• DOI:10.1353/LAC.0.0113
• Corpus ID: 161865550

Histories of the Library of Congress

@article{Aikin2010HistoriesOT,
  title={Histories of the Library of Congress},
  author={Jane Aikin},
  journal={Libraries \& the Cultural Record},
  year={2010},
  volume={45},
  pages={24 - 5}
}

• J. Aikin
• Published 27 January 2010
• History
• Libraries & the Cultural Record

Much has been written about the Library of Congress (LC), but relatively little of it consists of the scholarly historical appraisals that are the primary focus here. The emphasis is on book-length treatments and significant articles; with limited space, it is impossible to even reference the numerous theses, memoirs, articles, guides, pictorial works, and ex hibition catalogs as well as most of the descriptions of individual collec tions and individuals. A great deal of writing about the Library's history has come from the Library itself. One of the most important treasures is the Library of Congress Information Bulletin (1942-); its brief, fact-filled articles are gems recoverable chiefly through patience and indexes. Another publication, the Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, which began in 1943 as the (Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions and ceased publication with the 1983 volume, is likewise valuable for its specialized articles, especially the detailed descriptions of the collections. The first century of the Library's existence (1800-1900) produced noth ing in the way of a full-length history. But in July 1900 Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress from 1899 to 1939, hired William Dawson Johnston, a former history instructor at Brown University, as the first assistant in the Division of Bibliography. His assignments included editing a series titled Contributions to American Library History. The first volume, His tory of the Library of Congress, Volume I9 1800-1864, Johnston's own history of the Library, appeared in 1904. He planned three volumes, with the second volume covering 1864 to 1900 and the third the history of other federal libraries.1 The first volume, the only one published, reproduced "all documents of importance which relate to the history of the national library" (some complete, some excerpted), and the product seemed to some critics to be "a collection of documents strung together on a rather thin thread of narrative."2 But Johnston's history also contained, as he noted, "many picturesque incidents, many antiquarian details, many expressions of contemporary opinion, which in the history of another library might be of merely local interest." That detail, together with its