A history of libraries needs to look not only at the libraries themselves but at the way they work and at the structures and systems that make library operations possible. Libraries do not exist in isolation but work for the communities they serve, and their history relates to the varied contexts in which they have operated. To achieve their ends libraries have developed a range of characteristics and skills which are the subject of this section of the volume.

It is one of the features of the modern age that the library world has become more self-conscious – in the best and worst senses of that word – as the sense of a profession developed. Like many other specialities, librarianship had to prove its worth in a world where other professions were also seeking to establish their position. It has developed a varied yet broadly coherent philosophy and a range of skills applicable to librarians from many different backgrounds. In building up a professional practice base, librarians have drawn on other disciplines, from office and business methods to the techniques of logical analysis as applied to classification and the structures of electronic information. Social and educational philosophies have illuminated librarians' thinking and affected the way libraries have operated. Ideas have been shared with others both nationally and internationally, and professional bodies have proliferated; training and education have developed from craft-based skills acquisition into a formal academic discipline with links to many other subjects.

The development of a modern concept of higher education can, in much of Europe, be traced back to the Enlightenment, and the British Isles are no exception. The foundation of new universities and colleges in the early nineteenth century was a result of the growing awareness of the need to open up the world of the mind (including the natural world in all its manifestations) to a wider audience. The establishment later in the century of the colleges which developed into the civic universities took up the same theme, adding a new element, the practical and technical application of thought. Newer foundations in the twentieth century followed the same path, with refinements being added when expansion was fostered by government first in the 1960s, following the Robbins Report of 1963, then in a much greater degree towards the end of the century.

University and college libraries in this country are integral parts of their institutions (not, as in some countries, a parallel but separate state-supported system). As such, they inevitably reflect the same philosophies, and to a large extent the fortunes, of their parent bodies. While state funding has become a fundamental part of university financing (and so of library budgeting), it was for long felt that they should be left to manage their own affairs without much state interference, and while this has changed drastically in recent years the principle of semi-independence affected the ways libraries were treated in different institutions. The statement of the University Grants Committee that the library was ‘the power-house of the university’ became a touchstone for librarians and others pressing their claims for resources.

Introduction

By the mid-nineteenth century Oxford and Cambridge had lost their age-old monopoly of higher education in England and Wales, with the founding of universities in London (1826) and Durham (1833), and on a smaller scale at St David's College in Lampeter (1827). Further competition followed with the establishment of the Civic universities later in the century and further expansion of higher education in the twentieth century, but Oxford and Cambridge continued to dominate the library scene as well as the academic world, at least in size and richness, and in popular perception. (Surprisingly, however, they play only a small part in the two most influential library reports at the end of our period: the University Grants Committee's Report of the Committee on Libraries (1967) (the Parry Report), and the Report of the National Libraries Committee (1969) (the Dainton Report).)

The existence of a number of other universities in Scotland and Ireland, dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, must not be overlooked, since they share some characteristics of their English counterparts, including the impact of new foundations. The four (or five) ancient Scottish universities at St Andrews (founded 1411), Glasgow (1451), Aberdeen (1495/1593) and Edinburgh (1584) came to face competition, though rarely in library terms, from professional colleges and younger institutions such as Anderson's Institution in Glasgow (1796). In Ireland Trinity College Dublin was established as a Protestant bulwark by Queen Elizabeth I in 1599; the non-denominational Queen's Colleges founded in 1845 and the Catholic University of Ireland of 1854 had developed by the early twentieth century into the federal National University of Ireland and the independent Queen's University in Belfast.

Libraries and modernity

The 150 year period that this volume covers witnessed the emergence and development of what can justifiably be referred to as the ‘modern library’. It coincided with the maturation of modernity: a change of gear within the broad epoch of modernity that was set in motion by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. During our period, industrial production moved on to a more technical plane, and became irrevocably determined by the outputs of applied science (the ‘knowledge economy’, we might observe, existed for a century or more before its ‘rediscovery’ in the late twentieth century). Society underwent a process of massification. This was as much the case in terms of political arrangements (universal suffrage), communications (the mass media, including the book trade and newspapers) and social provision (education, welfare and housing) as it was in respect of production, consumption and advertising. The ‘control’ dimensions of modernity, such as surveillance, bureaucracy and standardisation, intensified alongside its liberating tendencies, such as the free flow of ideas and the operation of a public sphere, which was extended via a variety of rational and accessible institutions – although restricted, some would argue, by others, especially as the twentieth century progressed.

The history of libraries in the modern period is rich in the resources, both specific and more general, which are required to prosecute the subject. More history has been written about the past 150 years – witness the explosion of studies on the Victorian period since its rehabilitation in the mid-twentieth century – than about any other comparable period. This means that library historians have at their disposal a considerable amount of contextual knowledge to help them situate and make sense of the subjects they research. Secondly, modern organisations – organisations forged from the bureaucratic efficiency of maturing modernity – have generated vast swathes of archival documentation. As solid administrators, librarians have been busier than most over the past century and a half in documenting the activities of their organisations. Hence we have been bequeathed an abundant store of primary evidence, a good amount of which, owing to librarians' penchant for preservation, has thankfully survived.

Sources for modern library history can be divided into two basic categories. First there are library-centred administrative sources, which are derived mostly from instrumental needs to manage and improve library services, and to which one might add, for many types of library, the archives of their parent institutions. Secondly there are sources generated outside the library profession or the administrative domain of the library by those who have had something to say about them, whether as users or non-users.