History of Libraries seminar

Ian Willison, C.B.E. (Institute of English Studies) 9 November 2013 History of Libraries Institute of Historical Research

Institute of Historical Research Adaptees aux milieux canadiens-francais et catholiques: Educating Librarians to be Censors at the Universite de Montreal, 1937-61 Geoffrey Little (Concordia University Libraries) The narrative of North American public libraries as bastions of intellectual freedom and librarians as champions for books and reading in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is challenged by the history of libraries in the Canadian province of Quebec. In 1902 the Catholic archbishop of Montreal described public libraries as more dangerous than smallpox. Access to libraries and books, particularly novels, books in English, and works by Protestant writers, was severely limited by the Catholic Church, which promoted parish libraries in the place of public libraries and regulated access to existing libraries through pressures exerted in pulpits and through restrictive cataloguing and classification schemes. Francophone librarians also received training on how to be censors at Universite de Montreal, where a course on censorship was mandatory for all students from 1937 to 1961. The legacy of this system of library control and censorship has frustrated the development of public libraries in Quebec to the present. History of Libraries seminar series

Institute of Historical Research Seventeenth-Century Library Benefactors Books in Oxford Colleges: Some Examples and Some Uses Dr William Poole (New College, Oxford) This talk will concern the rise of the genre following the opening of the Bodleian Library, and how we can exploit college examples of the form for different historical purpose; in other words not just to track the growth of specific collections per se but to ask if and how far such resources can be used to discuss intellectual change more generally. History of Libraries seminar series

Institute of Historical Research 'The necessity of clear expression' home-grown writing, organisational learning and the library staff magazine in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century Professor Alistair Black (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) History of the Libraries seminar series

Institute of Historical Research The Invisible Library; Books, Book Rooms and Inventories at a Northamptonshire Manor House Mark Purcell (National Trust) First founded as an Augustinian Priory in the twelfth century, Canons Ashby was for over 400 years the home of the Dryden family. The history of libraries on the site is complex and many-layered, but one thing is striking: the near invisibility of books in the pre-nineteenth century documentary record. The paper will discuss the reasons which may underlie this, and will explore the pitfalls of relying on inventories when writing the history of domestic libraries. History of Libraries seminar series