Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic

这个项目调查了书籍对18世纪社会、文化和政治变革的贡献。它通过以前所未有的广度和深度探索自愿订阅图书馆在1731年至1800年期间在讲英语的大西洋两岸社区和个人的阅读生活中所发挥的作用。图书馆由国家组织和资助，如今被视为一种至关重要的社会公益，也是自由民主的基本支柱。然而，现代公共图书馆(起源于19世纪中叶)只是社区如何为自己提供书籍这一问题的最新解决方案。在此之前，存在着一种繁荣的、不受监管的图书馆文化，它不是由国家建立的，而是由一群自治的个人出于一系列动机而建立和维持的，其中包括通过私人订阅建立和维持的图书馆。第一个正式的订阅图书馆是费城图书馆公司(LCP)，由印刷商的学徒本杰明·富兰克林和一群志同道合的工匠于1731年创立，作为一种获得昂贵书籍的手段，以此来激发对话和启发知识变革。此后，订阅图书馆迅速成为城市景观的主要组成部分，到19世纪初，至少有350家订阅图书馆在不列颠群岛和北美的城镇和村庄建立。这些图书馆与通俗地称为“流通图书馆”的商业运作有很大的不同。订阅图书馆本质上是私人会员俱乐部，订阅者汇集他们的资源，获得比他们个人负担得起的更广泛的书籍选择。他们的藏品构成了读者兴趣转变的材料实例，有助于揭示新获得权利的读者在重新组织和扩展文学、知识和政治文化方面的作用。尽管学者们很早就知道18世纪英国和美国出现了订阅图书馆，但以前还没有可能进行过如此规模的研究。该项目将使用尖端的数字技术来捕捉、解释并在网上免费提供与图书有关的幸存文献证据，这些图书馆由80多家图书馆购买和流通，社区范围从苏格兰的威格敦和宾夕法尼亚边境的弗雷德里克镇这样的小农村居民点，到贝尔法斯特和利兹等快速发展的工业中心，以及纽约、都柏林和布里斯托尔等繁忙的跨大西洋港口。这些材料将提供前所未有的洞察力，了解在启蒙、革命、全球相遇和技术变革的关键时期，英语国家大西洋两岸图书的传播和接受情况。我们的发现将通过学术书籍和文章、为支持开放获取数据库用户而开发的在线资源，以及与九个项目合作伙伴共同设计的各种公共研讨会和展览计划--包括许多从这一时期幸存下来的订阅图书馆，如LCP--向广泛的受众传播。来自英国、澳大利亚和美国的8名研究人员组成的团队非常有资格进行这项研究，他们已经出版了20多本书，并就相关主题发表了80篇同行评议的文章和书籍章节。建议的方法已经通过国际图书馆协会成功的AHRC资助的社区图书馆研究网络进行了广泛的试验，而西悉尼大学的数字人文研究小组(DHRG)是关于图书史、图书馆史和阅读史的大规模数字研究的全球领先者。因此，DHRG处于独特的地位，可以提供与相关数据集的即时连接，例如Co-I Burrow获奖的法语图书贸易启蒙欧洲数据库，该数据库最初由AHRC资助。

This project investigates the contribution of books to social, cultural and political change in the 18th century. It does so by exploring in unprecedented range and depth the role played by voluntary subscription libraries in the reading lives of communities and individuals across the Anglophone Atlantic between 1731 and 1800. Organised and funded by the state, libraries are today valued as a vital social good and a fundamental plank of liberal democracy. Yet the modern Public Library (originating in the mid-19th century) is only the most recent solution to the problem of how communities provide themselves with books. Before then, there existed a flourishing, unregulated library culture built not by the state but by groups of autonomous individuals acting from a range of motivations, including libraries built and sustained through private subscriptions.The first formal subscription library was the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP), begun in 1731 by printer's apprentice Benjamin Franklin and a group of like-minded artisans as a means of acquiring expensive books to provoke conversation and inspire intellectual change. Thereafter, subscription libraries rapidly became a major part of the urban landscape, with at least 350 founded in towns and villages across the British Isles and North America by the turn of the 19th century. These libraries were quite different from commercial operations known popularly as 'circulating libraries'. Subscription libraries were essentially private membership clubs, in which subscribers pooled their resources to acquire a wider choice of books than they could afford individually. Their collections - captured in the library catalogues that are the main focus of this project - constituted material instantiations of readers' shifting interests, helping to reveal the role of newly enfranchised readers in reorganising and extending literary, intellectual and political culture.Although scholars have long been aware of the emergence of subscription libraries in 18th-century Britain and America, no study of this scale has been possible before. The project will use cutting-edge digital techniques to capture, interpret and make freely available online surviving documentary evidence relating to the books acquired and circulated by more than 80 libraries, founded by communities ranging from tiny rural settlements like Wigtown in Scotland and Fredericktown on the Pennsylvanian frontier, to rapidly growing industrial centres like Belfast and Leeds, and bustling transatlantic ports like New York, Dublin and Bristol. This material will provide unprecedented insights into the dissemination and reception of books across the Anglophone Atlantic in a crucial period marked by Enlightenment, Revolutions, global encounters and technological change. Our findings will be disseminated to a wide range of audiences through scholarly books and articles, online resources developed to support users of the open access database, and a varied programme of public workshops and exhibitions co-designed in collaboration with nine Project Partners - including many of the subscription libraries that survive from this period, such as the LCP.The team of 8 investigators drawn from the UK, Australia and the USA is extremely well qualified to conduct this research, having published more than 20 books and 80 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters between them on related topics. The proposed approach has been extensively trialled through the PI's successful AHRC-funded Research Network on Community Libraries, while the Digital Humanities Research Group (DHRG) at Western Sydney University is a global leader in pioneering large-scale digital research on book history, library history and the history of reading. As such, the DHRG is uniquely positioned to provide instant connections with related datasets such as co-I Burrows's award-winning French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe database, originally funded by the AHRC.