Abstract: Stories of Library Innovation: Historical Perspectives on Public Library Practice

◆ Jennifer Burek Pierce, University of Iowa

The history of U.S. public libraries in the mid-20th century remains under explored, particularly with regard to innovative practices then emerging in public libraries. In the years following World War II, librarians were concerned with how public libraries would support communities that were coming to terms with a world that had witnessed tremendous devastation during the war; death, destruction, and widespread knowledge of these significant harms alike were made possible by science and technology. These conditions were seen as ones that libraries would have to address. An ALA committee argued that the norms of public library service in the would have to change to respond effectively, that public libraries needed to be something different to serve their communities effectively given the lasting consequences of war. This conclusion, developed and articulated by ALA’s Committee on Post-War Planning, helped put in motion a range of efforts at creating innovative public services, focused in key areas. Importantly, the ALA Committee on Post War Planning argued for an agenda of rapid and capacious transfer of information to communities everywhere, and their white papers were roughly contemporaneous with the efforts of a United Nations committee led by Eleanor Roosevelt to develop the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That document would declare all people's rights to "seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" (Article 19), indicating that technology could be central to humanistic and humane visions for the future. This aligned library work with larger social and cultural aims. Implementing technology-based information resources in libraries after WWII may have grown out of interests in technological efficiency and education, yet this project also aligned U.S. public libraries with “a common standard of achievements” intended to lay “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights at https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/). Several librarians’ and libraries’ stories demonstrate that the mid-20th century was an important, if under-recognized, era of library innovation and change. This research project identifies those directions of innovation, assesses what we can know about their effects, and argues for them as context for libraries’ current engagement with new technologies. Public libraries have, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, considered efforts to modify their services and resources through technology-oriented options, from makerspaces to emerging interests in the utilities of artificial intelligence. Stories of libraries’ historical engagement with technology, grounded in a matrix of leadership, values, and the outcomes, can contextualize, identify directions, and clarify issues as public libraries make efforts to add new technologies to the services and resources they offer communities they serve.