Invention

Librarian

Seventeen of the first twenty library school students were women.

United States · 1887

Ancient libraries had custodians long before librarianship became a profession. The Library of Alexandria employed scholars who catalogued scrolls, developed alphabetical ordering, and compiled the first known bibliography of Greek literature.1 For centuries, the people who managed collections of texts were monks, priests, or wealthy collectors. No training program existed, and no shared body of professional knowledge connected one library keeper to another.

In 1876, Melvil Dewey co-founded the American Library Association and launched the Library Journal, creating the first institutional infrastructure for a field that did not yet have a formal name.2 Dewey had already developed his Decimal Classification system as a student at Amherst College, and he spent the following decade arguing that librarianship required systematic education rather than informal apprenticeship.

On January 5, 1887, Dewey opened the School of Library Economy at Columbia College with a class of twenty students, seventeen of them women.3 He admitted women over the explicit objections of the college's Regents. The school taught classification, cataloguing, and library administration, replacing the apprenticeship model that had governed the field. Within two years, Dewey's conflicts with Columbia's administration forced the school to relocate to Albany, where it became the New York State Library School.4

Women among the twenty students in the first library school class at Columbia in 1887.

The professionalization accelerated rapidly. By the 1920s, library schools had opened across the United States and the Carnegie Corporation was funding both buildings and training programs. In England during the 1870s, library work had been described as a role suited to women, and by 1960, women comprised eighty percent of the profession in the United Kingdom.5

The Columbia school operated for over a century before the university closed it in 1992 during a budget crisis. The profession Dewey helped formalize now requires a master's degree in most jurisdictions, and approximately fifty-nine accredited programs operate across the United States and Canada.6

Timeline

1876

Melvil Dewey co-founded the American Library Association and launched the Library Journal.

1887

Columbia College opened the School of Library Economy with twenty students.

1920s

Carnegie Corporation funding expanded library buildings and training across the United States.

1992

Columbia University closed its School of Library Service during a budget crisis.

Endnotes

1 Mark Cartwright, "Libraries in the Ancient World," World History Encyclopedia, July 2019.

2 Wayne A. Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (Chicago: American Library Association, 1996).

3 Ray Trautman, A History of the School of Library Service, Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954).

4 Columbia University Libraries, "Library & Information Science: Historical Context," collections policy document.

5 Alistair Black, "Women in British Librarianship, 1880-1960," Library History 18, no. 3 (2002).

6 American Library Association, accredited program directory, current listings.