The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901
The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901

Author: Sharon Murphy

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-06-23

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 113755083X

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The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901 considers the history of the libraries that the East India Company and Regular Army respectively established for soldiers during the nineteenth century. Drawing upon a wide range of material, including archival sources, official reports, and soldiers’ memoirs and letters, this book explores the motivations of those who were responsible for the setting up and/or operation of the libraries, and examines what they reveal about attitudes to military readers in particular and, more broadly, to working-class readers – and leisure – at this period. Murphy’s study also considers the contents of the libraries, identifying what kinds of works were provided for soldiers and where and how they read them. In so doing, The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901 affords another way of thinking about some of the key debates that mark book history today, and illuminates areas of interest to the general reader as well as to literary critics and military and cultural historians.

Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere
Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere

Author: Lara Atkin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-06-21

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 303020426X

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This open access Pivot book is a comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on networked conceptualisations of empire, transnational frameworks, and ‘new imperial history’ paradigms that privilege imbricated colonial and metropolitan ‘intercultures’, it looks at the neglected role of public libraries in shaping a programme of Anglophone civic education, scientific knowledge creation, and modernisation in the British southern hemisphere. The book’s six chapters analyse institutional models and precedents, reading publics and types, book holdings and catalogues, and regional scientific networks in order to demonstrate the significance of these libraries for the construction of colonial identity, citizenship, and national self-government as well as charting their influence in shaping perceptions of social class, gender, and race. Using primary source material from the recently completed ‘Book Catalogues of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere’ digital archive, the book argues that public libraries played a formative role in colonial public discourse, contributing to broader debates on imperial citizenship and nation-statehood across different geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders.

Unpacking the Personal Library
Unpacking the Personal Library

Author: Jason Camlot

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2022-07-01

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1771124644

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Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books is an edited collection of essays that ponders the cultural meaning and significance of private book collections in relation to public libraries. Contributors explore libraries at particular moments in their history across a wide range of cases, and includes Alberto Manguel’s account of the Library of Alexandria as well as chapters on library collecting in the middle ages, the libraries of prime ministers and foreign embassies, protest libraries and the slow transformation of university libraries, and the stories of the personal libraries of Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, Sheila Watson, Al Purdy and others. The book shows how the history of the library is really a history of collection, consolidation, migration, dispersal, and integration, where each story negotiates private and public spaces. Unpacking the Personal Library builds on and interrogates theories and approaches from library and archive studies, the history of the book, reading, authorship and publishing. Collectively, the chapters articulate a critical poetics of the personal library within its extended social, aesthetic and cultural contexts.

Burning the Books
Burning the Books

Author: Richard Ovenden

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0674241207

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The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.

Literacy Skills as Local Intangible Capital
Literacy Skills as Local Intangible Capital

Author: Sofia Kotilainen

Publisher: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura

Published: 2016-09-15

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 952222796X

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This book studies the ”grey area” of the success story of rural lending libraries in the Nordic countries through the activities of people’s libraries in one area of Central Finland. The study explores the influence of social, cultural, geographical and economic phenomena, such as the spread of revivalist movements, on the reading habits of the local population and reveals interesting reasons why the establishment of elementary schools and popular libraries and the growth of functional literacy did not automatically increase the informational capital of the common people of remote regions or lead to their social advancement. This study represents a methodological experiment in describing the life history of a people’s library. The combination of collective biographical and transnational comparative methods with rarely utilized original sources in this study is innovative and has not been used before in Finnish historical research on functional literacy and popular libraries. The advantage of the comparison is that it reveals the attitudes to libraries that were characteristic of each of the cultures involved. For the people of the Finnish countryside in the late nineteenth century, libraries represented a way of acquiring new information that was still strange and unwelcome. The distribution of immaterial capital was extremely uneven with regard to age, gender and social rank. In the earlier Finnish research has not very often been analysed, how the communal status of the peasant reader and his or her personal networks in the local community affected the quality of his or her reading habits. This book shows, that the location of the library in its local community and on the other hand the status and position of its customers in their networks, had a great significance on the use of the library and thus to the improvement of reading skills.

Down from London
Down from London

Author: Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1800855281

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In the first hundred years of the UK rail network, the seaside figures as a nerve centre, managing and making visible the period’s complex interplay between health, death, gender and sexuality. This monograph discusses around 130 novels of the railway age to show how the seaside infiltrates a diverse range of literature, subverting the boundaries between high and low literary culture. The seaside holiday galvanises innovative literary forms, including early twentieth-century holiday crime and romance fiction, which has its origins in the sensational strategies of mid-nineteenth-century authors. Where reading takes place is at least as important as what is read, and case studies on literary Brighton and Dickensian Kent explore the occasionally fraught relationship between seaside towns and the metropolis, as London visitors are represented in – and are the target audience for – literary accounts of the seaside holiday. The act of reading by the sea is itself overdetermined and problematic, a dilemma that is managed in part through the development of text-free literary tourism in the late nineteenth century. Deploying strategies from literary criticism, histories of reading, libraries and the book, and literary tourism, this book recovers ‘seaside reading’ as both a literary sub-genre and a deeply contested mode of engagement.

Towards Teaching in Public
Towards Teaching in Public

Author: Mike Neary

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-02-02

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1441143955

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Towards Teaching in Public: Reshaping the Modern University explores how the contested relationships between policy, curriculum and pedagogy are reshaping the modern university and examines the impact of conceptualisations of teaching in public on this debate in this age of academic capitalism. It traces the emergence of strategies for open access, with particular reference to the contribution of technology and e-learning, to the emergence of teaching in public as a critique of current educational policy. The contributors combine policy analysis with a consideration of pedagogical issues and an exploration of the student experience. This collection draws together chapters by experienced scholars and practitioners within the field of teaching and learning in higher education.

The Politics and Polemics of Culture in Ireland, 1800–2010
The Politics and Polemics of Culture in Ireland, 1800–2010

Author: Pat Cooke

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 100045150X

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As a contribution to cultural policy studies, this book offers a uniquely detailed and comprehensive account of the historical evolution of cultural policies and their contestation within a single democratic polity, while treating these developments comparatively against the backdrop of contemporaneous influences and developments internationally. It traces the climate of debate, policies and institutional arrangements arising from the state’s regulation and administration of culture in Ireland from 1800 to 2010. It traces the influence of precedent and practice developed under British rule in the nineteenth century on government in the 26-county Free State established in 1922 (subsequently declared the Republic of Ireland in 1949). It demonstrates the enduring influence of the liberal principle of minimal intervention in cultural life on the approach of successive Irish governments to the formulation of cultural policy, right up to the 1970s. From 1973 onwards, however, the state began to take a more interventionist and welfarist approach to culture. This was marked by increasing professionalization of the arts and heritage, and a decline in state support for amateur and voluntary cultural bodies. That the state had a more expansive role to play in regulating and funding culture became a norm of cultural discourse.

Before the Public Library
Before the Public Library

Author: Mark Towsey

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-10-23

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 9004348670

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Before the Public Library explores the emergence of community-based lending libraries in the Atlantic World before the advent of the Public Library movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Essays by eighteen scholars from a range of disciplines seek to place, for the first time, community libraries within an Atlantic context over a two-century period. Taking a comparative approach, this volume shows that community libraries played an important – and largely unrecognized – role in shaping Atlantic social networks, political and religious movements, scientific and geographic knowledge, and economic enterprise. Libraries had a distinct role to play in shaping modern identities through the acquisition and circulation of specific kinds of texts, the fostering of sociability, and the building of community-based institutions.

The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland
The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland

Author: Alistair Black

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-02-27

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781107693692

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The Public Libraries Act of 1850 founded a tradition of public provision and service which continues today, and national and academic libraries have grown and multiplied accordingly. Libraries have become an industry rather than a localized phenomenon, and librarianship has developed from a scholarly craft to a scientific profession. The essays in this volume present a picture of great diversity, covering public, national, academic, subscription and private libraries. The users of libraries are an important part of their history and are considered here in detail, alongside the development of the library profession and the impact of new information technologies.