...a rhet/comp grad student, points me to a great paper. Her info is here:
http://www.emilydrabinski.com/, by the way...

Cool! I missed that one and I will definitely look it up! Emily, do you want to tell us more why you are interested in Print Culture studies?

A large number of papers from this conference were rooted in data collected in the Main Street Public Library Project. The project is fundamentally based in a dataset collected by library historian Wayne Wiegand for his book-in-progress "Main Street Public Library: Books and Reading in the Heartland, 1876-1956." The dataset contains library acquisitions from five public libraries (in small towns in Iowa, WI, MN, Michigan, and IL), as well as limited circulation data, staffing data, etc.

The dataset offers to help us identify the roles of libraries in small town print culture: after all, Wiegand notes, the public library is among the most ubiquitous social institutions: there are more of them than there are McDonald's, and they exist in towns too small to be considered viable "markets" for global capital, whether you mean McDonald's or Waldenbooks.

The dataset is limited: In most cases, it is restricted to what the library bought. So it typically cannot tell us whether a book was bought and placed on the shelf, languishing unread (except in the very limited cases where circulation data exists). It cannot tell us whether the book was placed on the shelf and stolen by a patron. It cannot tell us, even, whether the book was ordered and placed in the staff room, noncirculating (as more than one controversial book has ended up, as a form of library censorship). Still, if taken in the aggregate, the Main Street Public Library gives us the beginnings of data to talk about the relationship between the institution and the community: how does the library respond to the community, and how does it seek to shape the community?

So, in "Seeking Perfect Motherhood: Women, Medicine, and Libraries,"
Rima Apple searched the dataset for books about health that would have been useful to women in these small towns. What was the library buying about nutrition, about disease, and about similar related topics? This might tell us about the dynamic at work in the libraries: libraries as serving the information needs of the patrons.

Among the most notable findings: that a commonly held text was Mary Baker Eddy's "Science and Health," an early textbook in Christian Science. This anecdotal data point, though, demonstrates one limitation of the dataset: if keywords and titles are the primary search tool, they are a loosely-toothed comb. Personally, I would no more consult Mary Baker Eddy for information about Health than I would consult Ezra Pound's "ABCs of Reading" for information about learning to read. Similarly, and oddly enough, a lot of what I think I know about health comes from magazines, not books (a gap that Apple acknowledged in her report).

One of the key issues in Apple's paper, one that deserves theorizing even more deeply, is the dynamics of gender and power in the institution. On the one hand, we would expect the library, as a state institution, to advance resources related to health that reinforced masculinist assumptions about women's bodies. On the other hand, libraries are, perhaps, the only institutions which were administered by women. (One of the 5 "Main Street Libraries" in the dataset was managed by one woman for 50 years.) The dynamics of gender in these libraries, as reflected in the acquisitions, is something very much worth exploring.

"Hidden in Plain Sight: Gay and Lesbian Literature in Five Public Midwestern Libraries, 1900-1969" by Joanne Passet explores the collections in terms of fiction that would serve gay and lesbian patrons. This research is still germinal; because, as Passet noted, most of the relevant fiction of this period was "coded," it's not very easy to locate via title/author search. Passet also reminds us that the data is entered by humans and so flawed, unless Alice B. Toklas authored her own autobiography...

More to the point, though, I want to poke at the assumption about the relationship between institution and public in collecting these materials. The tacit, sometimes explicit in minor expressions, assumption behind this paper is that libraries collect (for example) gay and lesbian materials to serve gay and lesbian patrons. But when Oprah Winfrey selects books for her book club about paranoid schizophrenics or illiterate guards in concentration camps, she is not selecting fiction on the principle that fiction best serves to represent its readers. Rather, following a long tradition of thinkers (notably Wayne Booth), fiction is a way of meeting people who are unlike you. Isn't it possible that, in 1950, such was also a role of fiction in the library? Isn't it possible that we need fiction with gay and lesbian characters even if there are none in the community?

In other words, how do we go from the data to a model for the institution's relationship to the citizenry and public and reader? What theory would guide such a model?

In "The World of Tomorrow: The 1939 World’s Fair, Political Boundaries in Flux, and the Geographic Coverages in the Main Street Public Library,"
Bradley Wade Bishop tells us that changes in the world's political geography, so long a topic ignored by a largely isolationist US political climate, came to the fore in two expressions: in popular culture via the 1939-40 World's Fair and in the library.

So, we see in the Fair, for example, that nations conquered by the Nazis and so with no autonomous governments (or governments in exile) were represented at the Fair even though they no longer existed in the real world. The "map of the world" of the fair no longer mapped the world. Bishop points to similar shifts in holdings in Main Street Public Libraries: shifts from a largely isolationist bent in collection holdings toward a collection that might help patrons make sense of these events.

Bishop's paper was an excellent starting point toward triangulating what is, at one level, an economic relationship (the purchase of books) inevitably caught up in both a political conflict and a popular culture phenomenon. The more any of these papers began to account for a kind of relationship between material practices, institutional structures, and cultural conflict, the more I got excited. Melanie Kimball did similar work in terms of Children's collections in her paper: "Seeing the World from Main Street: Early 20th Century Literature for American Youth about Life in Other Lands." Again, we see an attempt to account for material practices of collection development, a changing political climate, and a changing ideology about the "other" as an object of knowledge. Sweetly complicated, although there is much more to be done for both Bishop and Kimball.

In "Children’s Collections and Representations of Race in Main Street Public Libraries," Christine Jenkins and Mikki Smith add another complicating factor: the NCTE sponsored lists of recommended books addressing race themselves have a changing ideology. To the extent that librarians use selection tools rather than needing to review every book themselves, then, their work in the institution is mediated in this way.

The more nuanced the model for the work of the institution, the more I liked it. Jenkins and Smith are onto something big in teasing out the forces that act on the library as the library then exerts its own force on its local community.

In a heartening example of energetic co-authorship, "Evolution in Five Children’s Public Library Collections: Recommendations, Selections, and Circulation," Kate McDowell and Caroline Nappo offered one of the highlights of the weekend, if only because they were most careful and most articulate in their claims. First, and right off the bat, they hacked the "and circulation" off the list of things they were prepared to discuss. Second, they chose a moment of particular political, religious and popular resonance at the center of their exploration of the Main Street data. And the data indicates that something very much worth analysis is going on. Acquisitions of books about evolution drop off precipitously after the Scopes trial. And tools for collection development shift, as well -- subject headings move slightly askew.

There are still many factors to account for. When asked about whether there were books critical of Darwin's accounts of evolution collected in the library, the authors indicated that such critical accounts were typical of 19th, not early 20th century, works -- by the early 20th century, evolution had nestled in to a secure position. There are two easy refutations of this:
#1: every new edition of Paley's Natural Theology (published before Darwin, republished through the 19th century and into the 20th) is a rebuttal to Darwin, in a certain way. I'm not sure whether the search terms used would catch that, but I am sure that rebuttals to Darwin followed us from the very moment the theory of evolution was released to today's "intelligent designers." It would surprise me if there weren't [on average] one book hostile to Darwin published every year for the last 100 years.
#2: 1923 saw a major rebuttal of Darwin in Price's "The New Geology." Here, Price goes after Darwin by rebutting the idea that fossils can be dated: "Price contends that all fossils are of the same age—that is, that the fossils were all laid down during the flood of Noah described in Genesis." Without the dating of fossils, Darwin becomes a hard case to prove. Some of the rebuttals, in other words, are sideways glancing, rather than direct.

What does this mean? It only means that my office mate did a dissertation on this topic when I was in grad school, so I got some of this by osmosis. But it also means that the data in the Main Street Public Library databases is just the start; a deeper contextualization of the nature of the materials will enrich both the project and the kinds of theoretical claims that we can make about the dynamic that follows from the data.

Kate Vo Thi-Beard, who is studying LIS, asked a similar provocative question: what were the religious demographics of the towns, and how does that affect selction/acquisition? They were some variety of protestant and as white as the Wonder Bread in the grocery -- but we never got an answer to the second question. We need a model for the relationship between the people in the town and the books on the shelf.

Some questions to be asked, perhaps, by these "Main Street" papers' authors: Based on the Main Street data,

Do libraries reflect the community {or some subsection of the community}? Or do they respond to some idealization of the community?
Do they shape the community according to some abstract professional principles, some local values and political dynamics, or idiosyncratic personalities?
How do these forces get translated into the very basic economic act of buying a book?
Are libraries the places where citizens can come to learn about the important issues of the day (like the Scopes trial), or must libraries avoid controversy to retain funding?
What is the role of the library in the constitution of the public sphere?

These are the questions percolating in the background of these papers. I think they can be teased to the fore; I hope discussing them here helps, and am grateful for a lunchtime chat with McDowell and Nappo, scholars who are thinking about these issues. There is much that can be generated for the theory of the public sphere here.

And that makes this line of research valuable for rhetoricians. Before we can make claims about the power of rhetoric within that public sphere, we need to understand the dynamics that shape it, and the library, it seems to me, is an important component.

After all, there are more of them than there are McDonalds.