This first issue of 2013 marks my first as Editor of Library & Information History. I believe passionately in the relevance of library and information history to broader processes of social, cultural, and political change, and look forward to publishing material that locates these two fields in a broad conceptual and comparative framework. My research explores the reading lives of eighteenth-century men and women, uncovering the ways in which they encountered and experienced the rapidly changing information culture of the Enlightenment through correspondence, diaries, commonplace books, marginalia, and reading notes of other kinds. I have also published on many different types of Georgian library, looking not simply at their role in facilitating the circulation of books to new and varied readerships, but also as sites for the dissemination and widespread acceptance of cultural practices linked to politeness, sociability, and self-improvement. This issue focuses on the historical development of a special kind of library with which many readers will feel a special affinity — the specialist academic research library. The three articles ask important questions about the function of academic libraries in the past, and their relationship with the various communities they have served. This includes questions of access, funding, and administration that continue to resonate with academic librarians today.
The first article by Liam Austin and John Feather revisits the library of Archbishop Matthew Parker, bequeathed to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1575 and still in place to this day. Previous scholarship has perpetuated the myth that the Parker Library was neglected in the eighteenth century, a symptom of the university’s supposedly moribund intellectual culture in the age of Enlightenment. Based on their close analysis of surviving records of the library’s use, Austin and Feather contest such claims, arguing instead that the collection was reinvented to serve new academic communities and intellectual priorities. Catherine Minter returns to the themes of her 2009 article in Library & Information History, broadening out her original focus on research libraries in Germany to consider the changing perceptions of librarianship across Western Europe in the long nineteenth century. She finds that changing notions of library and information science combined with a more concrete sense of ‘public service’ to forge a more professional image for librarians, based on ‘conscientiousness, courtesy, self-effacement, self-sacrifice, and dedication’. The third article in this issue turns from library administration to library funding, shedding important new light on Andrew Carnegie’s little-known support for university library buildings in the USA. Susan M. Ryan delves into the archives to detail how Carnegie’s support functioned in practice, revealing that universities would only be awarded funding if they could prove that the local community supported their educational mission.
Much of the material that appears in this volume began the editorial process under my predecessor’s supervision, and I would like to thank Toni Weller for making the editorial transition so smooth. The Journal has made very great strides in Toni’s tenure as Editor, becoming the first in the world to recognize the emergence of information history as a field of historical research in its own right. Under Toni’s stewardship the Journal has enhanced its reputation for publishing the best and most adventurous work in all aspects of library and information history, and this is a record that I am committed to sustaining in the future.