SLA at 100

New Challenges For Specialist Librarians: 1930-1939

Chapter Five:
Within the Special Libraries Association, the decade began with a burst of professional enthusiasm as the idea of specialized librarianship, so dear to the organization's founders and its leaders and members during the first 21 years, continued to be a focus for their collegial work together. Wanting greatly to carry that idea--their "movement," they often called it--beyond their profession, these individuals were continually looking about for concepts and "hooks" that could attract attention in the management offices of organizations that employed specialist librarians (or which should be employing them).

Almost immediately, as the decade began (and in a presentation that clearly anticipates the entrepreneurial/intrapreneurial management direction that became so popular in specialized library management some 60 years later), Ruth Canavan laid out guidelines for how specialist librarians could make the specialized research library a "profitable" department in the organization. Beginning with the theory that the library serves the organization both "as its memory and as its forgettory," and functions "as a headquarters to which questions throughout the entire organization can be referred," she went on to note that "it coordinates departmental activities and avoids the duplication, delay, and expense of reproducing data already available," thus saving time and money. But these efforts, Canavan suggested, while not revenue producing, could be operated along with services that could produce revenue for the host organizations. She offered translation services, the producing of bibliographies, "literary researches" and the editing of technical manuscripts as tasks which could be undertaken, at a profit, by the staff of the specialized library.

Canavan's article was typical of one of the most successful efforts of the association at the time to provide practical information ("methods" was the term usually applied) that specialist librarians could read, discuss with colleagues and put to use in their own libraries for the benefit of their employers. Other titles, such as the "Methods Series" published in Special Libraries, offered advice and guidelines for such subjects as "Staff Organization and Administration of a Special Library," "Clipping Files," "The Care of Pamphlets in a Business Library" and "Reference Work."

Other theme issues of the magazine were published, including several devoted to newspaper libraries, both in America and in Great Britain. And the fairly recent tradition of publishing articles on business libraries was continued, including special issues on business libraries affi liated with local public libraries in various parts of the United States. Libraries in Indianapolis, Savannah, Boston, San Francisco and Providence were described, and articles with titles such as "Business Idea in Libraries" and "Publicity for Public Business Libraries" were published, to give specialist librarians in public libraries the opportunity to share in the findings of those in the corporate and research communities.

Many such efforts were undertaken, and while Special Libraries, as the organization's journal, was the primary medium for distributing this information, the SLA publishing program overall was exceptionally successful. In November 1931, a "Historical review" of association publications was undertaken. Among the remarkable facts presented was that the magazine itself, started in January 1910 with eight pages (and no advertising) had, by Volume 22, Number 6 (the Convention Issue of July-August 1931) grown to 101 pages, including paid advertisements. Paid advertising, in annual pages, had grown from six to 81 in just the six short years between 1923 and 1929, as new emphasis was put on the value of attracting advertising income to the association.

In a review of the association's publishing activities, it was noted that "The influence of the Special Libraries Association has made itself felt in two ways--by publications outside of the association that grew from ideas within the membership and promoted by them, and by those aids printed by the Special Libraries Association. the association can well be proud of its accomplishments." Noting that specialist librarians need "special tools," the association undertook to work with commercial publishers--especially "that good friend of the profession" the H.W. Wilson Company--with Industrial Arts Index being one of its first successes. In 1910, as noted earlier, the genesis of Public Affairs Information Service had been fostered by the association, and a great many timely articles and reprints of articles were furnished for members through the SLA publishing program. In 1921, the first volume to bear the imprint of the association, a Directory of Special Libraries, edited by the then-president, dorsey W. Hyde, Jr., was published, and from then on all presidents of the association encouraged publishing activities, including, in 1937, President Howard L. Stebbins's proud announcement that the new Technical Book Review Index had been launched with great success.

The nascent interest of specialist librarians in the value of technology in their professional lives came forward in a number of published articles that let the readers of the association's publications know that this was not a subject being neglected. In the earliest instances, the technology being described was microphotography, a precursor of what became known as microfi lm, microfiche (or simply "fiche"), and, later, more generically simply as microforms. (An earlier article on barometers had been published in the March 1925 issue, but its relevance to the management of a specialized library was not made particularly clear.) The first article on the subject, "Microphotography for the Special Library" by Vernon D. Tate, Chief, Division of Photographic reproduction and research, National Archives, was so well received that several articles on microphotography followed it.

In the aforementioned review of the association's publications program, the chronological list of titles (many of them available at the SLA office) included nearly 75 published works. But the association was not simply looking back when it came to its publishing activities. Another issue of Special Libraries at that time included the article "What Shall Special Libraries Association Publish? Present Activities and Future Projects," which stated the purpose of the effort, "to compile and print professional tools, valuable primarily to our members, which cannot be put out by commercial publishers because of the slight prospect of profit," and "to prepare and issue publications useful to our members but also useful to many persons and organizations outside of the Special Libraries Association, the larger sale of which will cover losses on the first group, and thus balance our budget." It was, all things considered, an ambitious and far-reaching goal, and it established the framework for what would become for the remaining years of the twentieth century one of the association's primary services, both to its members and to the larger professional community.

Excerpt from the book SLA at 100: From Putting Knowledge To Work To Building The Knowledge Culture by Guy St. Clair

An Era of Prosperity and The Adolescence of The Association: 1920-1929

The Special Libraries Association's (SLA's) second decade began as America's confident citizens, having been spared the agony of war fought on their own ground, looked to a future that they genuinely expected to be a prosperous one. True, Prohibition began in 1920, but 1920 was also the year that women were given the right to vote in the United States. The association had anticipated the national mood by electing its fi rst woman president, Maude A. Carabin Mann, in 1919. As the new decade began, specialist librarians--having pulled SLA through some tough times--were expecting the association to continue its growth and its contribution to modern American librarianship.

Looking back, the optimistic mood is not particularly surprising. the treaty of Versailles came into force on January 10, 1920, and established the League of Nations with its idealistic mission to resolve conflict through negotiation and thereby prevent war. The beginning of the decade was a time of global optimism as well. Business and industry, science and research, and various other endeavors that promised a better future were predicted, and even expected, to be brought to fruition. these were the very endeavors that specialized librarianship had been created to support. The future could not have looked any brighter, and even though John Maynard Keynes warned that the reparations required by the war's victors could not be met, and that the worldwide economy would not be able to relieve the resulting level of suffering, his caution was met with opposition and insult. to the victors belonged the spoils, and no one, not even an economist as eminent as Keynes, would be allowed to dampen the spirit of optimism that followed the end of World War I. The general trends associated with industry's move forward in those busy days and the role of specialist librarians have been captured by edythe Moore, SLA's president from 1974-75. In an essay published in 1988 Moore wrote: "Industries proliferated in the early 1920s after the First World War and those that already existed grew quickly in size. the number of corporate libraries also multiplied. the libraries were now recognized as a decided corporate asset or, as one prominent librarian of that period noted, industry 'has become aware that experience crystallized in print is a tool which may be used as effectively as any part of its accumulated capital.'" Moore's analysis was an early and prescient allusion to the connection between specialized librarianship and the management
of knowledge.

In 1991, only a few years after Moore's essay, thomas Stewart would bring the concept of organizational intellectual capital--its "knowledge, information, intellectual capital, experienc"--to the attention of the management world. Moore's linking the concept of what would become characterized as knowledge management to what had been thought about in the 1920s was an important statement about the role of the specialist librarian in the workplace. Although the knowledge management of the later twentieth century would no longer limit those assets to what is captured in print, in SLA's second decade print was still the primary information medium that specialist librarians would utilize for their parent organizations.

Moore writes that these precursors of later "information specialists" were enthusiastic about their new responsibilities for "supplying information which would further the work of their companies." With the development of SLA they and colleagues who faced similar challenges in such matters as the development of standard practices for acquiring, processing, classifying and indexing the resources their organizations required were able to come together in both geographically designated chapters (then called "regions" and, a little later, "districts") and subject-oriented divisions to share expertise and innovative techniques. Moore sees these early days as clearly laying the foundation for what specialized librarianship was to be, with the development of classifi cation and subject heading schemes, the compilation of local directories, and meetings for sharing information about suppliers, resources and, especially, new services instituted in their own libraries. As Moore put it, these early knowledge workers "took judicious shortcuts in traditional library practices and streamlined procedures," and she praised them for their willingness and the "great spirit" they brought to their tasks.

Like the founders of the association, the tireless professionals leading and participating in the work of SLA in the 1920s found themselves explicitly characterizing that third attribute of specialized librarianship that sets it apart from other types of librarianship. these individuals were totally committed to a level of collaboration that stood out, that pushed them to go that clichéd "extra mile," because they knew that their contribution would benefit them all. "It was a period of close-knit unity," Moore would write, "where both individual and shared responsibilities were highlighted. It was networking at its best--many decades before the concept of networking began to be talked about by more tradition-oriented librarians."

Such collaboration was, indeed, a hallmark of the association, both with members working with one another and with their clients in their parent organizations. As for the tense subject of collaboration between them and other professional colleagues, as members of different library associations, the picture is not quite so pleasing. If the descriptions of the events of the decade in this respect are accurate (and we have no reason to believe that they are not), and if the tone of the published reports is typical, it was a very unhappy time. As specialist librarians saw themselves moving ever forward and into the future, the antipathy between the members of the American Library Association (ALA) and the members of SLA was growing to a point that, before the end of the decade, it would produce what can only be described as the nadir of their relationship.

Excerpt from the book SLA at 100: From Putting Knowledge To Work To Building The Knowledge Culture by Guy St. Clair

Chapter Three: Early Achievements: 1910-1919

Describing specialized librarianship from the perspective of nearly 90 years of its existence, Fred Lerner reflected the observation Melvil Dewey made when he was thinking about the role of the "new" reference librarian in 1903. Dewey had noted that the public sometimes desired information rather than books. Writing about the primary role of the specialist librarian, Lerner observed:

It is one thing to assemble a library; it is another to provide intellectual access to its contents. In public and academic libraries the patron is expected to perform much of the intellectual labor of locating precisely the material he needs. But the special library user is expected to spend the minimum amount of time on searching the literature. It is the job of the library, and of the librarian, to do the searching: special librarians spend much of their time keeping up with new information services and new ways of using existing ones.

It was that "keeping up" that drove the new discipline, and which particularly characterized its early years. The first issue of Special Libraries, published in January 1910, described the goal of the journal. In addition to its coverage of the first meetings of the new association, that first issue began with a clear statement of its purpose:

Special Libraries is published by the Special Libraries Association as a means of furthering effective cooperation. It will serve as a medium of intercommunication and to a certain extent will be a clearing house of notes and news of special interest to the members of the association. It will publish a limited number of papers and short reference lists. It will devote special attention, however, to listing the more important current literature and especially those books, official reports, pamphlets, and periodical articles that are not included in the general book lists and periodical indexes. Conforming to the needs of libraries represented, these current lists will relate chiefly to public affairs, social problems, public utilities, technology, insurance, and finance. It is believed that such information will be very useful not only to special libraries but to a very large number of general and public libraries. ... It is expected that the members of the Association will communicate to the secretary for notice in Special Libraries news, items, and references to important publications. Short notes in relation to new methods of work will be particularly helpful. Send to the secretary also a copy of each reference list prepared, whether printed or in manuscript, and state how additional copies may be obtained by librarians desiring them. Put your ideas and work at the disposal of others and you will help build up a clearing house of ideas and information that will repay you seven fold. A directory of Special Libraries will be published in our next issue....

Such lofty goals were realized immediately, for even in its first issue, papers representing the aspirations of four of the association's first committees (Legislative and Municipal Reference Libraries, Public Utility Libraries, technology Libraries and Insurance Libraries) were included. Demonstrating that these particular subject fields and the libraries that supported them were prepared to take the lead in promoting the larger collaborative efforts that were the association's fundamental purpose, John A. Lapp, George W. Lee, Joseph L. Wheeler and D.N. Handy, respectively, put forward their ideas about what the association's members could expect from their committees. For example, Lapp wrote that "the legislative and municipal reference are the most general libraries of the Special Libraries Association. Their purpose is to have close cooperation not only among themselves, but with all the libraries in the association in so far as those libraries touch matters which become in any way subjects of public interest or action." And Lapp was not shy about listing the committee's ambitions: the "interchange of references," the "preparation of bibliographies," the "interchange of want lists," the publication (in Special Libraries) of "selected lists and references," and the "promotion of plans for the development eventually of a central clearing house of information and material through the Library of Congress, the Special Libraries Association, or the American Library Association."

Excerpt from the book SLA at 100: From Putting Knowledge To Work To Building The Knowledge Culture by Guy St. Clair

Chapter Two: The Establishment of Modern Librarianship in America: 1876–1909

As stated in the previous chapter, John Cotton Dana saw the need for a new kind of librarianship. What would have motivated a person such as Dana to embrace a campaign that would require strong and often competing forces to think about "doing things differently"? A clue can be found in Dana's already quoted call for a "new library creed." His thoughts on what comprised specialized librarianship are so important that they deserve to be quoted again: "...select from the vast flood of print the things your constituency will find helpful, make them available with a minimum of expense, and discard them as soon as their usefulness is past."

Dana's words clearly indicate his new way of thinking with regard to the library service provided by librarians working with specifi c constituencies. It is interesting to note that if we substitute the words "information and knowledge sources" for "print," Dana could easily be describing the work of today's knowledge services professionals, as they seek to manage information, knowledge and strategic learning for their employing organizations.

Other founders of the Special Libraries Association (SLA)--the leaders of the proposed new movement, as they called it--agreed with Dana. Daniel N. Handy of the Insurance Library Association of Boston; Dr. John A. Lapp of the Indiana State Library (later to take on the editorial responsibilities for Special Libraries and to become famous as the originator of the specialist librarians' motto, "Putting Knowledge to Work"); Guy E. Marion of Arthur D. Little; Sarah B. Ball and Beatrice Winser, working with Dana at the Newark (N.J.) Public Library; and others were all seeking methods and techniques for providing better library services to their particular constituencies.

These were people who were reacting to the times, when librarianship--a particularly American phenomenon--was coming into its own.¹ they wanted to take librarianship further, to ensure that the techniques and practices of general "library economy" (as it was called in those days) could be put to particular use for the benefit of the organizations that employed them, or--if in public or academic libraries--for the benefit of library patrons who required a different kind of service delivery than was usually available in the larger profession.

The founders' goals were clear. Although there always has been--and was from the beginning of the movement--a considerable amount of difficulty (some would say even a considerable amount of confusion) in defining the term "special library," the running theme as the movement was being established was apparent to these leaders: librarianship could offer better service delivery if the relationships between the library's clients and the librarians were enhanced. And enhancing that role was exactly what the movement's leaders were about. In today's terms, they would certainly be described as "change agents," for they were not at all uncomfortable with the role of change in their professional lives, a sentiment that has been a constant throughout the association's history, up to and including the present day. That acknowledged strength--the ability to recognize societal change and to incorporate change into the organizational framework--has contributed significantly to the success of SLA.

Excerpt from the book SLA at 100: From Putting Knowledge To Work To Building The Knowledge Culture by Guy St. Clair

Chapter One: Librarianship and Specialized Libraries

As it turned out, in the business, research and scientific communities--the very fields for which the print "flood" that Dana had identified required a "new library creed" in 1914--the flow and overwhelming quantity of information in the later part of the twentieth century added a new focus to the role of the specialist librarian. The management of information became a major new thrust, and those who had previously been required and expected to manage print materials now found that they were required and expected to manage information in all its formats. Specialized librarianship became aligned with the growing new discipline of information management. This new responsibility so affected the work of specialist librarians that new and unanticipated techniques had to be devised, and those who had become specialist librarians expecting to guide their users through the print world soon found that they had major new challenges confronting them.

By the end of the twentieth century--90 years into SLA's history and in the very last month of the century--the distinctions between specialist librarianship and other kinds of librarianship were clearly identified by Professor Marion Paris. Addressing the practitioners themselves, Paris was very specific in describing how specialized librarianship is different from other types of library work and her description of specialized librarianship can almost be seen as an update of John Cotton Dana's "new library creed":

... In searching for the technical, the obscure, the undocumented fugitive report, or the one final detail that will win a new client, special librarians have always been indifferent [to] walls and boundaries. Special librarians networked long before the noun underwent linguistic conversion into a verb.... Whether the context is a corporation or a museum or a military installation or a specialized academic collection or a research and development laboratory, the ethos of special librarianship veers sharply away [from that of other types of libraries]. ... According to the [American Library Association's] Library Bill of Rights special librarians are heretics. You practice censorship; you do not as a rule educate your customers; you do your clients' work for them, you acknowledge and admit that all customers of your libraries are not created equal. Summoning the totality of who you are (in possession of intelligence, education, experience, discernment and no small amount of cultivated prescience), you anticipate needs and cater to your customers. Moreover, it is essential to your credibility and to the continuing prosperity of your libraries that you make judgments about information sources and means of locating them. Means, by the way, that may be unconventional, but invariably their ends justify them. You create new information on demand. Knowledge management is merely a fresh take on your expertise: You collect information, organize it, store it, find it, and you repackage it.

In the twenty-first century, still further evolution is taking place in the role and purpose of specialized librarianship. That knowledge management to which Paris refers is one of the three foundational elements of knowledge services: the convergence of information management (which includes information technology, as well as such diagnostic and delivery entities as specialized librarianship), knowledge management and strategic learning in support of research, contextual decision making and innovation in the parent organizations in which specialist librarians are employed.

Just as specialized librarianship had always, either formally or informally, acknowledged the role of strategic learning in its success, and had, as the twentieth century progressed, moved from library management to information management, the new attention to managing knowledge describes yet another role that specialist librarians have been doing all along. Understanding and acting upon the value of the parent organization's intellectual capital is not a new function for practitioners in specialized librarianship.

Excerpt from the book SLA at 100: From Putting Knowledge To Work To Building The Knowledge Culture by Guy St. Clair

Chapter One: Librarianship and Specialized Libraries

Because of this important difference between specialized libraries and other types of libraries, the history of librarianship and the history of specialized librarianship are not the same. While the latter is a natural outgrowth of the former, these two branches of librarianship have developed as separate disciplines (not always willingly and not always acknowledged as such). Much energy and effort has gone into attempting to ensure that specialized librarianship, while distinct from what might be called "traditional" or "classical" librarianship, has not separated itself from the larger community of librarians.

The leaders of the library and information science profession, library managers, students of library and information studies (as well as scholars of library history), groups of library patrons, resource allocation authorities with fiduciary responsibility for library support and many others have struggled to avoid the separation of what are essentially two distinct approaches to information delivery, with both of them falling under the commonly accepted rubric of "librarianship."

As a result, there has been and is much confusion about what specialized libraries are and about what they do. In the perceptions of most people who are not connected with librarianship, all libraries are the same. Those who work as specialist librarians are consequently confronted--on an almost continual basis--with misunderstandings about why the work of the specialist librarian is not the same as that of other librarians. As will be seen, such difficulties have arguably been at the root of much of the tension that characterizes some of SLA's history. These difficulties have also contributed to some of the strain that has arisen from time to time among the various associations that represent professional library workers.

Excerpt from the book SLA at 100: From Putting Knowledge To Work To Building The Knowledge Culture by Guy St. Clair