Dain Article

I don’t really doubt that Harris lacks evidence for the claims that he makes but he definitely didn’t provide many raw fact in his article which is probably why I got the feeling that it was full of sweeping generalizations. In her sections on nonpublic libraries and the librarian Dain gives us data that reveals that by comparison to independent and social libraries public libraries had more books, money, higher circulation were open free of charge to more people making them more successful and by comparison more democratic. This information clashes with Harris’ opinion that the public library was a largely elitist institution.

Dain’s description of the Ticknor is more forgiving and thus more realistic than Harris’ one sided argument. So while Dain doesn’t dispute that Ticknor wasn’t liberal progressive that some historians may make him out to be she balances out Harris’ view so that Ticknor appears to be some one in between the two extremes.

Dain brings up a good point when she suggests that strictness in regards to the use of library materials was due to cultural lag because books only recently became cheap. Maybe that same sort of cultural lag is what was responsible for some people’s distrust of light fiction. She also encourages reader to look at individual libraries to evaluate and compare the relative strictness of each.

Dain like Fain end her article with a lot of questions especially about the work of librarians and how the library compares to other institutions of the time. Honestly, I think that the questions were an exciting part of the article if only because that is where one could start further research from and that they try to point that potential future research in a direction that expands the field instead of going over the same issues.