Katie Schmitt LIS502LE

Reviewed work(s): Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956. By Wayne A. Wiegand. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. Pp. 244. $25.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-60938-067-0.

The public library system is a unique government service that gives taxpayers direct power to mold the way the service is provided. Unlike the judicial, educational or many other government-funded systems, citizens use libraries on a purely optional basis. Therefore, in order for public libraries to fulfill their purpose, they must be able to adapt to the needs of the community that they serve. From circulating certain types of printed and digital materials to providing a space for social events and community meetings, public libraries have been able to adjust over the years. In fact, in small towns throughout Middle America, public libraries have been highly successful in serving their communities for almost 150 years. Many library historians hold a different belief of the way libraries interact with the communities around them. They are the so-called library faith that assumes that without an informed and educated citizenry democracy cannot exist, and then extends this Jeffersonian principle by arguing that without libraries available to all citizens Americans cannot be fully educated or informed according to Wayne A. Wiegand (p 3). Thomas Augst also discusses this theory in his work, Faith in Reading: Public Libraries, Liberalism, and the Civil Religion. Augst states that a public library is a type of institution that is able to standardize the norms within the culture and that people are able to learn how to act appropriately in public spaces by stepping into a library where specific rules are enforced. This popular argument, on a general

Katie Schmitt LIS502LE level, is that the public library system is actually an agent of change for the people it serves, rather than the possibility of other way around. In his 2011 book, Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956, Wiegand flips the library faiths argument and proves how library users have affected the way public libraries provide their service to the community. He choose to research the history of four small town libraries located in the Midwest, either on or just off Main Street, and spent several years studying how each library developed and changed over time. He researched the development of the original library organizations, how they became publicly funded and how the physical space of the library came to be. Wiegand sorted through more than one hundred years of town records, census data, acquisition records and circulation rates in order to procure an accurate picture of the how the libraries and their surrounding communities changed throughout the years. His conclusion was that public libraries have been shaped both by the people who have run them (trustees and managers) and by the people that have used them (p 4). Throughout the book, Wiegand attempts to give his reader a thorough understanding of the history of different roles libraries have played within small communities and their influence on social reading. Some libraries, like the Bryant Library of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, started as a small members-only organization and then eventually moved to a Carnegie-funded building with space for cultural exhibits and a reading room. Wiegand said, to an extent, public libraries were places to see and be seen Mostly they were benign agents in local socialization activities (p179). He examined the libraries as a public space and found they had a unique way of bringing together friends and family members for social events, meetings and

Katie Schmitt LIS502LE networking. And, he also discovered that the materials provided by the library had a way of figuratively bringing friends and family members together in their own ways. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Bryant Library became a major source of news and information on the war. Friends and family could meet at the library to get information on what was happening in the world outside of Sauk Centre. Wiegand also reports in depth on the acquisition records of the libraries from 1876 to 1956. He explains how the people in charge of acquiring new materials for the Midwestern libraries collections did not follow the ALAs 1939 Library Bill of Rights which encouraged libraries to challenge attempts to censor and at the same time provide information (sometimes controversial) that is essential for an informed citizenry (p185). Wiegand provides evidence that instead of following the ALAs guidelines, these four small town libraries acted in response to their communities wants and needs, including the overwhelming preference for fiction over non-fiction materials. Over time, the libraries collections are shown to have become reflections of the communities they served. The book Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956 was published in a concise 244 pages. Wiegands intentions for the book are well thought out and explained in the thorough introduction where he also compares his own research to what others have done have done on the subject. Wiegand claims that his book reports mostly new information, because never before has a library historian focused only on small town, Midwestern public libraries. Most research on library history has been conducted at the national level. The book is organized into five easy to follow chapters - one chapter on each of the four Midwestern libraries that were studied and one concluding chapter

Katie Schmitt LIS502LE where Wiegand examines trends in the acquisition of each of the libraries. Smartly, the research is cut off in 1956 when the Library Services Act allowed state libraries to receive federal funds and therefore altered the balance of control over the libraries. Wayne A. Wiegand is incredibly knowledgeable on the way Midwest folk interact with their local libraries. After all, Wiegand was born in Manitowoc, Wisconsin and earned a BA in American history from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. He has also earned degrees throughout the Midwest, including an MA in American History from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, an MLS from Western Michigan University and a PhD in American History from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. Wiegand has written and co-edited several books on the history of libraries and of the American Library Association and is generally considered to be an expert in the subject matter. Library students who may one day want to work in a small public library will appreciate Wiegands Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956. Although the history of the last fifty years are not covered, the book provides a thorough understanding of the way public libraries in the Midwest came to be established and how they developed along with the communities they served. Students will find it interesting to read about the changes within the four featured libraries due to the demands of the people the libraries served, and hopefully this will allow the students to be able to better relate to their own patrons once they are in a professional role. It will definitely help students avoid making the same mistakes as librarians of the past. Professional archivists and librarians throughout the Midwest will also be interested to read this book for similar reasons. It will provide this group with a thorough context for the

Katie Schmitt LIS502LE work that they are already doing. The history of the public libraries in this specific part of the country is very different from the more commonly researched big-city libraries. In a small town, the community has a lot of power to request acquisitions to the library and it is able to control how the physical space of the library is used. Wiegand notes that library historians often group a majority of American public libraries together in their research, so this will be the first chance for small town Midwestern librarians and archivists to have a history book dedicated specifically to their experiences. Wiegand briefly touches on the racial, financial, political and religious demographics of each of the four communities he studied but he should have dedicated more space to this topic. One of his intentions for the book was to describe the history of the social nature of reading and the way these four public libraries brought people together. What he did not describe in detail was how these libraries also split people apart, or how they excluded people from either running the libraries or using their services. He briefly mentions that the Bryant Library did not allow Norskes to check out materials before the library was publicly funded, but Wiegand does not give many other details on who else was discriminated against in any of the four communities either before or after they became public. Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956 tells the story of four public libraries in four small Midwestern towns. Wiegand uses his extensive research and knowledge of the subject to describe, in detail, how each library began, how it obtained its own physical space on Main Street, and how its collection and space changed over time to reflect the community it served. The only downfall of the book is that it is lacking details of those in the community who were not served by the

Katie Schmitt LIS502LE library and who may have been left out in shaping the way libraries adapt to serve their communities. However, Weigand did not intend to spend a lot of time studying the small town communities and their racial or religious disagreements, instead he researched the wants and needs of the librarys patrons and related them directly to the changes within the way the public library was managed and how it related to its users. This review recommends the book to anyone who is, or may be, working in a small town Midwestern public library. Any reader will finish the book with a solid understanding of the history of public library culture in the area.

Katie Schmitt LIS502LE

Bibliography

Augst, Thomas, and Kenneth E. Carpenter. "Faith in Reading: Public Libraries, Liberalism, and the Civil Religion." In Institutions of reading: the social life of libraries in the United States. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. 148-183. Wiegand, Wayne A.. Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. Young, Arthur P., and John C. Bertot. "Wayne A. Wiegand and the Library: A Passionate Engagement." The Library Quarterly 81, no. 3 (2011): 245-249.