TY - GEN
T1 - Edwards dreams of Alexandria
T2 - Library history in the service of public library activism
AU - Modrow, Sebastian
AU - Smith, Melissa
PY - 2022/8/6
Y1 - 2022/8/6
N2 - Our paper explores the relationship between Edward Edwards’s Memoirs of Libraries: Including a Handbook of Library Economy (1859) and 19th-century Britain’s Public Library Movement, especially the Public Library Acts of 1850 and 1855. Focusing on the instrumentalization of library history for the movement’s agenda, we show how Edwards projects the roots of this movement deep into antiquity and rhetorically creates a narrative of British deficiency set purposefully at odds with British patriotic and colonial sentiments, deriving from this vertical and horizontal comparison his arguments and advice for the establishment of municipal public libraries.
AB - Our paper explores the relationship between Edward Edwards’s Memoirs of Libraries: Including a Handbook of Library Economy (1859) and 19th-century Britain’s Public Library Movement, especially the Public Library Acts of 1850 and 1855. Focusing on the instrumentalization of library history for the movement’s agenda, we show how Edwards projects the roots of this movement deep into antiquity and rhetorically creates a narrative of British deficiency set purposefully at odds with British patriotic and colonial sentiments, deriving from this vertical and horizontal comparison his arguments and advice for the establishment of municipal public libraries.
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.29173/cais1239
U2 - 10.29173/cais1239
DO - 10.29173/cais1239
M3 - Conference contribution
BT - Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l'ACSI
ER -