I love serendip­ity. While I was prepar­ing for my ACPL Library Camp pre­sen­ta­tion about libraries and civic engage­ment, I saw a post on the Civic Engage­ment blog in which Nancy Kranich pointed to a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on the topic.

“Pro­mot­ing Cit­i­zen­ship: How Librar­i­ans Helped Get Out the Vote in the 1952 Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion,” Libraries & the Cul­tural Record 43 no1 1–28 2008 (Unfor­tu­nately, it doesn’t appear to be online in its entirety, but you can get the full text through Gale’s Aca­d­e­mic OneFile.)

I think this fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle pin­points the moment in time when libraries became known for pro­vid­ing high-quality, accu­rate, authen­tic infor­ma­tion about all sides of an issue. Its cer­tainly the point at which libraries became out­lets for infor­ma­tion about vot­ing. In a fas­ci­nat­ing look back, author Jean Preers chron­i­cles the efforts made to civi­cally engage Amer­i­cans and increase voter turnout in the 1948 and 1952 elections.

It starts with an ini­tia­tive by the Amer­i­can Her­itage Foun­da­tion in 1947, which results in the book­let Good Cit­i­zen: The Rights and Duties of an Amer­i­can, a con­fer­ence, and the Free­dom Train, an actual train that trav­eled across the coun­try exhibit­ing “orig­i­nal doc­u­ments that that estab­lished the nation’s demo­c­ra­tic tra­di­tion, from the Bill of Rights to the Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion.” The book­let is a won­der­ful arti­fact — I highly rec­om­mend it as a his­tor­i­cal snap­shot, and thank­fully it’s avail­able on the Inter­net Archive, thanks to the Uni­ver­sity of Florida’s George A. Smath­ers Libraries.

Dur­ing this time, the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion (dis­claimer: my employer, although I wasn’t even born back then) “under­took its own pro­gram to pro­mote the dis­cus­sion of cur­rent issues in pub­lic libraries. This was a direc­tion long-favored by its Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Carl Milam, and, as part of its “Four Year Goals” in 1948, ALA had ini­ti­ated a pro­gram called Great Issues, which urged librar­i­ans to high­light such top­ics as U.S.-Russian rela­tions, civil rights, and world gov­ern­ment in their col­lec­tions and programs.”

Librar­i­ans started cre­at­ing bib­li­ogra­phies for these top­ics and encour­aged com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions to form read­ing and dis­cus­sion groups around them.

“Ruth Ret­zen, chair of ALA’s Adult Edu­ca­tion Board, saw this as an oppor­tu­nity for libraries to take the lead in their com­mu­ni­ties, direct­ing their pro­grams towards wider cir­cu­la­tion of per­ti­nent infor­ma­tion: ‘Let us make our libraries active com­mu­nity cen­ters for the spread of reli­able infor­ma­tion on all sides of this vital issue and for the encour­age­ment of free dis­cus­sion and action.’ ”

Unfor­tu­nately, none of these efforts really suc­ceeded, and voter turnout for the 1948 elec­tion was “sur­pris­ingly low.” To cel­e­brate its 75th anniver­sary in 1951, ALA changed direc­tion and used a $150,000 grant from the Ford Foun­da­tion to help libraries imple­ment read­ing and dis­cus­sion groups them­selves. [Iron­i­cally, “this nation­wide adult edu­ca­tion pro­gram began in the fall of 1951 just as National Library Day obser­vance in Phli­adel­phia on Octo­ber 4 effec­tively con­cluded the seventy-fifth anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion.” All Philadel­phia libraries are cur­rently set to close on Octo­ber 2, 2009, unless the Penn­syl­va­nia Leg­is­la­ture acts to save them.]

As ALA began to ramp up its pro­gram, the AHF con­tin­ued to work on increas­ing voter turnout for the 1952 elec­tion. The folks behind the AHF pro­gram real­ized that guilt­ing peo­ple into vot­ing wasn’t work­ing (and wasn’t likely to start work­ing any­time soon), so they also changed direc­tion to sim­ply “pro­vide ade­quate infor­ma­tion and mate­ri­als to imple­ment the will of the peo­ple.” An enhanced focus on civic and non­profit orga­ni­za­tions brought ALA and libraries into the effort as the cen­tral source cit­i­zens could go to in order to find unbi­ased infor­ma­tion. ALA agreed, in part because this meant the AHF and other orga­ni­za­tions would pro­mote this new role and encour­age their mem­bers to seek out libraries specif­i­cally for unbi­ased infor­ma­tion that could then be used to reg­is­ter local vot­ers. Accord­ing to Preers, this is also when libraries take on the man­tle of library adult edu­ca­tion, another new role.

It truly is a thought-provoking arti­cle (there’s a lot more to it, so you really should read the whole thing), and it high­lights one of the themes that’s res­onated with me per­son­ally dur­ing the last 12–18 months, that when we talk about how the library “used to be,” we have to be very spe­cific about which era we’re refer­ring to. As I’ve noted in the past about gam­ing, children’s ser­vices are a rel­a­tively recent addi­tion to libraries, as are fic­tion, mul­ti­me­dia, and even pub­lic access (see my brief post about D. W. Krummel’s The Seven Stages of Librar­i­an­ship for more about this).

More impor­tantly, it helps show how proac­tive civic engage­ment is not a new role for 21st cen­tury libraries. We’ve done this before — suc­cess­fully — and we can do it again — suc­cess­fully — if we focus on spe­cific areas. For exam­ple, stud­ies show that gam­ing in libraries could include civic engage­ment expe­ri­ences. I’m also inter­ested in the “Great Issues” pro­gram to offer the library as a por­tal to civic dis­course around many of the “great” issues that aren’t eas­ily acces­si­ble to the aver­age per­son. Pri­vacy, dig­i­tal iden­tity, online rep­u­ta­tion, media lit­era­cies, trans­par­ent gov­ern­ment… there’s a wide range of top­ics that need addressing.

The ques­tion is can librar­i­ans (and not just pub­lic librar­i­ans) still pro­vide this type of ser­vice? I ques­tion if there’s any­one else who can.