Williams Article

It was helpful that Williams started out this article with an explanation of the common historical idiographic approach to research and the nomothetic that is more typical of social science research. I immediately thought of the Wiegand article where he criticized library historians for being too “reverential” or in Williams terms “more idiographic than nomothetic.” Another criticism of Williams that was similar to Wiegand’s was that librarian historians need to use quality primary sources in their research. This would be especially important if the work done by library historians was to be helpful to researches in other fields as Williams thinks should be the case.

Williams critiques researcher’s general use of the Social Conditions theory in public library formation by saying that they failed to point out the relationship between each factor and importance of the given social factor. I went back to the Shera article where it seemed that he didn’t say explicitly, for example, a communities’ economic ability had more affect on library formation than say the lyceum movement but I gathered that it was implied. In my entry on the Shera article I mentioned how he brought up that the lyceum and the public school were both “book centered” but he didn’t elaborate on what exactly that meant or if there was any further relationship between the two institutions. Having said all this in agreement with Williams, Shera’s article was still very informative but I see now that in some places it just didn’t take that extra step into proposing a definite theory like Williams advocates.