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Library History Round Table
Meetings and Programs

 

2010 Midwinter Meeting - Boston, MA

  • Executive Committee Meeting - Date, time, and location TBA.

2010 Annual Meeting - Washington, D.C.

  • Executive Committee Meeting - Date, time, and location TBA.
  • LHRT Invited Speakers Program:  Documenting and Celebrating Your Library's History - Date, time, location, and speakers TBA; See CFP below.
  • Research Forum: Politics, Libraries, and Culture - Date, time, location, and speakers TBA; See CFP below.
  • Edward G. Holley Lecture: Date, time, location, and speaker TBA.

Library History Seminar XII

  • Libraries in the History of Print Culture - September 10-12, 2010, University of Wisconsin-Madison; See CFP below.

 

Executive Committee Meeting

LHRT's Executive Committee Meeting is a business meeting open to all ALA members. At the Midwinter conference, we usually discuss the round table budget for the following year, and complete a final mark-up of any items to be inserted on the election ballot. At the Annual conference, we typically discuss nominations/committee appointments, amendments to our constitution and by-laws, and programming for the upcoming year.

Agenda coming soon.

 

LHRT Invited Speakers Program:

Documenting and Celebrating Your Library's History: Tips from the Experts

Co-sponsored by ALTAFF and PLA

Join us for a fascinating series of presentations by some of the most distinguished researchers in the field of library history. This year's program aims to help practitioners and library advocates to document, preserve, and promote the unique histories of their own institutions.

Call for Presenters:

The Library History Round Table (LHRT) of the American Library Association (ALA) seeks presenters for its Invited Speakers Program at the ALA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., June 24-30, 2010.

No community’s history is complete without the history of its library. Yet many libraries have never researched or published an institutional history. While many libraries collect local newspapers, maps, and other documentation about their surrounding area, they often neglect their own library’s annual reports, newsletters, and photographs. Thus they lose an opportunity to remind constituents that libraries are among the grandest, busiest buildings in town, have long records of public service, and are a vital part of community life. In light of the large number of Carnegie, LSA/LSCA-funded, and other libraries celebrating anniversaries in coming years, LHRT’s 2010 Invited Speakers program aims to help practitioners and library advocates to document, preserve, and promote the unique histories of their own institutions.

Importantly, this event will NOT be a scholarly, “conference paper” panel. Instead, the program will provide step-by-step instructions, helpful advice, and ready-to-use resources. We are seeking speakers who can address one or more of the following topics:

  • Recommended information sources for library history research
  • Capturing 20th and 21st-century library history through oral history, photography, and other means
  • Handling and storage considerations for historic documents and artifacts
  • Organizing an archive of your library's reports, newsletters, photos, and other documents
  • Interpreting old documents, notetaking, and other practical aspects of research and writing
  • Options for publishing and promoting your library's history
  • Other topics pertaining to documenting, researching, archiving, and promoting library history

LHRT welcomes proposals from speakers of all backgrounds, including library school faculty, practitioners, administrators, and library volunteers. Proposals are due on November 27, 2009. Each proposal must give a presentation title, a summary or outline (up to 500 words), and the presenter’s resume or vita. The proposal should also make clear which of topic(s) above the presenter is willing and able to address. If the presenter has taught similar workshops in the past, he or she is welcomed to append handouts and/or slides. Since this program will emphasize practice rather than research, it is desirable that the resume or vita emphasize the presenter’s professional expertise, work experience, and workshops/courses taught, rather than scholarly publications or awards.

From the submissions, the LHRT Program Committee will select 1-4 Invited Speakers and publicize the list of speakers in January 2010. Depending on the number, quality, and variety of proposals, LHRT may pursue publication of a book or journal special issue on this topic. The Invited Speaker(s) and other high-quality submissions will be offered first opportunity to publish in this venue if it is arranged.

So that the program’s facilitator may introduce each presenter, completed presentations are due June 12, 2010. The Invited Speakers Program will likely occur during a 1.5-2 hour time slot on Sunday, June 27, 2009. All presenters must register to attend the conference. For registration options, see ALA’s events and conferences page at http://www.ala.org/ .


Deadline for proposals: November 27, 2009
Deadline for completed presentations: June 12, 2010

Please submit proposals and direct inquiries to:

Bernadette A. Lear
LHRT Chair/Program Committee Chair
Penn State Harrisburg Library
351 Olmsted Dr.
Middletown, PA  17057
Telephone: (717) 948-6360
E-mail: BAL19@PSU.EDU

 

Research Forum:

Politics, Libraries, and Culture: Historical Perspectives

The purpose of LHRT's yearly Research Forum is to encourage new scholars and studies in library history. For the first time in a decade or more, the chosen theme is historical linkages between libraries and politics. 

Call for Papers:

The Library History Round Table (LHRT) of the American Library Association (ALA) seeks papers for its Research Forum at the 2010 ALA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., June 24-29, 2010. The theme of the Forum will be historical perspectives on the ways in which politics and libraries interact and influence one another.  In this instance, politics should be considered broadly—not simply as concerning the administration of governments (international, national, state, local) but also the politics of other institutions and groups.  Possible topics might be the effects politics have had on the history of libraries, archives, government documents and other cultural records.  How have individual and institutional efforts of librarians influenced public policy pertaining to information access, reading, and services to the public?  How have political concerns shaped the collection, preservation, availability and use of libraries and other repositories in different periods, locations, and jurisdictions?  How have libraries, archives, and similar institutions tried to shape information politics and society through copyright law, the right to read, public library funding and other efforts?

LHRT welcomes submissions from researchers of all backgrounds, including students, faculty, and practitioners. Proposals are due on November 30, 2009.  Each proposal must give the paper title, an abstract (up to 500 words), and the scholar’s one-page vita. Also, please indicate whether the research is in-progress or completed. Proposals should include the following elements: a problem or thesis the study addresses, a statement of significance, objectives, methods, primary sources used for the research, and conclusions (or tentative conclusions for works in progress).

From the submissions, the LHRT Research Committee will select several authors to present their completed work at the Forum. The program will be publicized in January 2010. So that the Forum’s facilitator may introduce and react to each author, completed papers are due June 4, 2010.  The Research Forum will likely occur on Sunday, June 27, 2010. All presenters must register to attend the conference. For registration options, see ALA’s events and conferences page at http://www.ala.org/ .

Deadline for proposals: November 30, 2009
Deadline for completed papers: June 4, 2009

Please submit proposals and direct inquiries to:

Melanie A. Kimball
LHRT Vice-Chair/Research Committee Chair
Simmons College
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
300 The Fenway
Boston, MA  02115
Telephone: (617) 521-2795
E-mail: melanie.kimball@simmons.edu 

 

Edward G. Holley Lecture:

For the endowed Holley Lecture, LHRT traditionally invites a distinguished scholar from a related (non-LIS) discipline.  The speaker and theme will be announced at LHRT's Midwinter Meeting.

 

Library History Seminar XII:

Libraries in the History of Print Culture

Hosted by the Center for Print Culture in Modern America; Co-sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Library and Information Studies, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association, and the University of Wisconsin Libraries.

Call for Papers:

Library records provide a particularly fruitful avenue into the history of print culture.  For millions of Americans from mid-nineteenth century on, institutional libraries have constituted a major path of access to texts, and in recent years, print culture scholars have begun to exploit libraries as a rich—and widely available—source of data.  In addition to providing an important link between individual readers and the texts that they read, libraries can help occupy the middle ground between specific texts and readers and the macro or meta-theories that have come to dominate literary criticism. Indeed, libraries provide print culture scholars with an arena in which to exercise the historical and sociological imagination, linking micro analysis of the study of this text, these readers, here and now with the dimensions of macro analysissuch as class, race and gender, that they recognize need to be included.  Libraries are both a site and a source of regulating processes.  The interactions of multitudes of authors and readers are shaped in part by the meta-texts of the library’s operations:  its classification and cataloging practices, its shelving system and the principles on which it bases reader access to those shelves; its circulation rules, its spatial and temporal arrangements for in-house reading; its provision of printed signs and guides to the collection, its use of web pages and personnel to steer readers along pre-defined and recognizable paths.  Yet just as individual readers engage in ruses which allow them to appropriate individual texts, so those who read in the library read the library itself—becoming in the process, potentially resistant readers of the library.

We especially encourage the submission of proposals that make use of library records as primary sources, that focus on libraries as sites of textual encounter, or that locate libraries in the broader print culture of specific places and at specific times.  Proposals for individual papers or complete sessions (up to three papers) should include a 250-word abstract and a one-page c.v. for each presenter. Submissions should be made via email to printculture@slis.wisc.edu. The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2010. Notifications of acceptance will be made by early March.

Keynote speakers will be Professor Janice A. Radway of Northwestern University (author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, and A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire) and Professor Wayne A. Wiegand of Florida State University (author of many books on library and print culture history, including Books on Trial: Red Scare in the Heartland [with Shirley A. Wiegand] and Irrepressible Reformer : A Biography of Melvil Dewey.

Two publication opportunities will be available. As with previous conferences, we plan to produce a volume of papers for publication in the Center’s series, “Print Culture History in Modern America,” published by the University of Wisconsin Press. A list of books the Center has produced, available on the Center’s website (http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/), offers a guide to prospective authors. We also plan to publish a special issue of Libraries and the Cultural Record (whether papers appear in the book or the journal will be decided by the editors, in consultation with the UW Press and L&CR editors).

More information will shortly be available on the web at http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/

Deadline for proposals: January 30, 2010

Please submit proposals and direct inquiries to:

Christine Pawley
Director of the Center for Print Culture in Modern America
University of Wisconsin-Madison
School of Library and Information Studies
Room 4234 Helen C. White Hall
600 N. Park Street
Madison, WI 53706
Fax: (608) 263-4849
E-mail: printculture@slis.wisc.edu