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Librarianship
Ray Lonsdale with Sheila Ray
Although children’s literature is now regarded as a subject of cross-disciplinary interest,
the first group of professionals to take a systematic and knowledgeable interest in what
children read consisted of librarians.
Although isolated examples of school libraries date back to the seventh century, and
of libraries serving the general public to the early nineteenth century, libraries for
children were a comparatively late development. Their appearance in English-speaking
countries and elsewhere was motivated by improvements in educational provision, with
the resultant increase in literacy, and to some extent governed by book publication for
children. After the establishment of the American Library Association (ALA) in 1876, and
the Library Association (LA) in Britain in 1877, progress was sure but very slow, with
the Americans always at least a decade ahead.
In 1877, Minerva L.Saunders, Librarian at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, set aside a
corner of her library for children, provided special chairs, and began lending them
books. In 1882, Caroline M.Hewins, Librarian of Hartford Public Library in Connecticut,
presented a report on library work with children to the American Library Association. It
became increasingly difficult to exclude children from public libraries and in 1894, a
Report on Reading for the Young, presented at the ALA Conference at Lake Placid, seems
to have been a landmark in the development of library work with children, arousing ‘the
librarians present to a clear conviction of the desirability of abolishing age limitations in
the public library, and of providing special rooms for children with special attendants
designed to serve children’ (Meigs 1969:386).
In 1906, Anne Carroll Moore, who had been in charge of the children’s room in the
Pratt Institute Library since 1896, was invited to organise the children’s department of
the New York Public library, and she soon became the leading player in the development
of children’s librarianship. She had already, in 1898, pressed the need for specialised
professional education for librarians working with children, and had launched a series
of classes at the Pratt Institute. Similar classes at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburg led
to the establishment, in 1901, of the Training School for Children’s Librarians, which
placed its graduates throughout the country. The Section for Children’s Librarians of the
American Library Association (now the Association for Library Services to Children),
formed in 1900, held its first conference in the following year, with Anne Carroll Moore
in the chair. Moore also became a leading critic of children’s literature, contributing
regular articles to The Bookman and demonstrating that criticism can
distinguish ‘between the merely average and the genuinely great; that it can discover