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National Planning for Public Library Service: The Work and Ideas of Lionel McColvin
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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1695
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| Title: | National Planning for Public Library Service: The Work and Ideas of Lionel McColvin |
| Author(s): | Black, Alistair |
| Subject(s): |
Library science --History
Information science --History |
| Abstract: | Lionel McColvin (1896–1976) is regarded as one of the most infl uential fi gures in the history of British librarianship. In the specifi c context of 150 years of public librarianship in Britain, his reputation as a visionary inflfl uence is second only to that of the nineteenth-century pioneer Edward Edwards, while in the twentieth century his reputation is unsurpassed. McColvin was the major voice in the mid-twentieth-century movement to reconstruct and modernize public libraries. He is best known as author of The Public Library System of Great Britain: A Report on Its Present Condition with Proposals for Post-war Reorganization, published in 1942 at a moment of intense wartime efforts to assemble plans for social and economic reconstruction. The “McColvin Report,” as it came to be termed, was a landmark in the struggle to de-Victorianize the public library, not least by emphasizing the institution’s universalism and its function as a national, not just a civic, agency. This article briefl y describes McColvin’s notable contribution to twentieth-century librarianship, resulting from his work as a public librarian, as a leading fi gure in the Library Association, and as an infl uential player in the international library movement. The article’s core aim is to offer a critical appraisal of McColvin’s vision for public libraries by placing it in the context of the project to build a better postwar world. This project was defi ned by the conceptualization and development of a welfare state in Britain, the underlying values of which can be seen to correspond to McColvin’s national plan for a rejuvenated public library system. McColvin drew on the spirit of the time to produce a plan for public libraries that was shot through with social idealism and commitment and with a confi dence in the need for intervention by the state—values that perhaps provide lessons for current and future library and information policymakers and professionals. |
| Issue Date: | 2004 |
| Publisher: | Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. |
| Citation Info: | In Library Trends 52(4) Spring 2004: 902-923. |
| Genre: | Article |
| Type: | Text |
| Language: | English |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1695 |
| ISSN: | 0024-2594 |
| Publication Status: | published or submitted for publication |
| Rights Information: | Copyright owned by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 2004. |
| Date Available in IDEALS: | 2007-07-23 |
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Library Trends 52 (4) Spring 2004: Pioneers in Library and Information Science
Library Trends 52 (4) Spring 2004: Pioneers in Library and Information Science. Edited by W. Boyd Rayward
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