College and Research Libraries FRANCES L. HOPKINS A Century of Bibliographic Instruction: The Historical Claim to Professional and Academic Legitimacy This paper links the origin, decline, and renaissance of bibliographic instruc- tion (BI) to the increasing specialization and democratization of education. It argues that BI in academic libraries and the reference desk in public libraries were both initiated to foster independent learning by unsophisticated users; that BI, introduced by scholar-librarians in the 1870s, could not be sustained by the semiclerical graduates of early library schools and was consequently displaced by the reference desk, and that improved training and status for li- brarians contributed to the BI renaissance of the 1960s. Library schools should recognize the centrality of BI to academic librarianship and develop its theo- retical base. Concept-oriented BI can help students understand the disciplines as different but equally rigorous approaches to knowledge by comparing their bibliographic structures and research methods. INTRODUCTION Three broad themes comprise the major bibliographic instruction (BI) issues that are now coming to the fore, and define the likely dimensions of BI's continuing development. Intellectually, BI librarians, or instruction li- brarians, as they will also be referred to here, are striving to move BI content from facts and procedures to concepts and theory. So- cially, they are struggling on two fronts: in the academic environment they seek recogni- tion of the educational value of bibliographic instruction; in their own professional envi- ronment, they seek its recognition as a core function of librarianship. These are not new themes, of course. The difference now is that there is finally a critical mass of instruction librarians who are confident and experi~ Frances L. Hopkins is head of the Reference Ser- vices Department, Temple University Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania . 192 I enced in the teaching role and ready to put these basic issues first. In this paper, these three dimensions will be projected backward into the early history of bibliographic instruction. What were the intellectual and social issues then and how were they related? An approach from this perspective may illuminate the present situa- tion and help BI librarians go forward with a clearer sense of purpose. HISTORY The modern American system of higher education and the development of librarian- ship as a distinct occupation both had their origins soon after the Civil War, as a conse- quence of four interdependent social forces: the growing importance of technology, the democratization of American culture, the secularization of knowledge, and the bur- geoning of basic scientific research and sys- tematic scholarship. 1 The character of aca- demic libraries was shaped by their dual environment of academia and librarianship, and the early rise and swift decline of biblio- graphic instruction between 1870 and World War I can be traced to the combined effects of these environments. Until the 1860s American higher educa- tion followed the British model. Through a fixed religious and classical curriculum, the goal was to turn upper-class youths into moral, cultured gentlemen. In 1862, when the Morrill Act provided federal land grants for the establishment of institutions to teach "agriculture and the mechanic arts," higher education was transformed into an instru- ment for social betterment. In the 1870s the same spirit motivated introduction of the elective system. Both elite, private Harvard and democratic, land-grant Cornell began allowing students to fashion their own pro- grams, opening the way for faculty members to offer whatever courses their interests dic- tated. For the presidents of both institutions this was a deliberate means of replacing the old curriculum with new, socially useful sub- jects without first having to debate educa- tional philosophy with conservatives. The elective system was widely copied, and the resulting proliferation of college sub- jects led not only to a demand for more pro- fessors but to a demand for a new kind of professor- the subject specialist to replace the generalist, who had been master of all subjects in the old, narrow, fixed curricu- lum. As the transformation of college educa- tion progressed, the enlarged, specialized faculties became grouped into academic de- partments. Their specialized expertise soon brought them the right to determine pro- grams and standards within their own fields, a power formerly centralized in the presi- dent. While this decentralization was occur- ring at the college level, the rapid develop- ment of scientific research and systematic scholarship, modeled on the German achievement, led to the establishment of research-oriented graduate education. Johns Hopkins, which opened in 1876 (with, it should be noted, a former Yale librarian, Daniel Gilman, as first president), was planned as a graduate institution only. Har- vard, anticipating competition from this new university, was prompted to offer graduate-level courses in 1875. This educational revolution of the 1870s Bibliographic Instruction I 193 was accompanied by a surge of library devel- opment. 2 Both university and public libraries began building research collections in the 1860s. The technical problems of organizing large collections for efficient access were solved by Dewey's classification scheme, de- veloped at Amherst College in the 1870s, and Cutter's dictionary catalog, which was intro-· duced at Harvard in 1861. The new research libraries existed for the sake of scholars, and it was reasonable to assume that professors working in specialized fields knew their liter- ature and could cope with classification and cataloging schemes. But the broadening of college course offerings under the elective system and the new independence of students was creating a class of novice library users. Librarians championed students' right to in- dependent access by extending library hours beyond the usual one or two days a week and by helping students select books and find in- formation. Most of the early academic librarians were professors, responsible part-time for the li- brary, possibly chosen for the job because they retained generalist interests in an era of increasing specialization. Their natural in- clination in an academic setting was to teach the use of library materials for academic pur- poses. Justin Winsor, appointed at Harvard in 1877 as professor of bibliography and one of the few full-time academic librarians, was a Harvard graduate who had studied at Paris and Heidelberg and was a respected histo- rian and cartographer. 3 He believed that col- leges should "pay more attention to the meth- ods by which a subject is attacked" and should "teach the true use of encyclopedic and bibliographic helps."4 Azariah Root of Oberlin College Library had an Oberlin BA and an MA, had studied law at Boston University and Harvard, and had spent a year at Gottingen, 5 whose li- brary provided the standard for the new American universities. 6 From 1899 to 1927 he taught a sequence of courses on library or- ganization, bibliographic resources, and the history of the book. 7 Edwin Woodruff, re- porting on BI at Cornell in 1886, wrote that it was the "duty of a college library to teach the student how he may, if necessary, at any time in his post-collegiate years, seek out and use the books that have displaced or carried along the knowledge of his college days" and 194 I College & Research Libraries· May 1982 to "reveal to [the student] the fact that no professor's word is final." 8 Academic librarians were thus on the way to establishing a position for themselves as educators, and they could perhaps have filled in part the general education role abdi- cated by a specialized faculty. But the inexo- rable flood of acquisitions in research li- braries caused a shortage of trained librarians, who learned their profession one by one as apprentices after receiving their . college degrees. Responding to the shortage, Melvil Dewey opened his School of Library Economy at Columbia in 1877, where he was then librarian. With reformist zeal, he not only admitted women to his school but required only native ability and good charac- ter for entrance, over strong protest by Win- sor and other leaders in the field. Other li- brary schools followed his lead. Courses in the early library schools were entirely practi- cal, emphasizing typing and "library hand" as well as classification. 9 Thus, classification and cataloging, which had required enter- prising intelligence for their invention, were largely routinized within a few years into semiclerical work. Most of the new library school graduates were neither the intellectual nor social equals of academic faculty. BI of the sort developed by Winsor and Root could not be routinized or divorced from familiarity with the curric- ulum and research methods, and it is unlikely that the new breed of librarian would even have attempted it. But the head librarians, although still appointed from the professo- rial ranks, were also being pushed from the teaching role by collection growth. In larger libraries, at least, they had to function more as administrators than as educators, respond- ing more to the demands of powerful depart- ments than to student needs and presiding over a proletariat of assistant librarians who were little more than clerks. There were, of course, a number of very able women in the field, as a check of Notable American Women will reveal, but there is no doubt that Dewey's good intentions depressed the profession as a whole. A bibliography of articles on academic li- brary instruction published between 1876 and 1932 documents the decline from in- struction in use of library materials for re- search to instruction in access procedures. 10· The early entries from such institutions as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Amherst, Dart- mouth, Bowdoin, Wesleyan, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins show the influence of the Winsor-Root-Woodruff approach. From 1907 on, there is increasing incidence of arti- cles on teaching basic access skills to fresh- men in normal schools and agricultural col- leges, and by 1926 the opinion was published that freshman instruction is remedial and should be the responsibility of the high schools. Meanwhile, another approach to user as- sistance was taking hold in academic li- braries. In 1876 Samuel Green reported his introduction of formal reference service at the Worcester, Massachusetts, Public Li- brary. 11 Public libraries had a concern for the needs of unsophisticated users similar to the academic librarians' concern for stu- dents, and the idea of having a librarian at a visible desk to give ad hoc responses to indi- vidual users' questions was gradually adopted into academic libraries. Unlike BI, reference service required no planning or lec- turing, no direct involvement in the aca- demic program, and little exposure to faculty scrutiny. To the average library school grad- uate, the role of reference librarian must have been much more congenial than any at- tempt to emulate Justin Winsor as professor of bibliography. Yet interest in BI at an intellectual level did not disappear. In 1928 the librarian of Swarthmore College criticized the shallow- ness of the library instruction usually given to freshmen and suggested establishing aca- demic departments of bibliography that could offer sequenced courses in library re- search.12 In 1934 Louis Shores first described his idea of a library-college in whiCh teach- ing librarians woulq team with subject- specialist professors to guide undergraduates in independent, interdisciplinary study . 13 Harvie Branscomb, in a report commis- sioned by the Association of American Col- leges, made a similar recommendation in 1940. 14 All of these proposals were tied to the ideal of general education for undergraduates in an era when specialization was ascending. Indeed, increasing specialization of teaching at the undergraduate level was recognized as a mixed blessing almost as soon as the old cur- riculum had been overthrown. The elective system suited that minority of undergradu- ates who had well-defined scientific or voca- tional interests and who knew what courses they needed to achieve their goals. But less directed students often . floundered, and many faculty still believed that character formation through broad humanistic study should be the essence of undergraduate edu- cation. Yet repeated attempts from the 1880s through the 1940s to introduce general edu- cation programs in major universities were thwarted by lack of consensus on an essential core of knowledge, by the ambivalence of science faculty, by reward systems that fa- vored faculty research over teaching, and by suspicion of lingering elitism. Mter World War II, from 1945 to about 1970, changes in the production of knowl- edge and in higher education repeated those that had followed the Civil War. Again, gov- ernment support brought a sudden expansion of research in science and technology. Expo- nential growth in the volume of research lit- erature was followed by extensive ramifica- tion of the bibliographic apparatus. Ac- ademic libraries responded, as they had in the 1860s and '70s, with rapid collection growth and with new techniques of organi- zation and retrieval. Consequently, in the 1960s, as in the 1880s, there was a severe shortage of trained librarians. The library schools had been upgrading gradually and the fifth-year master's degree had by this time become standard; now the schools be- gan offering courses in documentation and computer applications. Job mobility and sal- aries improved, and librarians began to gain some recognition as technical experts. In aca- demic libraries, directorships formerly held by nonlibrarian scholars were now more of- ten filled by administrators with technical knowledge. Through the 1950s library instruction- usually routine or merely remedial where it was offered at all- was almost completely eclipsed by developments in technical ser- vices, which were at once more interesting and more advantageous for the professional- ization of librarianship. In 1956, Jesse Shera, one of the chief spokespersons for intellectu- alism in librarianship, advised librarians not to pursue the teaching role. 15 He recom- mended, instead, that librarianship be devel- Bibliographic Instruction I 195 oped as a discipline in its own right, compris- ing subject bibliography, the theory and techniques of documentation, and the inves- tigation of how scholars and students make use of recorded knowledge. He outlined the subject matter of a social science discipline of librarianship that would have been the ideal theoretical base for the Justin Winsor ap- proach of tying- practical instruction in re- search techniques to the "method by which a subject is attacked" by scholars. But Shera apparently saw nothing in this relevant to undergraduate education; he certainly saw no realistic hope that librarians could partic- ipate directly in the educational process. Also after the war, a new wave of government-supported democratization of higher education extended the democratiza- tion begun by the land-grant act of the pre- vious century. The ideal of universal higher education brought in a huge student popula- tion with a greater range than ever before of academic abilities and preparation. Vocational-professional programs prolifer- ated; teaching in the traditional science and · social science fields became more pre- professional as the ever more specialized fac- ulty found more of their students aiming for graduate study. Again, the increasing fragmentation of knowledge into specialties produced a counter-movement, this time strengthened by reaction to the impersonal- ity of mega-universities. In the 1960s rigid syllabi and assigned paper topics gave way to more independent study as faculties accom- modated to student rebelliousness. Several small experimental colleges were founded in an effort to provide the option of integrative, humanistic education for more undergradu- ates. Just as the decline of BI early in the cen- tury had been the product of social forces in the professional and academic environ- ments, so was its revival in the 1960s. Two problems related to developments in educa- tion could be tackled only through systematic group instruction, and librarians, equipped now with better training and higher status, were ready for the challenge. The first prob- lem concerned the continuing effects of spe- cialization. Patricia Knapp's grant-funded project at Monteith, one of the new small col- leges, reflected her conviction that library competence is a liberal art that is systemati- 196 I College & Research Libraries • May 1982 cally ignored by subject specialists intent on imparting content rather than competence in learning. 16 She developed a problem-solving approach to library instruction. The second problem was the consequence of rapid democratization combined with the increasing complexity of libraries. In the public colleges and universities especially, ad hoc reference service was not adequate to the needs of increasing numbers of students who lacked basic library competence but who were nevertheless expected to cope with a bibliographic apparatus geared to graduate students and faculty. In this situation, li- brary instruction focused on general access skills and on use of the more technical biblio- graphic tools. These two strains- problem- solving and access-skills instruction- persisted through the 1970s, but they seem now to be converging gradually into the concept-oriented instruction that is being de- veloped in the 1980s. HYPOTHESIS The three dimensions of bibliographic in- struction will again be examined, this time in a different order. It was stated earlier that "in their own professional environment [in- struction librarians] seek recognition of [bib- liographic instruction] as a core function of librarianship"; "intellectually, [they] are striving to move [its] content from facts and procedures to concepts and theory"; and "in the academic environment they seek recogni- tion of [its] educational value." How does the historical perspective enable BI librarians to see more clearly where they stand? Consider first the place of BI in librarian- ship. Library collections and technology were developed originally for the support of scholarship. But librarians were motivated also by a strong social service ideology. They sought to provide not only access to libraries by the untutored, but also assistance in use, without which access alone would have been for many a pointless privilege. Public librari- ans appropriately established reference desks. They placed them only in the popular reading areas where questions would not usually arise from the context of academic disciplines, not in reading rooms used by scholars. 17 Academic librarians, also appro- priately, offered instruction to students in the use of library resources to answer questions that normally did arise from academic disci- plines. At one level, the purpose of the public li- brary reference desk and academic library instruction was the same: the democratic goal of fostering independent learning, free from reliance on tradition or authority. But in the academic library the "authority" of the disciplines could not reasonably be ignored. To learn independently in that context, the student had to learn how to keep up with on- going research and how to evaluate one ex- pert opinion in the light of others. The refer- ence desk was designed for responding to specific questions and providing informa- tion, not for imparting such an understand- ing of general research principles. Thus, it is hypothesized here that the refer- ence desk, offering ad hoc information ser- vice, displaced BI so decisively as the focus and ideal of academic library service largely because few graduates of the clerically ori- ented library schools had the competence or status to teach research methods, however te- nacious they often were in the search for in- formation. If this theory is correct, the con- current rise of the reference desk and decline of group instruction in academic libraries was an unintended consequence of Dewey's social conscience, not a deliberate redefini- tion of the academic librarians' role. There- fore, historically as well as logically, BI li- brarians are on firm ground in claiming that BI is one of the primary functions of librari- anship and are right in insisting upon its in- clusion in library school curriculums. Second, consider the matter of content. BI, as originally conceived by the professor- librarians, was intended to teach broad problem-solving research methods. That goal, which lends itself to conceptual ap- proaches, has survived mainly in the small liberal arts colleges that now enroll only a minute proportion of American students. In the public universities that have dominated modern higher education, the combination of huge student populations comparatively lacking in basic academic skills, the increas- ing complexity of libraries, and the technical character of many academic programs has of necessity focused BI on tools and locational procedures. But experience has shown that knowledge of technique is not enough. It does not, for example, enable students to cope with dis- crepancies or bias in standard reference works, to distinguish scholarship from jour- nalism, or to judge the kind of resources needed at each juncture in the research pro- cess. And learning theory confirms that facts and procedures isolated from a meaningful structure are neither grasped well nor re- tained. Lately, therefore, the search for theo- retical principles, once seen as a luxury for those who could instruct small groups in se- lective colleges, has taken on a more practi- cal urgency. So far, BI has been a pragmatic enterprise advanced through informal observation of student researchers, through largely uneval- uated efforts to teach them more efficient ways, and through continuing adjustment to institutional realities. Instruction librarians have made painfully slow progress, theoreti- cally, since Patricia Knapp's work in the early 1960s. Now that they agree in general on the need for theory, perhaps they can con- sciously cultivate appropriate research. Med- ical education was revolutionized a century ago when American university medical schools accepted the responsibility to pursue whatever research was relevant to profes- sional practice. 18 BI librarians should expect no less. They already draw on studies of sci- entific publication and citation patterns, and they need precise behavioral studies of how scholars in different disciplines and novice researchers use the literature. BI librarians need to make qualified researchers aware of them and of their needs; fruitful cooperation might result. Finally, consider the educational role of BI. It has been seen how increasing speciali- zation has fragmented the undergraduate curriculum, leaving students vulnerable to the mistaken view that a given discipline is truth. Many faculty members regret in prin- ciple the abandonment of general education, yet their own interests are often incompati- ble with educating the whole student. They are trapped in a system that requires highly specialized research for professional sur- vival. Repeated efforts to overcome the ef- fects of fragmentation by required general courses have all failed , having been accused of cultural insularity, snobbishness toward middle-American materialism, or sheer va- cuity. So the need remains for a means to syn- Bibliographic Instruction I 197 thesize fragmented knowledge without re- sort to any suspect value system. It is this author's belief that the growing interest in the philosophy and sociology of knowledge has been at one level an effort to tame the arrogance of disciplines. There is a need to reduce them to human size by under- standing them as alternative approaches to knowledge of the world, with no exclusive claim to truth and no immunity to the social forces that influence every other human en- terprise. Philosophy and sociology of knowl- edge, however , are not easily presented to undergraduates; they require too much background in cultural history. But biblio- graphic instruction may provide a relatively value-free approach to the comparative study of acad~mic fields and disciplines that is accessible to undergraduates. It is possible to use publication and citation patterns to compare what counts as knowledge in the different subject fields and to contrast the processes by which their knowledge is gener- ated, evaluated, and used, or consigned to the archive. CoNCLUSION BI librarians are therefore justified in claiming a central role for bibliographic in- struction both within librarianship and within the larger academic enterprise. Their predecessors once saw the teaching of re- search methods as a basic function of aca- demic libraries; the present generation may see the realization of their vision. This gener- ation of instruction librarians knows more about the structures of disciplines and the ways of learning than did previous genera- tions. And in the increasing! y specialized and divided groves of academe, the need for an integrative role for BI is even greater. REFERENCES 1. Joseph Ben-David , American Higher Educa- tion: Directions Old and New (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), is the source of all histor- ical infoqnation on American education . 2. The source for information on the early devel- opment of academic libraries is a series of arti- cles on academic libraries in 1876 published in the issues of College & Research Libraries, V. 37 (1976). They were reprinted in Richard D . Johnson, ed., Libraries for Teaching , Li- braries for Research: Essays for a Century , 198 I College & Research Libraries • May 1982 ACRL Publications in Librarianship, no.39 (Chicago: American Library Assn., 1977) . 3. James Truslow Adams, "Winsor, Justin," Dic- tionary of American Biography, V.lO (New York: Scribner, 1936), p.403-4. 4 . Justin Winsor, "The Development of the Li- brary," Library Journal 19:370-75 (Nov. 1894). 5. "Root, Azariah Smith," National Cyclopedia of American Biography, V.22 (New York: James T. White, 1932), p.ll2-13. 6. Hendrik Edelman and G. Marvin Tatum, Jr., "The Development of Collections in American University Libraries," College & Research Li- braries 37:223 (May 1976). 7. Richard Rubin, "Azariah Smith Root and Li- brary Instruction at Oberlin College," Journal of Library History, Philosophy and Compara- tive Librarianship 12:250-61 (Summer 1977). 8. Edwin H. Woodruff, "University Libraries and Seminary Methods of Instruction," Li- brary Journalll:219-24 (Sept. 1886). 9. William Z. Nasri, "Education in Library and Information Science," Encyclopedia of Li- brary and Information Science, V. 7 (New York: Dekker, 1972), p.418. 10. John Mark Tucker, Articles on Library In- struction in Colleges and Universities, 1876-1932, University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science Occasional Papers, no.l43 (Feb. 1980), ED 187 330. 11. Samuel Rothstein, The Development of Refer- ence Services through Academic Traditions, Public Library Practice and Special Librari- anship (Chicago: Association of Colleges and Reference Libraries, June 1955), gives a gen- eral history of the early development of refer- ence service. 12. Charles B. Shaw, "Bibliographic Instruction for Students," Library Journal 53:300-301 (April!, 1928). 13. Louis Shores, "The Library Arts College: A Possibility in 1954?" School and Society 4:110-14 Gan. 26, 1935), reprinted from an address delivered in 1934. 14. Harvie Branscomb, Teaching with Books: A Study of College Libraries (Chicago: Associa- tion of American Colleges and · American Li- brary Assn., 1940). 15. Jesse Shera, "The Role of the College Librarian- A Reappraisal," in The Role of the College Library- A Reappraisal in Library- Instructional Integration at the College Level, Report of the 40th Conference of Eastern Col- lege Librarians (Chicago: Association of Col- lege and Reference Librarians, 1956), p.lO. 16. Patricia Knapp, The Monteith College Li- brary Experiment (New York: Scarecrow, 1966). 17. Rothstein, Development of Reference Ser- vices, p.22. 18. Ben-David, American Higher Education, p.93.