Curated Issue of Information & Culture: A Journal of History
by Ciaran B. Trace
p. 1-3
Excerpt
This special issue of Information & Culture brings together a curated set of previously published articles from the last two decades of the journal's more than fifty-year history. These articles represent the wide scope of actors, disciplines, and viewpoints that have helped make the journal the space in which to frame and debate the nature of the information domain from a historical perspective.
Revisiting Archival History
by Richard J. Cox
p. 4-11
Excerpt
The article included here, which I wrote in 2000, owes its origins to an invitation to contribute to a volume celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Library History Round Table. This is hardly a sufficient explanation for the final version. When I was requested to write this article, a request I happily accepted, I drew on my own interests and experiences, gathering my thoughts about what was known about the history of archives and recordkeeping, where and how such research was being carried out, and why such scholarship was being done. What I concluded then surprised me.
Richard J. Cox was the lead faculty in the archival education program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences, now the School of Computing and Information, until his retirement on January 1, 2018, when he was named an emeritus professor. Prior to joining the faculty, Dr. Cox worked as an archivist, starting in late 1972, at the Maryland Historical Society, for the city of Baltimore, and later at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, as well as at the New York State Archives. He came into the field because of his interest in American history, with undergraduate and master's degrees in history from Towson State University (1972) and the University of Maryland (1978), respectively, and then discovered the importance of understanding the development of recordkeeping, the archival profession, and archival theory and practice, which he researched throughout his career (his master's thesis was on the history of archives in Maryland from 1634 to 1934). He led the successful effort to establish the Archival History Roundtable in the late 1980s. The author of numerous books and articles, Cox is a three-time winner of the Waldo G. Leland Award for the best book on archives. He is a fellow of the Society of American Archivists (SAA). He has also served on the SAA Council both as editor of the American Archivist and as editor of nonserial publications, in addition to serving on editorial boards of other journals.
The Failure or Future of American Archival History: A Somewhat Unorthodox View
by Richard J. Cox
p. 12 - 26
Abstract
The quality of research on American archival history has been uneven and the quantity not very impressive. This essay reviews some of the highlights of American archival history research, especially the growing interest in cultural and public history that has produced some studies of interest to scholars curious about the history of archives. The essay also focuses more on why such research still seems so far removed from the interests of most archivists. The essay will consider some hopeful signs, such as the reemergence of records and recordkeeping systems as a core area for study, for a renewed emphasis on American archival history. While much needs to be done, I am optimistic that the golden age of historical research on American archives lies ahead.
Back to the Future of Library History
by Jonathan Rose
p. 27 - 32
Excerpt
Fifteen years ago I sketched out what at the time I saw as alternative futures for library history. Dusting off and reading one’s youthful predictions is inevitably somewhat embarrassing. It isn’t so much that I got things wrong, but I am struck by what I didn’t foresee, including some developments in which I would later be an active participant.
Jonathan Rose (BA, Princeton University; PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University, where he has directed the graduate program in History and Culture. He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing and continues to serve as an editor of the journal Book History. His book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2nd ed., 2010) won the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize, the American Philosophical Society Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the British Council Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies, the SHARP Book History Prize, and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize. His other publications include The Edwardian Temperament, 1895–1919, British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820–1965 (with Patricia Anderson), The Revised Orwell, The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (winner of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Award for Scholarly Humanities Non-Fiction), and Readers' Liberation. With Simon Eliot, he will soon publish a second expanded edition of A Companion to the History of the Book. He is now editing (with Mary Hammond) The Edinburgh History of Reading. His scholarship, then, has always focused on libraries (both personal and institutional) and readers (both ordinary and eminent). His article "Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences" (Journal of the History of Ideas, January–March 1992) was a seminal work in the historiography of reading, a subject he continued to develop in "Marx, Jane Eyre, Tarzan: Miners' Libraries in South Wales, 1923–1952" (Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte, 1994), "Arriving at a History of Reading" (Historically Speaking, January 2004), and, most recently, "The Autism Literary Underground" (Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, 2017). His next large project will be a study of what John F. Kennedy read. His work has been translated into Chinese, Russian, Italian, Flemish, and Lithuanian.
Alternative Futures for Library History
by Jonathan Rose
Originally published: Volume 38, Number 1, Winter 2003
p. 50 - 60
Excerpt
In response to a recent article by Donald Davis and John Aho, "Whither Library History?" Jonathan Rose discusses six possible alternatives for the future of library history. Library historians can either continue to produce a traditional kind of library history or reframe their subject as a subfield of information science, mainstream history, or the history of the book. They can also adopt the models of such critical theorists as Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. Rose argues for a sixth option: to make library history a part of the new academic discipline of book studies.
Still Breathing: History in Education for Librarianship
by Christine Pawley
p. 44 - 52
Excerpt
I wrote “History in the Library and Information Science Curriculum: Outline of a Debate” at the request of Donald G. Davis Jr., the long-running editor of this journal (then called Libraries & Culture), following a Historical Perspectives discussion at the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) conference in 2004, where panelists reflected on the place of history in the Library and Information Science (LIS) curriculum for the professional master’s degree. The resulting article was my effort to summarize the discussion and provide some context. Don Davis, renowned LIS professor at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the foremost historians of libraries in the United States, was about to retire, and Libraries & Culture planned a special issue to celebrate his work.
Christine Pawley holds degrees from the Universities of Oxford (MA) and Guildford (MSc) in the UK and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (PhD), as well as a postgraduate teaching certificate from the University of York (UK). She is the author of over thirty book chapters and journal articles and of two award-winning books, Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa (2001) and Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America (2010), both from the University of Massachusetts Press, and is coeditor with Louise S. Robbins of Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth Century America (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). She retired in 2012 as professor and director at the School of Library and Information Studies and the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her career also included teaching sociology at Avery Hill College in London (now part of the University of Greenwich) and library and information science (LIS) at the College of St. Catherine (now St. Catherine University) in St. Paul, Minnesota, and at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, where she was also briefly director of the Center for the Book. Although her research centers on the history of reading and of libraries, only when teaching at the Universities of Iowa and Wisconsin did she have the opportunity to teach in these areas (and then infrequently), hence her interest in the place of history in the LIS curriculum. A professor emerita, she now lives in Sechelt, British Columbia, where she continues to teach online and at the local ElderCollege (a voluntary educational program for the over fifty-fives) and to write for scholarly publications. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled Organizing Women: Print Culture and Community Power in Early Twentieth Century America.
History in the Library and Information Science Curriculum: Outline of a Debate
by Christine Pawley
Originally published: Volume 40, Number 3, Summer 2005
p. 223 - 238
Abstract
Only a small minority of Library and Information Science (LIS) schools now schedule courses with a historical focus, and LIS faculty whose research specialty is history seem to be a vanishing breed. Yet some educators are committed to finding ways to preserve historical perspectives in the master's degree curriculum. At the 2004 conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) the Historical Perspectives Special Interest Group (SIG) discussed strategies and subsequently carried on the debate in an online forum. Theoretical justifications for including history in the curriculum appealed to both generalist and specific rationales that argued for "history as story" as well as "history as process," while practical suggestions included focusing on the preservation of documents, adopting the principles and methods of public history, and creating stronger avenues for collaboration among all historians of libraries and information science, no matter what their disciplinary affiliation. Overall, participants felt that in the current economic climate modestly scaled efforts stood the best chance of success.
Information History: Searching for Identity
by William Aspray
p. 69 - 75
Excerpt
The surprise and honor that I felt when I received the news from Information & Culture editor Ciaran Trace that she would like to include my article in this special issue were quickly swept away by panic. In this new introduction, what could I possibly write about this article and its construction that the readers of this journal would be interested in knowing? The longer, second half of my original article identified nine topics that I argued were underrepresented in the scholarly literature about the history of library and information science. An obvious approach in this new introduction would be to survey the literature in the years since my article was published to see if scholars in this field had paid attention to my exhortations, written about these topics, and engaged the scholars I cited. However, I had learned from Thomas Kuhn, who had briefly served as my dissertation advisor, that changes in the direction of a scholarly field do not come so quickly—after all, my article was published only seven years ago (in 2011)—nor do they typically come as the result of the call of a single scholar.
William Aspray is professor of information science and adjunct professor of media studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He holds bachelor's degrees in mathematics and philosophy and a master's degree in mathematics from Wesleyan University and a master's degree and doctorate in history of science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has also done graduate study in history and philosophy of science at Princeton and Toronto. He has previously served as the associate and acting director of the Charles Babbage Institute, staff director of the IEEE Center for the History of Electrical Engineering, and executive director of Computing Research Association. He has also held full-time teaching positions at Williams College (mathematical sciences), Harvard (history of science), Indiana University (distinguished professor, information school), and the University of Texas at Austin (distinguished professor, information school); and part-time faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania (history and sociology of science), Virginia Tech (science and technology studies), Rutgers (history), and the University of Minnesota (history of science and technology). His research focuses on the histories of information, computing, and mathematics; information policy, especially relating to workforce issues, support for computing education and research, or privacy; and information behavior, especially in an everyday context. He is the author or editor of more than 25 books, 100 articles, and 250 deposited oral histories. His books on information and computing history include Computing before Computers (ed., 1990, Iowa State), John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (1990, MIT), Computer: A History of the Information Machine (3rd ed., with Martin Campbell-Kelly, Nathan Ensmenger, and Jeffrey Yost, 2014, Westview), The Internet and American Business (ed. with Paul Ceruzzi, 2008, MIT), Participation in Computing: The National Science Foundation's Expansionary Programs (2016, Springer), and Women and Underrepresented Minorities in Computing: A Historical and Social Study (2016, Springer). He is currently writing a book on the history of fake facts and urban legends in the United States with James Cortada and a book on the history of computing at the National Science Foundation with Rick Adrion and Peter Freeman.
The History of Information Science and Other Traditional Information Domains: Models for Future Research
by William Aspray
Originally published: Volume 46, Number 2, 2011
p. 230 - 248
Abstract
Historians of the traditional information domains—libraries, archives, and museums as well as conservation and information science—could be more effective in punishing unrighteousness, avenging the injured, and rewarding the innocent if they had better tools. This article aims to help them develop these tools not by honing their satirical abilities or teaching them how to become more at one with their moral outrage but instead by drawing their attention to several scholarly literatures that offer insights into information history: the history of information technology, social informatics, and business and economic history of technology. I identify nine themes from these literatures that seem ripe for exploration in the history of information science but first examine the boundaries between information science and various other information domains. This article benefits from two recently published literature reviews that provide good overviews of the existing literature on the histories of information science and technology.1 However, these reviews were retrospective works meant to review existing literature; the goal here is prospective, to suggest avenues for future research.
Revisiting "Shaping Information History as an Intellectual Discipline"
by James W. Cortada
p. 95 - 101
Excerpt
The articles reprinted in this issue of I&C represent more than an occasion to look back on accomplishments or even to celebrate them. Instead, they give us an opportunity to think about the future of our emerging field of information history. The past decade has been a busy one. I&C has published well over a hundred articles, and Library & Information History nearly a similar number. Every year, books have appeared that we would collectively consider to be about information history. Yet we are strangely at a similar spot as when we all wrote the articles reprinted in this issue of I&C. While we spend less time debating the definition of information history, we still have to describe its features and role in society, business, professions, and other human endeavors. We still are shaping its contours, defining its coda, and shaping its themes. The very good news is that there are more scholars engaged in this enterprise.
James W. Cortada completed his PhD in modern European history at Florida State University in 1973 and soon after joined IBM. He spent the next thirty-eight-plus years in various sales, consulting, and managerial positions. Initially, he continued writing on European history but in the early 1980s began publishing reference books for use by historians of computing. In the 1990s, he began writing on the business history of computing, Before the Computer (Princeton, 1993) and The Computer in the United States (M. E. Sharpe, 1993). In the 2000s, he studied how users of computers applied them across eighteen American industries, exploring the effects of the technology on their work (The Digital Hand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Financial, Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment Industries, 3 vols. [Oxford, 2004, 2006, 2008]). That led him to explore IT diffusion on a wider scale, which resulted in his writing The Digital Flood (Oxford, 2012). These two projects led him to conclude that it was never the technology that drove its diffusion but the data—information—that were created and delivered by IT. He came to that conclusion as much because of his simultaneous study of how IBM's customers used information and IT, which he codified in a series of business management books in the 1980s through the mid-2000s, including How Societies Embrace Information Technology (Wiley, 2009) and The Essential Manager (Wiley, 2015). He next published All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870 (Oxford, 2016), a national history of information in business, government, and the private lives of American residents. In this book, he demonstrated that the use of all manner of organized, often published, information was ubiquitous, back to the 1700s in American life. It was his seventh volume about information. A widely circulated book of his that fused his insights of history and contemporary management appeared earlier, Information and the Modern Corporation (MIT, 2011). Cortada returned to his business history roots with his latest book, IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon (MIT, 2019). He is currently writing a book with William Aspray on information ecosystems and fake facts in the United States. He is a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Information & Culture, and Library & Information History. He is the author of over one hundred refereed journal articles.
Shaping Information History as an Intellectual Discipline
by James W. Cortada
Originally published: Volume 47, Number 2, 2012
p. 119 - 144
Abstract
Information is an emerging field of interest and concern to citizens, public officials, and scholars in many disciplines. This article acknowledges that problems exist in defining the subject of information history and argues the case that the topic can be addressed in a more coherent fashion. It then poses five questions for historians to investigate with respect to this field and proposes a sequence of three strategies and an agenda for what scholars can do to make this topic a new field of inquiry called “information history,” drawing upon the historiographical experiences of other areas of historical inquiry.