Admittedly belatedly, I'd like to offer this article from the December issue of American Libraries as the culmination and conclusion to this blog and historical research project celebrating AL's hundredth year. Thanks for reading!

A Centennial Journey
“This first number of a Bulletin of the American Library Association marks, it is hoped, the beginning of a closer connection between the Association and its members.” Those words, penned by ALA Publishing Board Chairman William Coolidge Lane, opened the first issue of the Bulletin of the American Library Association, precursor to AmericanLibraries, in January 1907.

In its early years, the Bulletin carried three basic types of information. The regular issues comprised short news updates—the Association’s growth to 1,844 members, the headquarters committee’s experiment in acquiring space for the Association in Boston, and an invitation to the New Jersey Library Association’s annual meeting, to borrow from that first issue. One issue per year consisted of the Handbook of Organization. (In 1907, it filled 65 pages, of which 39 were devoted to the list of members. This year’s Handbook, by comparison, is 246 pages.) But by far the biggest issue of each year was the conference proceedings. These behemoths give the impression that few words uttered at Annual went unrecorded: The published proceedings include full transcripts of each address made at the conference, including the remarks introducing the speakers, and detailed committee reports. At only nine pages, the minutes of the Council and Executive Board meetings seem downright skimpy by comparison.

The conference issue gradually took a bit less importance, as addresses began to be used as features in other issues and, eventually, what we’d consider features today made their appearance.

A big chunk of that happened in 1932. The Bulletin got its first fulltime editor, Beatrice Sawyer Rossell (who had previously held responsibility for the Bulletin as part of her duties as ALA publicity assistant). It also got some of the magazine-like accoutrements we take for granted today—a cover, feature articles, and departments.

The Bulletin did not receive a new name that year, despite lobbying within its
pages (a facetious August 1931 article cited unread Bulletins through history as the cause of such things as German spies not receiving codes in World War I and the Biblical destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah). Concerns over the cost of recataloging kept the name as-is—until 1939, when it was shortened to ALA Bulletin, and again in 1970, when it became American Libraries.

Rossell was there for the first name change—but for not long after. She resigned from the Bulletin and the Association with some acrimony in 1940 over what she considered the board’s inappropriate stance on the impending war. “Compulsory military training in peace time will rob millions of these young people of their freedom and violate both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” Rossell wrote in her resignation letter. “But the A.L.A. Executive Board accepts conscription even before it has been passed by Congress, and urges libraries, both public and college, to help with military training.”

Color and personality
Art Plotnik, the longest-serving chief editor (1974–89) in AL’s history, also left an indelible mark. He is the editor most responsible for AL’s transformation into a modern magazine. Things like “color,” “feature photos,” and “design,” which were relatively unfamiliar concepts at the beginning of his tenure, had become integral parts of AL’s makeup by the end.

Plotnik introduced quick sidebars to liven up the news section with statistical reports, personality profiles, lists, and offbeat information. More significantly, he was the impetus behind some notable theme issues, including 1975’s “Washington Library Power” issue and 1976’s exceedingly popular “Who We Are” issue, a collection of 29 profiles of librarians, each filling a different niche.

Of course, every era has its own personality. Usually it’s overt, but some of the most interesting discoveries are the more curious markers that nevertheless define time periods in the magazine’s history. The now-cringeworthy term “information superhighway” splatters its way through the headlines of 1994. The early 1947 Bulletin heralded the Atomic Age with dire articles on nuclear weapons and energy. The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s included, in most years, host-city–specific fashion advice for Annual attendees, occasionally in verse.

In these back issues, award namesakes and other major figures from librarianship show up as contemporaries, rather than history. These appearances give glimpses of their personalities that tend to get lost in mere lists of achievements.

Charlemae Rollins, 1957–58 president of ALA’s Children’s Services Division, had “an uncanny way of getting the wrong address, time, or date for her appointments” and relied on her son Joseph to make sure she kept her schedule, according to a 1955 profile.

John Cotton Dana, 1895–96 ALA president, was a frequent and often fiery figure in the Bulletin’s pages, enough that the editor seemed to grow weary of his correspondence. The January 1929 issue noted that Dana had sent another letter criticizing, “in his usual vigorous manner,” certain ALA activities, and explained that the Bulletin would not publish the letter, saying, “We should be glad to send a mimeographed copy of it to any member of the Association who cares to write to Headquarters for it.”

Jesse Shera, automation pioneer and dean of the library school at Western Reserve University in Cleveland from 1952–70, was a prolific contributor, but prone to overwrought metaphor: His 1962 article “Automation without Fear” works in references to Karl Marx, Frankenstein, the development of the lever, Pandora’s box, Gulliver’s Travels, Rolls Royce, the Amazon rain forest, and Leo Tolstoy.

Gratia Countryman, director of Minneapolis Public Library from 1904 to 1936, claimed “sleeping out of doors” as a hobby—and sang the practice’s praises in a session at the 1910 Annual Conference.

The details may not always be ennobling, but they are humanizing. And that humanity is probably the most striking thing I’ve taken away from a year of researching the magazine’s history. In this Association of 65,000 members and 270 employees that frequently seems to be an impenetrable monolith, it’s comforting to be reminded that there are, indeed, people behind every aspect.

This week, a roundup of brief and hopefully amusing nuggets from the history of American Libraries.

Wonderful ads
Beginning in 1948, the Bulletin began accepting advertising. There's not much flash by modern standards, hardly surprising given that things like inexpensive color printing are pretty recent developments. There is a lot of charm, however.

World Book

Compton

A pair of encyclopedias led the way. World Book vividly described the lengths it went to to make its entries accurate boasting on the back cover of the December 1951 issue, for example, how "We anesthetized a snake to make our World Book Diagram accurate!"

Compton Encyclopedia's ads were even better; they consisted of "Compton Comments" written by "L.J.L." on a wide range of topics, always tying them back to an updated entry or some event of the day. Take the irresistable September 1951 missive, which opens: "How would you have felt on the morning after the A.L. A. Conference if you had awakened at 6:15 to find a sky-blue parakeet sitting on your pillow peeking at your nose?"

I don't know if these ads make me any more motivated to buy an encyclopedia (it's not a question that comes up often in my current position), but they sure make me want to read more ads.

The Library in Cartoons

The Bulletin published a series of cartoons in 1936 and 1937 detailing life in various types of libraries or library departments. My favorite is the first one, published in January 1936 (p. 24-26) detailing the duties of a public branch librarian, which include telephoning the Animal Rescue League to call for a basket of kittens deposited on the return desk, calling an ambulence for a passer "who has slipped on a bit of orange peel", and having a talk with a sailor who wants a card (right; click for larger versions).

An unintentional sequel of sorts came in May 1949 (p. 181), with "The Bookmobile Arrives" (left). I'm especially fond of the pilot who's reading as he's about to crash into a tree, although maybe I'm just in a weird mood.

Image
In November 1946 (p. 463), ALA's Public Relations Office put out a call for photos of librarians at work, for use in recruiting materials. On one hand, it's a nice, forward-thinking little project: "Let's declare a moratorium on pictures of empty charging desks, still and deserted bookmobiles, childless children's rooms," wrote PRO Chief Olga Peterson. On the other hand, the call could have perhaps been delivered with a bit more tact. It came under the heading "Good-Looking Librarians, Note!!!" (sic) was addressed "To Photogenic Members" and declared that "good pictures" showing attractive librarians at work "are very scarce."

The 1950s
There is no excuse for this.

Richardson

Clift

Stevenson

Beginning with the April 1953 issue, author photos for the editorial by Ransom Richardson took this format: a disembodied and poorly cut-out head on a line-art suit. Executive Secretary David Clift started getting the same treatment in May. Meanwhile, Grace Stevenson, ALA associate executive secretary, got merely an unclothed disembodied head at the top of her "In the Mill" department. I apologize for any nightmares.

I'm gonna say, "not"
The February 1946 issue (p. 72) related this tale: "At a recent convention of English teachers in Indianapolis, Marian McFadden, city librarian, presented a talk, the notes for which she threw into the wastebasket. Later she was asked for a copy of the talk or of the notes so that they could be sent to a professional periodical for possible publication. That night, when Miss McFadden was walking home some papers were deposited at her feet by the wind. Believe it or note, they were the notes she had thrown into the wastebasket!"

Conference Entertainment
Here's the partial list of social activities on the five days of the 1942 Annual Conference in Milwaukee, as listed in the June issue (p. 398): Dancing, brewery tour, folk dancing, square dancing, square dancing, stunts, and square dancing.

(For those who found the square dancing units in elementary, junior high, and high school gym classes an unpleasant and traumatic experience, some closure can be gained by reading the list in your best Terry Jones-as-a-waitress voice.)

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant.

The tech desert in the ALA Bulletin continued, in reality, to 1933. The magazine's entrance into a more technological age was heralded relatively innocuously in the November issue of that year, with the printing of an abridged version of ALA President Harry Miller Lydenberg's speech at the Annual Conference in Chicago. Near the end of his speech (p. 492), Lydenberg observed that "With the camera, the offset process, the rubber blanket, the film slide, the phonograph record—to say nothing about radio broadcasting, television, sound pictures—so emphatically at our elbow, what can we as librarians do but ask earnestly where we may find the man with vision extensive enough and accurate enough to picture exactly whither we go and what we are to encounter? ... We are living in a new world, with a new emphasis on the machine."

The growing awareness of technology was echoed in the September 1934 Montreal Annual Conference proceedings. Helen Gordon Stewart, director of Fraser Valley Demonstration in British Columbia, spoke on "Social Trends," noting her generation's acceptance of change: "In our own experience we have run the gamut of a whole scale of new things from incubators and carpet sweepers to vitamines and television.... And if the future decrees that we shall travel from place to place as projectiles, I have no doubt we shall face our first human pea-shooter with the equanimity of a Jules Verne hero." (p. 485)

There were, certainly, specifics as well. A May 1934 article by Edward M. Peterson, chairman of the ALA Committee on Work with the Blind, reported on the development of the talking book (p. 243-244), noting that there were then two types of readers, one electric and one spring-driven, and that manufacturers were debating which materials to use in making the records and how to best maximize the disc capacity. An Oct. 1, 1937 article listed the mechanical equipment used in modern libraries, based on a survey of eight facilities. Among them: Label pasting machines, floor scrubbing and polishing machines, calculator machines, adding machines, typewriters, projectors, mimeographs, and stereopticons. The Bulletin was also covering radio, in terms of its potential for publicity, and movies, in terms of their value in collections, by this time.

But the first technological development that truly got major coverage in the Bulletin, the "killer app" of this post's title, was microphotography.

Between mid-1936 and late 1938, the Bulletin published nearly monthly articles on the topic. (Several of these articles have been digitized and are available online at the New Deal Network.) It began in August 1936, with coverage of a microphotography symposium at the Annual Conference in Richmond (p. 719-723). That symposium developed into the Microphotography Round Table, which held a fiery meeting at the 1937 New York Annual Conference (p. 808-813), where "The crowd of five hundred who packed the Sert Room to overflowing then demanded a show-down on projectors, while the group that lunched together afterward were equally insistent on starting a new journal." It also never met again.

But in those two years, the Bulletin covered numerous aspects of the practice: Uses, including current ones like filming newspapers, and experimental ones like filming encyclopedias, dictionaries, and telephone directories; practical considerations like how to care for and catalog the films; comparisons of cameras; news; and a speculative article in the April 1938 issue (p. 241-243) suggesting that library card catalogs could be transferred to microfilm. (This last one brings back happy memories of using the microfiche at my childhood library—and a certain amusement, remembering my father's angry resistance to it.)

After 1938, technology coverage slipped into the background once again: I suspect due to a combination of the heavy coverage microphotography had received and the impending war. It won't be like that for long, though: Big Blue makes its first appearance in the Bulletin in 1944, and in Part 3.

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant.

Part of my job with American Libraries is to help compile the list of annual ALA award-winners, published each September. If you've perused the list, you've seen that many of the 200 or so are named in honor of librarians from the Association's early years.

Not surprisingly, these librarians also appear in early years of the Bulletin. Throughout this year, I'd like to review some of them.

My first subject is John Cotton Dana. Today, a Library Administration and Management Association award for public relations bears his name. And certainly, the Bulletin does contain several examples of Dana's work in library promotion, such as coverage of his chairmanship of a committee to produce a library exhibit at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco.

But it's Dana's fiery final appearances in the Bulletin that initially attracted my attention. His obituary in the September 1929 issue noted that "He was like a gadfly to stodgy conservatism. He was always calling for a reassessment of old traditions and standards in library work."

In his last years, ALA activities were frequent targets. A lengthy letter read to Council at the Midwinter Meeting December 29–31, 1927, and published in the January 1928 issue, expressed his opposition to a number of ALA activities:

• The appointment of a board of examiners of library schools. ("My charge is that they did not use their brains; but dumbly submitted to the dictates of current fashion in attempting to introduce the goose-step into a flourishing private enterprise.");
• The then-new term "Adult Education." ("Our Adult Education Committee has inflated this new name for an activity half a century old, at a cost of $50,000; and has so pleased us with the notion that we are doing something new and grand as to make us forget that we have always been busy at that same thing.");
• ALA Library Extension efforts. ("If intelligent and alert adults in large numbers could be persuaded to read the publications on which the Library Extension Committee has spent about $16,000, the steady growth of libraries would perhaps have been quite notably increased.... We await proof that any access of growth has been due to the expenditure by the A. L. A. in the last four years of a quarter of a million dollars.");
• A survey of members. ("I insisted that its thousands of questions on thousands of questionnaires would bring no results of value; that we already had ample information on our administrative methods; and that, if we had money for a survey, we should spend it not on a survey of a dead past, but on an inquiry into the relation of recent vast economic and educational changes to library methods."); and
• A Curriculum Study, which produced two textbooks "that [the authors'] native talents and forms of experience and education would have impelled and permitted them to write had they never heard of $30,000 worth of questions and answers acquired via a curriculum study."

Council did formally consider Dana's concerns, appointing the "Special Committee to Consider Communication of Mr. John Cotton Dana," which made its report at Annual in 1928 and generally defended the value of the projects that Dana had attacked. A couple of proposals related to Dana's concerns (one to publish full financial statements in the Bulletin; the other to require a report of the estimated cost and detailed description of any policy proposal brought before Council) were introduced, but Council voted both down.

Dana wrote a couple more letters to the Bulletin, which were covered but not published. I get a sense that by that time, receiving a communication from Mr. Dana was not an occasion for celebration at ALA headquarters.

For example, a January 1929 treatment: "Mr. Dana criticized in his usual vigorous manner three activities of the Association.... We are unable to publish the whole letter, and, as it does not lend itself to abstracting, we shall be glad to send a mimeographed copy of it to any member of the Association who cares to write to Headquarters for it." (Emphasis added.)

Earlier Years
Dana was an active member of the association and made numerous appearances in the Bulletin's pages. I don't want to give the impression that all of his work was controversial or confrontational. But he did have his rabble-rousing moments in his earlier years. For example, at the Midwinter meeting January 1-2, 1914, he argued via a letter to Council that "It is a great mistake for a quasi-literary institution of 2,500 members, like our association, to devote a good slice of its income to the preparation and issuance of [Booklist] that would probably be welcomed by the reading public of this country, and then, in effect, to conceal it from that public"; that papers presented at Annual should be directed more towards the public, and that the association should "extract it from the Almighty Library Aggregation of piffle and technique which we must annually produce... and let our friends see it and even dare them to read it"; that Headquarters should move from Chicago to New York City; and that conferences should be held in major cities rather than on "distant prairies and mountain fastnesses."

All of this came after excoriating attendees for feeling the need to meet in person rather than communicating by print. (His exact words: "No, you must feel your own reading limitations; that you are unable to get out of print what the writer of print wishes to convey; that you are all grievously ear-minded, and have never so devoted yourselves to acquiring skill in that use of print, to the promotion of which you devote your lives, that you can understand it clearly when you see it.")

The letter went over poorly.

Councilor F.P. Hill said "The only objection I have to Mr. Dana's letter is that he does not make any plans for building up the structure which he is always so ready to tear down." Henry Legler, chair of the publishing board, reported that he had often heard from Dana about Booklist: "Often before he has wanted to have the Booklist changed; to have the matter changed; the form changed and the character changed, in fact everything about the Booklist changed except perhaps the quality of the paper. In other words that Mr. Dana did not want an A. L. A. Booklist published; what he wants is a library journal for the public."

—Greg Landgraf, Editorial Assistant, American Libraries