Of possible interest… Mary K. Chelton Begin forwarded message:

From: "Wiegand, Wayne" <Wayne.Wiegand@cci.fsu.edu> Subject: [LRRT Membership Listserv] "'A Part of Our Lives:' A People's History of the American Public Library" Date: June 14, 2013 12:28:29 PM EDT To: "lhrt@ala.org" <lhrt@ala.org> Cc: "lrrt-mem@ala.org" <lrrt-mem@ala.org>

Colleagues:

On Saturday morning, June 29, from 10:30 to Noon, in Room S503a in the McCormick Place Conventlon Center, Dawn Logsdon and Lucie Faulkner will be giving a presentation on their documentary-in-progress, "Free For All: Inside the Public Library." For the five years they've been working on this, I have been serving as consultant.

In part they selected me as consultant because I am working on a book (now nearly finished) I've tentatively entitled: "'A Part of Or Lives:' A People's History of the American Public Library," which takes a "bottom-up" rather than "top-down" perspective by uncovering the voices of public library users since the mid-19th century that can be found in hundreds of newspapers digitized in the past fifteen years. From this data I argue that the American public library has been more important to users for the place and space it provides (lots of public sphere research here) and the stories it supplies (lots of humanistic research on reading here) than for the information it makes accessible (our current professional discourse, which I argue is too narrow to measure value comprehensively).

Dawn and Lucie have asked me to briefly summarize my research at their presentation. Thought this might be of interest to some of you.

Wayne

Wayne A. Wiegand F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies Emeritus President, Friends of the Florida State University Libraries 142 Collegiate Way Florida State University Tallahassee, FL 32306-2100 850-644-8123 (office) 850-728-2011 (cell) LRRT-MEM is the official discussion listserv of the ALA Library Research Round Table. The list's address is lrrt-mem@ala.org. When posting messages to this discussion list, please be sure they are sent from the email address recorded in your member profile. Messages intended for distribution to everyone on the discussion list should be sent to lrrt-mem@ala.org. When responding to an individual please reply to that individual in order to reduce unnecessary email traffic for others on the discussion list.

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