Hewins Gave The Last In The Series Of Reading Of The Young Reports In 1898

By Author: Mark Gary
Total Articles: 61
Comment this article

By 1898, professional librarians had successfully adapted the representation of multiple voices in the field to a more succinct format by selecting a small handful of experts to present their experience, their research, or both. These blended forms allowed multiple perspectives to be represented at ALA conferences while focusing on a few librarians who had special expertise on a topic. Although the primary qualitative data that James, for example, collected for her 1885 Reading of the Youngreport is a rich resource for historians, excerpts of all seventy-five replies to Shoes Online a questionnaire made for a lengthy conference presentation. The multiauthor form may have developed as an attempt to preserve some of the breadth of information offered by the survey research model while keeping the length of conference papers more manageable.

Women's research had bridged the previous divide between statistical research and expert opinion pieces with their survey-based research model. Like their earlier survey-based research, these collaborative forms of discourse brought together ...
... the opinions and practices of groups of librarians who had expertise to share, albeit in a more succinct form. This newer form of collaborative discourse retained an emphasis on representing multiple librarians' expertise, but, because men and women wrote on the same topics, the gender of the individual librarian was deemphasized. The shared authorship of articles can also be read as a symbolic change in librarians' discourse, reflecting the emerging collaborative values of librarians, regardless of gender. Survey research was no longer a matter of women going to unusual lengths to be able to participate as professionals; now, research method became a matter of choice and fit to the subject matter at hand.

The decreasing use of the research model introduced by women may also reflect the changing library workforce. Librarianship became publicly acceptable as Discount Shoes an appropriate career for women in the 1890s, further changing the predominate gender of professional librarians from male to female [3]. At the same time, northeastern librarians who had been the major professional leaders in librarianship up to this time found that their mid-western and western counterparts were eager to be represented and make their influence felt in the ALA [53]. This geographic diversity became evident in the changing contents of professional journals as state library associations from outside the northeast began to be a stronger presence in the profession. The periodical Public Libraries was first published in 1896 and devoted more articles to state library associations than the earlier Library Journal, which had focused on national librarianship. The changing forms of writing reflected the broadening base of professional expertise that informed the discourse of librarianship. Innovation began to come not only from men but from women, not only from an elite cadre of leaders in the northeast but from librarians across the country.

Hewins gave the last in the series of Reading of the Young reports in 1898. Her questionnaire posed seventeen questions regarding aspects of services to youth. The responses were organized in tabular form, with the libraries in rows and questions asked in columns. Most of the questions for this report asked whether libraries had yet initiated specific types of service to children and so required only "yes" or "no" answers. The table showed which libraries had or did not have each aspect of services to youth, and she summarized her results in numerical terms. Of all the topics addressed by sequential reports from 1882 to 1898, service to children was the only subject that received consistent and exclusive treatment with surveys, and it was the only series of reports written entirely by women.