First Published in 1994. This book focuses on the historical development of the library as an institution. Its contents assume no single theoretical foundation or philosophical perspective but instead reflect the richly diverse opinions of its many contributors. This text is intended to serve as a reference tool for undergraduate and graduate students interested in library history, for library school educators whose teaching requires knowledge of the historical development of library institutions, services, and user groups, and for practicing library professionals.
...a leaping departure in comprehensiveness, organizational format, and accessibility through indexing...A magnificent contribution to the study of American library history. --LIBRARIES & CULTURE ...a work of enormous and painstaking scholarship. --LIBRARY ASSOCIATION RECORD (UK)
This book advances the belief that the library--more than any other cultural institution--collects, curates and distributes the results of human thought. Essays broaden the debate about academic libraries beyond only professional circles, promoting the library as a vital resource for the whole of higher education. Topics range from library histories to explorations of changing media. Essayists connect modern libraries to the remarkable dream of Alexandria's ancient library--facilitating groundbreaking research in every imaginable field of human interest, past, present and future. Academic librarians who are most familiar with historical traditions are best qualified to promote the library as an important aspect of teaching and learning, as well as to develop resources that will enlighten future generations of readers. The intellectual tools for compelling, constructive conversation come from the narrative of the library in its many iterations, from the largest research university to the smallest liberal arts or community college.
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
Handlist to manuscripts in one of Britain's major medieval repositories. Lambeth Palace Library, which dates from a bequest by Archbishop Bancroft in 1610, is one of England's major repositories of medieval manuscripts. More than half of the ninety-six manuscripts and documents containing items of Middle English prose were already present when the library was temporarily transferred to Cambridge in 1647. In the succeeding centuries further manuscript materials have continually been added, and within the last few years the library has become home to the older part of Sion College Library, an event that has added a further seven manuscripts to the present handlist. The collection at Lambeth is large enough to be fully representative of the corpus of Middle English prose: the Brut, the Wycliffite Bible, and Love's Mirror, for example, are all present, in some cases in multiple copies, as are writings by Hilton and Rolle. There are sermon cycles (including an almost complete set of Wycliffite sermons), medical recipes, historical works, and anthologies of religious treatises. Altogether the current handlist indexes almost 800 separate items, ranging from the veterinary to the liturgical. O.S. PICKERINGis Senior Assistant Librarian and Associate Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds; V.M. O'MARAis Lecturer in English at the University of Hull.
This important reference volume covers developments in almost every aspect of British library and information work during the ten-year period 1991-2000. The book provides a comprehensive record of what took place in library and information management during a decade of considerable change and challenges.
