Christine Pawley

Unequal Legacies: Race and Multiculturalism in the LIS Curriculum.

Race remains poorly understood and inadequately represented in library and information science (LIS) education. Educators tend to avoid the term “race,” preferring the more inclusive “multiculturalism.” Yet these terms are far from equivalent: the various dimensions of multiculturalism, including race, ethnicity, class, and gender, have different histories and different theoretical explanations. Four models dominate LIS research and teaching: science/technology, business/management, mission/service, and society/culture. Each has left its own racialized legacy, invisibly influencing the field’s current concepts of race. Drawing on recent research into “whiteness” and racial formation, I show that although each model transmits an inheritance that perpetuates white privilege, each also carries the potential for positive transformation. Arguing that courses in all four areas have the capability to foreground race, the article outlines ways in which faculty, students, and library practitioners together can make curricular changes that contribute to the creation of libraries as “nonwhite” or “race‐neutral” spaces.

Beyond Market Models and Resistance: Organizations as a Middle Layer in the History of Reading.

Two theoretical models dominate discussion of research methods in the history of reading: “market” models such as Robert Darnton’s communications circuit and “resistance” models such as those that draw on Michel de Certeau’s concept of poaching. This article suggests that both make important contributions but also have limitations, especially when researching later nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century print culture. An alternative approach considers institutional sites of print as a middle layer that can bridge the gap between structure and agency and between macro and micro views. These sites are also spaces where activities of reading and writing may intersect, since they provide opportunities for individuals to both produce and consume texts. Moreover, an explicitly institutional view gives researchers a window onto the acts of reading and writing by nonelite groups for whom few individual records survive.

Retrieving Readers: Library Experiences1

The history of readers and reading is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field that draws from a variety of academic traditions. A key issue is not only to make the link between texts and their historical readers but also to uncover how and why people read. This poses special difficulties for the practices of so‐called ordinary readers, those who lived relatively anonymous lives and who are unlikely to have left personal papers in archives. But libraries can help provide the vital social context for the reading of nonelite groups. The five essays in this special issue use a variety of research methods and data to provide examples of how libraries and library records can provide a window into the reading practices of individuals and groups that range from antebellum users of an American subscription library to Australian soldiers in two world wars to Latino students at a twenty‐first‐century American university.