. In contrast, the work of Jurgen Habermas (1989), investigating the rise and disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere offers an alternative which not only accounts for the development of the public library as an institution of social control, but may point the way toward a model of public librarianship that offers at least the possibility of democratization and social emancipation.

Habermas and the public sphere

For Habermas, the philosophical project of the Enlightenment (the emancipation of reason from the “tutelage” of religious and metaphysical world-views) corresponded to the project of social and political liberation of a middle-class involved in trade and commodity production, beginning in the 17^th century. Excluded from social and political participation by feudal social relations, the bourgeoisie (i.e., the middle-class) created non-political institutions (the salon, the coffee-house, etc.) in order to debate, rationally and critically, the events of the day which affected them economically. Over the course of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, these institutions enabled the middle-class to reflect on itself, achieve “maturity” (Kant’s term) and eventually to seize political power. Habermas locates the triumph of the bourgeoisie in Britain with the great Reform Act of 1832.

Rapid industrialization and economic expansion, however, exacerbated and exposed the social inequalities of bourgeois society. The response of the bourgeois state which until then, had believed firmly in the principles of laissez-faire, was to intrude into the sphere of commodity exchange and production (by legislation of working-hours, for instance) and into the public sphere (by increasing suffrage, parliamentary reform, social legislation, etc.). The purpose of this interference was to mitigate the effect of economic oppression, in other words to de-radicalize the working class. This is the context of the origin of public libraries in Britain (Black, 1996). Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, published between 1864 and 1879, offer an untangling and exposure of these social and political processes during the period in question.

Under the guise of “improving” the lives of the working class (i.e., making the working class bourgeois) and of social progress, the public library was an institution of pacification and the dissemination of the bourgeois way of life; in other words, an institution of repression against already oppressed classes.

The class-consciousness which led to the emancipation of the middle-class had come about through individuals’ participation in the public sphere, a sphere which allowed for debate and discussion without recourse to the advantages of birth, property or coercion. This constraint-free debate, ostensibly one of the products of the public library, was in fact withheld from the working-class. No debate was possible within an institution that provided only the “improving” materials written by members of the dominant class. The ambiguous benefits of increased literacy, which had been one of the primary weapons used by the bourgeoisie in its struggle for liberation, were immediately recognized when it came to educating the working-class. On one hand, literacy would allow the working class to absorb bourgeois culture more easily, would educate them and allow progress to take its course; on the other hand the middle-class knew only too well how literacy could lead to dissatisfaction with the status quo, and alternative channels for the spread of culture and ideas. After the revolutions of 1848, fear of social unrest in Britain was great, and the public library became a tool, not for the emancipation or improvement of the lives of the working-class, such as it was professed to be by its founders, but a tool for their tranquillization and de-radicalization (Black, 1996). This is the context in which we must consider the future of the public library and, more importantly, its future as a possible agent of social change.

The public library as an agent of change

The justification for considering the library as an engine of social and political change goes back to the original conception of the public library. Habermas offers an account of the development, growth and eventual decline of bourgeois public institutions – of which the subscription and circulating library was one – between the 18^th and 20^th centuries. Society libraries such as the Halifax Library (1824) and the library of the Halifax Mechanics’ Institute (1831) fostered free discussion, the dissemination of new ideas, and, unofficially, the bourgeois-liberal programme. The rate- or tax- supported public library was the product of what Habermas refers to as the re-feudalization of society. It is this intrusion or interference that gives the public library the socially controlling character pointed out by Black.

The dynamics of this situation were analyzed by Habermas, though without specific reference to libraries, public or otherwise. As a sphere between civil society and the state, a sphere in which critical public discussion of matters of general interest was institutionally guaranteed, the bourgeois public sphere took shape in the specific historical circumstances of a developing market economy. In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emerging bourgeois public sphere gradually replaced a ‘publicity’ which was merely represented before the people by the ruler. When the bourgeoisie gained political power in the early 1830s, state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people – which was only possible because of the presence of rational-critical public sphere institutions such as the press (Held, 1980).

The primary focus of the public sphere was ‘discursive will-formation’, or what Held calls ‘constraint-free discussion’. The public sphere fostered discussion and argument free of ideology, bias, and other patterns of domination among the newly public class. Institutions in which such discussions could take place had to be deliberately created because the bourgeoisie was (until 1832) excluded from traditional avenues of public activity. As the bourgeoisie gained power, the institutions they created became integral elements in middle-class society and administration.

As long as social and political participation was restricted to the small remaining group of aristocrats and the rising middle-class, subscription libraries were all that was required. As the 19^th century progressed, however, and the inequalities of laissez-faire capitalism were increasingly exposed, the needs and desires of the working classes grew in importance. Fearing social revolution, the bourgeois government interfered in the previously sacrosanct arena of commodity production and exchange (by introducing working-hour and safety-standard legislation, for instance). The government also attempted, in good faith more often than not, to ‘improve’ the intellectual and moral lives of the working-class. The library was the perfect institution to accomplish this, but most working poor could not afford the dues of a subscription library. It was in this context that the public library was born.

The social aspect of library history is relatively new. Prior to the 1980s, library history tended to concentrate on institutional or biographical history, which is the history of specific libraries as organizations or the biographies of important people in library history (Black, 1996). As social history became more and more accepted in the wider historical field, so social library history also developed. Interdisciplinary methods, drawn mainly from the social sciences, began to be applied to history in general and library history in particular. This development occurred as a result of a crisis in historical method.

The “crisis” in historical method

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, renewed attention was given to the field of library history (Pawley, 2005). Initiatives such as the international symposium arranged by the International Federation of Library Associations’ (IFLA’s) Round Table on Library History in 1988 were put forward to investigate the “complex tendency” of library history to take into consideration advances in other fields, notably sociology (Kaegbein & Sturges, 1990). In 1989 the American Library Association’s (ALA) Library History Round Table issued a statement calling for all LIS programs to incorporate “history and historical methodology” into their curricula (Pawley, 2005, p. 223). These initiatives grew out of a double tendency which became increasingly problematic through the 1980s: the attempt by library historians to “show mutual connections and influences between libraries and their environment”, and the phasing out of library history as LIS education became more focused on professional aspects of librarianship (Black, 1995; Carmichael, Jr., 1995; Pawley, 2005). The response of library historians to this double tendency was to embrace a new view of methodology, and to promote the importance of “new history” in the face of a “new vocationalist library and information studies curriculum” (Black, 1995, p. 1).

In many respects the marginal position of library history was not new, even in 1988-89. The American library historian Michael Harris (1972), noticed “too little cumulation of skill, experience, knowledge, and maturity in library historians. Library history remains, by and large… a playground for amateurs” (as cited in Manley & Keeling, 1995, p. 80). While Manley and Keeling do not dispute the fundamental truth of “Harris’s gloomy comments”, they see the 1960s as a “crucial decade” in the development of library history as a discipline, and describe the work of library historians of this period as “sunshine in the gloom”. For example, the Library History Group of the (British) Library Association was created in 1962, and from 1964 on included specifications for library history in LIS training programs (Black 1996).

In his New History of the English Public Library, however, Alistair Black (1996) states quite categorically that even in the 1990s “the value and history of the literature are inquestionably uneven” (p.16). The main problem was that, in the old view of library history, “too little attention has been paid to wider social, economic and political developments” (p. 16). This criticism of the “old history” was implicit in Michael Harris’s gloomy comments. Much of the library history research since the Second World War was institutional – it concentrated on chronology and biography– rather than analyzing or examining the position of the library in a wider social context. In addition, much of this work was characterized by a “historically positive outlook on librarianship and library institutions” (Wiegand, 1990, p. 105). Harris’s article on “The Purpose of the American Public Library: A Revisionist Interpretation of History” (1973; as cited in Wiegand, 1990) introduced a new kind of library history. Harris looked beyond the immediate field of library research and took account of “revisionist historians of American education” (Wiegand, 1990, p. 106) to show that the public library movement in the 19^th century was less concerned with philanthropy or enlightenment than with the threat to social order posed by the masses.

The debate around Harris’s essay, and the rejoinder by Phyllis Dain, created interest in new historical methodologies in what had become a fairly stagnant field of research. This revisionist outlook also provided the context for Alistair Black’s significantly new library historiography, which was increasingly interdisciplinary, and which took developments of theory (mainly European, mainly sociological) seriously into account. In his “Manifesto for the ‘New’ Library History”, Black announced that:

Skouvig (2005), in her work on public library research, gives consideration to the application of Black’s call for a more contextualized theoretical historiography to the history of Danish public libraries. According to Black, the traditional institutional view of library history is obsolete because “the history of the library as an institution neither incorporates the public libraries in a broader social or historical context nor sees them in a theoretical perspective” (Skouvig, 2005, p. 251). According to Skouvig the importance Black places on theory derives from his understanding of two important, though contradictory, tendencies of modernity: the tendency towards emancipation of the individual on the one hand, and the tendency towards “control, surveillance and regulation” of the individual by the state on the other. “Black sees these two tendencies and inseparable parts of the project of modernity from the Age of Enlightenment and onwards, and they belong as such to the new theoretically based approached to the history of the library as an institution” (p. 225).

Foucault and the Enlightenment

This tension between the emancipatory effect of Enlightenment reason and the controlling, repressive functions of the institutions of the Enlightenment (or bourgeois) state must be the focus of any discussion of the public library [2]. For Skouvig, as for Black, the work of Michel Foucault provides the fittest theoretical framework for the new conception of library history. Foucault’s ‘histories’ are concerned with the exposure of repressive structures of domination in institutions which are generally thought of as ‘civilising’, ‘enlightened’, or ‘progressive’. The applicability of this point of view to library history is clear. Black himself states that “despite the obvious and wide availability of positive images of libraries and librarians, it is their ‘darker’ side that has often attracted critical historical scholarship” and that this “negative dimension is certainly something that interfaces easily with the work of Michel Foucault” (Black, 2005, p. 418). Indeed, as far back as 1996, Black was advocating the work of Foucault to analyze the “status aspirations” and “fabrication of… power” of public libraries (Black, 1996, p. 220). It is Foucault’s conception of modernity that informs the two criteria raised by Skouvig.

A Foucauldian analysis, however, may be problematic (Flynn, 1996). Black (1996) admits that “critical appraisals of Foucault’s work have been plentiful”, and that “many historians, certainly, have found it hard to embrace him as one of their own” (p. 419). This is not to dispute the relevance of Foucault’s model, however, since “the hesitancy that historians have displayed towards Foucault’s style… has not stopped historians of libraries and librarianship from offering Foucauldian interpretations of their subject” (p. 419). Despite historians’ problems with Foucault’s method, then, they have found his overall approach valuable.

It is certainly true that Foucault’s analysis of power / knowledge structures has proved fruitful. On the other hand, his theoretical position, “which questions not only the validity of the Enlightenment project and its faith in progress and reason” (p. 419) presents serious problems to library historiography which must be addressed. If, as Skouvig maintains, the elements of emancipation and social control are central to Black’s Foucauldian analysis of public library history, but that Foucault, by Black’s own admission “questions the validity of the Enlightenment project”, this suggests a gap in the theoretical model which needs to be filled. The public library, after all, arose out of the Enlightenment and achieved legitimate status along with other social institutions following the industrial revolution, and continued to be an important institution throughout the modern period. Whether or not the public library will continue to be relevant or viable remains to be seen. What is not in dispute is the fact that the public library – indeed the modern form of most libraries – must be situated in their modernist Enlightenment context. In Peter McNally’s review of the second volume of Black’s work (The Public Library in Britain, 1914-2000), he states that Black “argues that the role of the individual has been central to modernity and that for the past three centuries libraries – of all types – have served as fonts of reason and catalysts of progress. Libraries have been, if not central to the ‘project of modernity’, then certainly notable contributors to it” (McNally, 2002, p. 194), which suggests that a Foucauldian analysis that seeks to play down or reject the modernist/ Enlightenment context is insufficient.

The call for a new theoretical library history was not ignored by Canadian historians and library professionals. In Lorne Bruce’s review of Black’s first volume (1996), he recognizes the applicability of Black’s methods to library history in Canada, though he thinks that a theoretical model encompassing all of Canada’s diverse regions, populations, and histories might not be difficult:

Bruce’s rationale for this position is the political ‘liberalism’ that developed in Canada, but to concentrate on the library as a purely ‘democratic’ or ‘liberal’ institution is to ignore the connection between liberal public institutions and the power/knowledge structure which lie beneath them. It is also to discount alternatives to liberal-capitalism, and such an approach can never be truly critical.

The origin of Alistair Black’s “new history”

Black’s new library history is part of the development of historiography in general that has taken place over the last half-century or so, and which in turn is linked to the debate between modernists (such as Habermas) and post-modernists (such as Foucault) over the continuing relevance of the Enlightenment project, reason, and truth (LaCapra, 2000).
The view of society that laid the groundwork for modern historiography was devised by Giambattista Vico in his Scienzia Nuova (1725-1744). In the first place, Vico believed that humanity could only hope to comprehend structures of its own creation. We can, for example, understand the social world but not the natural. Society, in Vico’s view, was man-made, and hence a proper object of study. Vico also saw that the development of societies was not random, but that each phase of development bore characteristics that were shared by other societies in the same state (Bentley, 1996). This view of historical development was the basis for both Hegel’s and Marx’s philosophies of history, as well as the “scientific” historiography of Ranke. It is, in fact, the Enlightenment view of history: that society is a product of reason and therefore progressing rationally towards some sort of rational perfection. This idea came under attack in the late 20^th century by post-modernists, thus Habermas and Foucault found themselves on opposite sides of the debate. Foucault firmly rejected the Enlightenment notion of rational progress, while Habermas continued to support the validity of the “unfinished” Enlightenment project (Habermas, 2000).

Developments in historiography up to this point had tended to supplement Vico’s basic premise with theories from the social sciences. The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) is a good example of an attempt to theorize on the historical forces behind social development, and vice versa. Das Kapital (1867), of course, is itself a massive contribution to interdisciplinary ‘political economy’, and Lenin’s famously referred to Marx’s work as a conjunction of “German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism” (Lenin, 1913, para. 3). Marx reconfigured the field of history to move away from simple political history towards a social history which was not a history of a given society, but of “society” itself.

The importance of modernists such as Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud in the history of European thought is not disputed. As Marshall Bermann points out in his All that is Solid Melts into Air, modernism had a tendency to dispute and to challenge the accepted ideas of the time. In the field of historiography, this challenge led to a “crisis over method” (Bentley, 1999) which occupied the field between about 1880 and 1920. What Marx had done for social history began to be applied to other fields of research, primarily economic history. This new focus “implied that economic issues had lain for too long at the margin of enquiry” (p. 81). The new context, however, was still firmly grounded in the point of view prescribed by the Enlightenment: “It asked how the histories of economies and the social groupings that interacted with them should be constructed. It raised with renewed force the Enlightenment’s questions about history’s relation to social science.” (p. 81).

These questions were already being raised in the area of sociology by Pareto, Durkheim, Weber, and others; and these questions became central to the new methodology put forward by Alistair Black, calling for a “move away from the closed, inward-looking world of much library history, which generally avoids making connection with the social, political, economic, and cultural world outside itself” (Baggs, 1999, p. 1). Library history, like other fields of research, was reticent to adopt a theoretical approach (Bentley, 1999). This led, however, to a narrow, institutional history whose significance was quickly exhausted and which, for Black:

Theories of the public library

The crisis over method outlined above has been described as “a period in which historians have turned to the social sciences for their methodology and social scientists have relied on the historians for their theories” (Williams, 1981, p. 327). Robert Williams, in his discussion of “Historically Oriented Theories and Hypotheses of Public Library Development” considers this viewpoint to have some merit, but is “nevertheless an anomalous one”:

Communication between these two fields has proved valuable to the research performed in both, despite fundamentally different approaches to testing, causality, and the use of theoretical models. Williams (1981) stated categorically that “we have not had an enriching exchange of methods and theories between the library historians and the ‘nonhistorians’” (p. 330), and ascribes this lack of enrichment to the fact that, in the small community of library scholars (at that time), theoretical generalizations that were of use to one researcher were not necessarily of use to another, so that “when the work of library historians contains generalization about library-related phenomena, they are often neglected” (p. 330).

There was no fundamental reason why this should remain the case, and Williams set out to “encourage [the] interchange of theoretical models examining the generalizations which have been put forward in the area of public library development” (p. 330). Therefore Williams’ research was the opposite of Black’s. Rather than seeking to apply social-scientific or philosophical theory to an area of library history (in this case, public library development), Williams seeks to pass the theories developed by library historians back to the social science community. He identifies three predominant theories of public development in the historical literature: the social conditions theory, the democratic traditions theory, and the social control theory.

The social conditions theory is the most inclusive, and is supported by the work of important library historians Dee Garrison, Jesse Shera, and Sidney Ditzion. Shera’s study of public library development in New England from 1629 to 1855 is held up by Black as “a classic statement of contextual library history” (Black, 1996, p. 17), and Shera’s argument is cited by Williams as follows:

Williams criticized this model since the variables involved are considered applicable at all places and all times that public libraries developed. For Black, the “contextual” approach lacks theoretical rigor. In discussing Shera’s work, Black states that:

Williams’ second theory, the “democratic traditions” theory is, understandably, the most popular theory in American circles. “Public librarians are especially fond of it since it places them squarely in the mainstream of the Jeffersonian tradition and permits them to view their work as central to the advancement of democracy” (Williams, 1981, p. 334). In many ways this is the dominant view in North American librarianship today, and informs many of the statements and activities of the American Library Association. The argument here is simple: “the development of the American public library is the result of the growth of democracy” (p. 334). No account of why this should have occurred is given, nor is the concept of “democracy” analyzed at all. This situates the democratic traditions approach firmly within the context of other “democratic” theories prevalent in the United States. As Williams himself notes, “the concept of democracy is and has been a useful myth in all of American history and life and it seems to have the same role in library history” (p. 334).

Finally, the social control theory provided the basis for Alistair Black’s PhD thesis, “The English public library as an agency of social stability, ca. 1850-1919” (1989), and continues to play a part in his work today (Black, 2005). According to Williams, the basis of this theory is that “while there is much to commend in the interpretations made by the ‘liberal-progressive’ historians of public libraries (…) one should not neglect to consider the actual motivations of the founders of public libraries (…) who used the public library as one of the means by which they could control social change in an orderly manner and thereby insure their position in society” (Williams, 1981, p. 335-6).

The discourse of library history

An investigation of social context, as we have seen, is insufficient for Alistair Black’s purpose; questions of power, class, economics and politics must also be raised. It is for this reason that the work of Michel Foucault, dealing as it does with the hidden histories of social institutions such as prisons and clinics, is so vital to Black’s project. Foucault identified the processes whereby power is arrogated to certain social groups through the manipulation of knowledge. The conventional view of (especially “scientific”) knowledge is that it is objectively arrived at and “truthful”. In Foucault’s view, “scientific truths can only be understood in the context of the motives of the ‘expert’ networks that produce them…. all knowledge… is inseparable from the exercise of power” (Black, 1996, p. 220). Knowledge and power are elements of a single social process (power/knowledge), which maintains power in the hands of those who “have” or “employ” knowledge, and subjugates those who have been excluded from such socially constructed discourses. “In essence, those in command of a discourse have the power to make it true, and to underwrite its scientific validity” (p. 220). Black sees the possibility of an application of Foucault’s arguments to the field of library history, and in a fascinating article on “The Library as Clinic” (2005), Black shows that, far from being politically and socially neutral institutions, benevolently housing and providing access to knowledge and wisdom, public libraries in Britain were also:

The work of Foucault lends itself well to such an expanded analysis of the social dynamics surrounding the public library. Foucault himself looked at prisons and asylums in much the same way. Black’s Foucauldian analysis continues by making a strong case for viewing “the discourse of librarianship itself as merely [a] ‘regime of truth’” (Black, 1996, p. 222). Two elements of the “discourse of librarianship” picked out by Black are the “self-help ethic which librarians preached” and the “message of emancipation” inherent in that ethic (p. 223). From a Foucauldian perspective, this message was:

It is this question that lies at the heart of Alistair Black’s New History. For only by understanding a culture in its totality can we understand that culture’s institutions, where they came from, how they developed, what position they occupy, and what forces surround them.

Conclusion

The application of theory to public library history should not concern only library historians. The current state of the World Wide Web (“Web 2.0”) seeks to create a virtual public sphere to replace the hopelessly re-feudalized original. Proponents of Web 2.0 technologies claim that they increase constraint-free discussion and democratic participation in the public sphere. Certainly the history of the open-source movement seems to demonstrate the capabilities of ‘discursive will-formation’, but with the expanding monopolies of corporations such as Google, the increased media presence on the internet (both traditional and alternative media) and hence the possibility of privileged voices among internet users (despite the prevalence of Wikis, blogs, etc.), is the virtual public sphere in danger of becoming just as mercantalized as the original? Will e-commerce and electronic media serve to undermine the emancipatory potential of the Web just as it is coming to fruition? What of that section of the global population who do not have access to the World Wide Web? Is the new public sphere just as representative of social class dynamics as the old print public sphere was? These questions are beyond the scope of the present paper, but are important nonetheless.

For Karl Marx, the question of a “virtual” public sphere would have been ridiculous. The material conditions of our existence (food, shelter, etc) condition our consciousness and not the other way around. In this respect, the public library system which developed within the capitalist mode of production, obviously serves the bourgeois-capitalist class. Any theoretical point-of-view which privileges the virtual or the informational over the material is at best misleading, and at worst a deliberate attempt to control society. In speaking of the privileged position first religion, then commodities held in the world, he spoke of “fetishism”, and the popularity of, for example, the online community Second Life, exemplifies nothing if not the fetishism of information.

Habermas, while taking Marx as a starting point, believes that the inequalities and contradictions of liberal-capitalist society can be resolved from within by means of freedom of expression (‘freedom’ both in the legal and practical ability to participate). According to this viewpoint both public libraries and the internet, so far as they enable “constraint free discussion” must have a positive effect on society. As we have seen, however, the extent to which both the public library and the internet enable such discussion is open to debate. For Alistair Black, drawing on the work of Foucault, the public library was never intended by those who created it, to enable constraint-free debate, but to condition readers in the dominant ideology, the ideology of the bourgeoisie. The current trend toward preferring mainstream over alternative information within the library (justified by popularity) and the redesign of libraries to be less a “place of books” (libraria, bibliotheca) than a place of comfort and entertainment (justified by competition) simply reinforces the public library’s position as an agent of bourgeois ideology.

A.S. Popowich is currently a second-year student at the Dalhousie School of Information Management, Halifax. Notes

1. The “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge” had been active in this field since the 1820s and played a role in the establishment of the Select Committee of 1849 which preceded the Public Libraries Act (Black, 1996).

2. This tension is, in fact, the basis for all of Habermas’ work, since it was the location of the aporia identified by Horkheimer and Adorno in the Philosophical Fragments / Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944 / 1947).

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The Politics of Public Library History by A.S. Popowich
Dalhousie Journal of Information and Management, volume 3, number 1 (Winter 2007)

The Politics of Public Library History by A.S.Popowich

The Politics of Public Library History
by A.S.Popowich