Quantifying the "goodness" of library history research: a bibliometric study of the Journal of Library History/Libraries & Culture.

Library historians use primarily qualitative research methods, unlike most in LIS, who adopt social science research methods. This contrast becomes problematic when evaluating the goodness of historical research. This article briefly explores this conflict and crosses the methodological divide by adapting both bibliometrics and qualitative approaches to examine four volumes from the Journal of Library History (1967, 1977) and its successor, Libraries & Culture (1987, 1997), in order to observe transitions. The sample, 497 citations from 53 articles, was tabulated by age, self-citation, and other factors to examine the goodness of historical research.

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It seems at times as if library and information studies research is divided into two separate and opposing camps, quantitative and qualitative, and "never the twain shall meet." This article crosses the methodological divide by adopting one quantitative methodology, bibliometrics, the study of citations, to examine four sample volumes from the Journal of Library History (1967, 1977) and its successor Libraries & Culture (1987, 1997) in order to observe transitions over the journal's nearly forty years of existence. These four volumes included 53 articles (915 pages) with 497 citations to journals, monographs, and archival collections. I tabulated references manually for several factors, including age and self-citation patterns. I examined these factors to explore the possibility of using citation analysis to determine the goodness of historical research in LIS. This article concludes with a brief discussion on the socioeconomic and intellectual outcomes of applied bibliometrics to library history research and suggests areas for further research.

Library History Research: A Brief Introduction

Historical writing on libraries, or library history, predates professional education for librarians; however, library history has emerged as a subdiscipline of what is now called library and information studies (LIS). (1) Library history was included in the curriculum of Melvil Dewey's pioneering School of Library Economy at Columbia College, but only in order to "illustrate or enforce modern methods." (2) Early professional educators also used the history of librarianship to inculcate values encompassed by an evangelical library faith. Librarians celebrating institutional anniversaries wrote most of the library history in this initial era--not completely unlike today. Few authors had the historical training or inclination to record critical narratives. The situation improved at the University of Chicago's Graduate Library School in the 1930s as Pierce Butler and his colleagues introduced historical and sociological methods into their graduate program and definition of library science research. (3)

Despite significant advances by the next generation of intellectuals, such as Jesse Shera and Sidney Ditzion, library history came increasingly to be viewed as "antiquarian" or in a second-tier status compared to quantitative methods employed by sociologists and other social scientists. Some LIS scholars imply that historical research in librarianship declined at this point. Schlachter and Thomison captured this trend in their survey of LIS doctoral dissertations, which showed a decrease in the percent of dissertations using historical research methods from 30 percent between 1925 and 1972 to 15.4 percent between 1973 and 1981. (4) Bluma Peritz found a similar decline in historical methodologies among articles published in core LIS journals between 1950 (28 percent) and 1975 (13 percent). (5) In this latter period many schools of library science transformed themselves into schools of information (emphasizing information science) and responded to the major technological and socioeconomic transformations of the last quarter of the twentieth century that brought market-driven values to higher education and saw the closing of prestigious graduate LIS schools at Columbia, Chicago, and Berkeley. (6) These developments put LIS faculty in a defensive scramble to prove their school's relevance to graduate professional education in the so-called information age. (7) Some of these pressures resulted in positive changes, such as the encouragement of greater interdisciplinarity and the hiring of faculty with new interdisciplinary research methods and theories. One downside, though, was that library historians were often not replaced in LIS programs, and historical elective courses were simply not offered or were taught by visiting or adjunct instructors, often with little preparation in either historical methods or librarianship. (8) Despite these institutional problems historical methodologies still made up 10.7 percent of all research articles in a 1990 study of LIS journals. (9)

It is no surprise that LIS education remains a contested terrain. It has always been so; (10) however, I strongly agree with the protests of Alston, Carmichael, Davis, Shifflett, Stieg, and Wiegand concerning the perils of the increasing ahistoricism of LIS education. (11) This conflict has a number of roots, with one of the most serious outcomes being a lack of agreement on how we evaluate the quality of each other's scholarship. Part of this problem stems from our lack of interdisciplinary preparation. Research methods courses in most LIS Ph.D. programs, for example, focus largely on quantitative research; few give more than a token nod to historical or other qualitative research methods. (12) Library historians today are primarily graduates of the few LIS programs with faculty historians or received historical preparation in a B.A., second M.A., or Ph.D. minor.

Library historians in the United States share their research at the annual conferences of the American Library Association (Library History Round Table), the Association for Library & Information Science Education (ALISE Historical Perspectives Special Interest Group), and the peer-reviewed Library History Seminar, which meets every five years. The better papers from these conferences eventually find their way into the preeminent American journal covering library history, Libraries & Culture.

Journal of Library History/Libraries & Culture

Florida State University Professor Louis Shores founded the Journal of Library History (JLH) in 1966. (13) Following Shore's 1967 retirement, FSU Dean Harold Goldstein maintained the journal until 1976, when, after some negotiation, it was taken over by University of Texas Assistant Professor Donald G. Davis, Jr., and the growing journals wing at the University of Texas Press. Library historians are indebted to Davis for rescuing the journal administratively and intellectually and for transforming it from a professional journal with many rambling personal columns to a respectable scholarly journal. Davis renamed JLH as Libraries & Culture (L & C) in 1988 to highlight the need to research library history from wider social perspectives. Library historians recognize that Davis raised the journal's international preeminence during his nearly thirty years as editor. The ALA-LHRT, for example, presented Davis with several unique honors, including the naming of a research award in his honor as well as special commemorations for his editorship and on his retirement in 2005. The ALA also nominated Davis as a representative to the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). Despite these recognitions, the journal at times appears not fully appreciated in LIS circles.

Herubel and Goedeken, studying journal articles on American library history that were cited in L & C's…