Harris Article

Harris’ claim that social control and power was the purpose of early libraries seems similar to some of the points that Ditzion brought up throughout his article and especially in his conclusion so maybe it’s not that revisionist.

The two main purposes of the conservative library founders, to educates the masses and provide scholarly resources for the upper classes, seem dead on but the former is definitely more prevalent in this article and the other documents that we’ve been studying. Harris’ insistence that authoritarianism and then bureaucracy made libraries distant from the goals of the founders sounds like a cynical generalization but his really is a revisionist interpretation then maybe that is just what other library historians needed to hear in order to seriously consider Harris’ point of view. Overall, I think that Harris’ argument is that the public libraries purpose of educating the common man isn’t bad per se, for example, when immigrants choose to use the libraries they did so with success. The root of Harris’ criticism is that argument for self-education often came from men with paternalistic tendencies and real belief in their cultural and intellectual superiority, such as is the case with Ticknor, Everett and Cargenie.

Harris also says that as the modern library became increasing distant from its original purpose that librarians have become more and more apathetic. The librarians are portrayed as moving along a spectrum where on one side, in the mid to late nineteenth century they were expected to mold a reader’s taste for literature and learning and then in the early and mid twentieth century they were to be total neutral disseminators of information.