Dec 08, 2008 - 04:05:33 CST
URBANA, Ill. (AP) - A timid, hair-wrapped-in-a-bun, pince-nez-wearing spinster.Is that the image you have of a librarian from 100 years ago?
Try this one on instead:
Gun-toting, horseback-riding, walk-2-miles-to-work-in-a-blizzard type of woman.
Those were the kind of librarians who settled the West.
Around the turn of the 20th century, graduates of the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science (then called the Illinois Library School) headed to places like Texas, North Dakota, Idaho and Oregon.
Lisa Renee Kemplin, senior library specialist at the University of Illinois, looks through Ida Kidder's 1908 letter from Salem, Ore., at the Archives Research Center in Urbana. The letter and other documents catalog UI librarians' trips to the West 100 years ago.
"These women had such a spirit of adventure," said Betsy Hearne, professor emeritus with the library school. "They were determined to be where the action was."
Using information gathered in Liz Cardman's 1996 doctoral dissertation, Hearne, who is also a storyteller, spoke about graduates establishing libraries in places where, in some cases, they were the only librarian within a 130-mile radius or the only single female in town.
Not only were the graduates going to new places, they were entering into a totally new profession: librarianship, Cardman said.
"They were pioneers in both senses of the word," she said.
Until the latter part of the 19th century, libraries were primarily private places, she said. But thanks to Melvil Dewey and Andrew Carnegie, in the late 1800s and early 1900s "public libraries were just exploding and they needed librarians," Cardman said.
NDGuy wrote on Dec 8, 2008 2:01 PM:
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