CentenniAL

The fact that predicting the future is a tricky proposition doesn't stop people from trying. It makes for good punditry, and by the time the future's arrived, most observers will have forgotten the prediction anyway.

Unless, of course, someone publishes them. Which American Libraries has, over the years—so let's review some excellent, and less so, predictions.

16-hour work week
In the March 1933 issue (p. 133), the Bulletin published a speech made by B. Lamar Johnson, librarian and dean of instruction at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, to "Normal School and Teachers College Librarians" at the Midwinter Meeting in December 1932, proposing increasing value for books once the Depression ended. After giving highlights of amazing accomplishments in industrial technology, he declared that "Technocrats suggest that this situation will soon result in conditions which will make it necessary for workers to labor only four hours a day for four days a week. Whether or not such a condition becomes a reality, certainly we can look forward to a civilization in which leisure time and consequently the use of books will play a part of increased importance."

So, a sixteen-hour work week? I wish. I'll give him partial credit for his thoughts on the increased focus on recreation, although most of that credit disappears for his failure to imagine that other forms of recreation might provide harsh competition.

Chicago Branch Plans
The February 1976 issue of American Libraries (pp. 95–96) reported on the opening of Chicago's Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, and reviewed the 1969 study by Lowell Martin, Library Response to Urban Change, that set out recommendations for the city's system.

Martin recommended a central library, ten large regional libraries, and many diversified "branch" programs throughout the cities. The article noted that those ten regional libraries were probably over-ambitious, "even for that healthier economic milieu."

Thirty-one years on, Chicago has just two regional libraries, rather than ten. It opened a central library in 1991 and has in the past two decades focused on building and renovating its network of neighborhood branches.

AACR3
At a LITA program at the 1979 Annual Conference (July/August, p. 413), panelists were asked for a prediction of publication of the 3rd edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. As depicted at right, Maurice Freedman predicted, Match Game-style, 1984, while others on the panel suggested "never."

While predicting can be precarious, the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules has announced an early 2009 release of RDA:Resource Description and Access to supercede AACR2.

Hypertext
At the 1987 Annual Conference (July/August, p. 558), LITA president Ray DeBuse declared that scientists would begin to use hypertext break through the limits of the printed page by the end of the decade. (AL's description of the idea: "You're at the beach browsing through something by Dostoevski on your reading machine when you remember there's a Cubs game going on. You watch an inning or so—on the same machine—then get back to Dostoevski. As you peruse the text, you call up a citation and a critical essay on the novel and check the translation of a Russian word—all on the same screen. You're using hypertext.")

Well, we still call them "computers," it took a couple extra years for the technology to integrate into American life, and I'm not sure how many people combine Dostoevski, the beach, and the Cubs, but overall this one's pretty close.

Economic Understanding
There's one final "prediction"—or more accurately, an implied prediction based on a grand misreading of the current situtation— that I'd like to share. It comes from Edward Eyre Hunt, secretary of the U.S. president's Committee on Recent Economic Changes, who commended Americans' ever-growing economic understanding, with the implication that it would lead to continued prosperity. "In the good old days, Wall Street would never have heard of an article in the Atlantic Monthly by a Harvard professor. But only a few months ago an article by W.Z. Ripley upset the street and every broker and runner had to read that article. And what has been going on in the financial district appears to have been going on throughout the country.

This, I suggest, is a new thing in America and it is to be attributed at least in part to the persistent efforts of the President to educate all of us to think in economic terms."

Lovers of irony may be able to guess that the U.S. president was Herbert Hoover, and Hunt's speech was made May 13, 1929, at the Annual Conference in Washington D.C., less than six months before the stock market crash kick-started the Great Depression, and published in the August conference proceedings (p. 245).

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant

1976 was the ALA's centennial and the nation's bicentennial. I have to confess, however, that neither of those facts were in my mind as I picked the year to research for this post. Instead, I was looking to see the headlines from the month I was born.

The first "Great American Libraries" cover, from January 1976, featuring the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island.

I'll run down some of those: A proposed consolidation of block grants that would eliminate direct federal aid to libraries; a review of proceedings from the Midwinter Meeting, including draft legislation to help large urban public libraries and an organizational meeting for the OCLC Users Group; and a sheepish Page One admission that "Black History Month slipped by unrecognized by American Libraries in February." But it's the ALA's Centennial that really dominated the year.

It begins on the covers, at least the covers from January through May. They feature a series called "Great American Libraries," a series of paintings of notable library buildings.

It's quaint, and I mean that both sincerely and cynically. Sincerely because the paintings are attractive and comforting to look at; cynical because there's really no way that such a cover would be published today, filling the magazine's most valuable real estate without making the necessary statement about what's inside.

Chicago's Grant Park, looking much as it does today, from the January 1976 centennial Annual Conference preview.

The magazine also recognized ALA's centennial with "Centennial Vignettes," an impressive series of nearly-forgotten history that ran monthly from May 1975 through May 1976. Stories in this series included those of Tessa Kelso, the outspoken, innovative, and idealistic librarian at Los Angeles Public Library from 1889 to 1895, who was forced out of her position and librarianship as a whole by a local minister irate over one of the books in her library; James Bertram, the aloof private secretary to Andrew Carnegie who ran Carnegie's library grants program from behind the scenes; and William Howard Brett, who made Cleveland Public Library the first large system with open stacks.

Some were more offbeat, such as the reluctance of Ainsworth R. Spofford, then librarian of Congress, to attend the ALA's first convention in 1876, calling conventions "usually mere wordy outlets for impracticables and pretenders" (He did show up, although only for the conference's last day); and the Bibliosmiles, a group of librarians who held conferences from 1907 through 1910 because they thought it was "high time to formulate a permanent protest against undue solemnity in the profession."

The June 1976 'Who We Are' cover.

The centennial Annual Conference got a special preview in the January issue, with large and striking line-art illlustrations of some of the events and venues. The conference was in Chicago that year, and the landmarks depicted in the drawing are still instantly recognizable.

AL's coverage of the ALA centennial concluded in June 1976 with the dramatic "Who We Are" feature: more than 50 pages of interviews and profiles of 29 unique librarians. I'll cover this in more detail when I look at the librarian image through the years, because that's in part what this is: Busting the librarian stereotype by giving in-depth profiles of a diverse group of individuals.