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Community Libraries: Connecting Readers in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850

社区图书馆：连接大西洋世界的读者，1650-1850 年

基本信息

批准号：
AH/K005421/1
负责人：
Mark Towsey
金额：
$ 4.62万
依托单位：
University of Liverpool
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2013
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2013 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FK005421%2F1
关键词：
Community Libraries Connecting Readers Atlantic

项目摘要

This Research Network will investigate the cultural history of libraries at the dawn of the modern age. The recent upsurge in interest in the history of reading has opened up numerous new interpretative avenues for scholars. Libraries, book clubs, and reading circles have attracted particular attention, as scholars seek to recover the physical, administrative, and cultural environments in which reading took place. Yet such research has tended to be conducted within disciplinary boundaries, without fully embracing the interdisciplinary and boundary-crossing potential of Library History, and rarely employing international or comparative perspectives to reach a broader understanding of the relationship between libraries and the communities that host them.In the two centuries before the passage of the Public Libraries Act in the UK in 1850, libraries proliferated across the UK, Europe and North America on a bewildering variety of organizational models, none of which were 'public' in the modern sense. Libraries emerged to serve particular communities, reflecting the specialist demands of military garrisons, emigrant vessels, prisons, schools, churches, mechanics institutes, factories, mills, and informal networks of medical men and lawyers. Libraries were part of the newly emerging leisure industry, with books available for hire from smallscale operators in inns, taverns, banks, railway stations, and coffee houses, and from the sprawling city circulating libraries associated with the rise of the novel. Subscription libraries, library societies, book clubs, and other proprietary institutions provided a forum for conversation, debate and sociability, and made a key contribution to the spread of new political ideas. These libraries were not 'public' in the modern sense, supported by the taxpayer and lending books free of charge to the whole community, but they were a crucial part of an Enlightened 'public sphere'. They served different communities, providing a space where civic, religious, political, and commercial values converged and overlapped. They developed as communities in their own right, shaping the intellectual horizons of members, and signaling a range of collective identities that expressed concepts of cultural belonging and difference. The Network will examine how different types of library interacted with local, national and international communities of readers. We will assess the contribution made by libraries to the circulation and reception of print of all kinds, and to the forging of collective identities amongst discreet groups of people. The Network has broader implications for social and gender history, encompassing not only the exclusionary tactics employed by libraries of different kinds, but also the potential for social mobility that access to literature opened up for certain sections of society. In the process, the research will inform current debates about the role of public libraries in shaping communities and promoting social mobility through literacy today.Since they emerged in Britain, North America and continental Europe at around the same time, libraries offer tremendous potential for comparative history that has yet to be fully exploited - with territories adopting distinctive organisational models, yet consuming a remarkably similar canon of international bestsellers. The Network will assess the emergence of libraries in comparative perspective, asking how far models of library provision and administration were disseminated, discussed, imitated, and challenged as they travelled between different social environments and political regimes. In particular, the Network will assess the explanatory power of the Atlantic paradigm for library history, asking how far Atlantic libraries were distinctive from libraries elsewhere in the world, or whether a global perspective is more useful in explaining the emergence of different models of library provision.

这一研究网络将调查现代黎明时期图书馆的文化史。近来，人们对阅读历史的兴趣高涨，为学者们开辟了许多新的解读途径。随着学者们寻求恢复阅读发生的物理、行政和文化环境，图书馆、读书俱乐部和阅读圈受到了特别的关注。然而，这样的研究往往是在学科范围内进行的，没有充分利用图书馆史的跨学科和跨越边界的潜力，很少使用国际或比较的视角来更广泛地理解图书馆与图书馆所在社区之间的关系。在1850年英国通过《公共图书馆法》之前的两个世纪里，英国、欧洲和北美的图书馆以令人眼花缭乱的各种组织模式激增，没有一种是现代意义上的公共图书馆。图书馆的出现是为了服务于特定的社区，反映了军事驻军、移民船只、监狱、学校、教堂、机械学院、工厂、磨坊以及医务人员和律师的非正式网络的特殊需求。图书馆是新兴休闲产业的一部分，书籍可以从客栈、酒馆、银行、火车站和咖啡馆的小规模经营者那里租用，也可以从与小说兴起相关的庞大的城市流通图书馆租用。订阅图书馆、图书馆协会、读书俱乐部和其他专有机构为对话、辩论和社交提供了一个论坛，并为传播新的政治思想做出了关键贡献。这些图书馆不是现代意义上的“公共”，由纳税人支持，向整个社区免费借阅书籍，但它们是一个开明的“公共领域”的重要组成部分。它们服务于不同的社区，提供了一个公民、宗教、政治和商业价值汇聚和重叠的空间。他们以自己的权利发展为社区，塑造了成员的智力视野，并标志着一系列表达文化归属和差异概念的集体身份。该网络将审查不同类型的图书馆如何与当地、国家和国际读者群体互动。我们将评估图书馆在各种印刷品的发行和接收方面所做的贡献，以及在谨慎的人群中建立集体身份的贡献。该网络对社会和性别历史有更广泛的影响，不仅包括不同类型的图书馆采用的排外策略，而且还包括为社会某些阶层提供文献获取所带来的社会流动的潜力。在这个过程中，这项研究将为当前关于公共图书馆在塑造社区和通过识字促进社会流动性方面的辩论提供信息。由于公共图书馆几乎同时出现在英国、北美和欧洲大陆，图书馆为尚未充分开发的比较历史提供了巨大的潜力--各地区采用了独特的组织模式，但消费的国际畅销书非常相似。该网络将从比较的角度评估图书馆的出现，询问图书馆提供和管理的模式在不同的社会环境和政治制度之间传播、讨论、模仿和挑战的程度。特别是，该网络将评估大西洋范例对图书馆历史的解释能力，询问大西洋图书馆在多大程度上有别于世界其他地方的图书馆，或者全球视角是否更有助于解释不同图书馆提供模式的出现。