What is "Amphiboly"?: A 1962 Dictionary Defines It ...

On days that I'm not elbow-deep in archival boxes, I can sometimes be found at Penn State Harrisburg's library, holed up in a back office on the 2nd floor. Often, I'm bobbing my head to obscure punk, rap, or other music on Rolling Stones's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list while I am thumbing through and scanning pages from chunky reference books. Because my current research project focuses on the 1950s-1990s, I need to use a vast amount of material that wasn't born-digital and cannot be accessed through aggregator databases like HathiTrust because it is still protected by U.S. copyright law. Searching volumes by hand, making my own copies, and uploading them to Zotero is tedious work -- the kind of task that well-supported researchers hand off to graduate student assistants -- but being a library historian at an institution that doesn't have an LIS program is a threadbare and lonely undertaking. 

Fortunately, though, each day I uncover a little "gem" that isn't directly related to my topic, but is supremely entertaining. Lately, I have been thumbing through 1960s editions of The Bowker Annual -- now known as Library and Book Trade Almanac -- and it is loaded with them. Bowker's/LBTA is an annual publication that many younger librarians "heard about" when they were in library school, but have never actually used because the $300-400 price tag is too steep for most institutions. That so many of my colleagues haven't had the joy of playing with Bowker's is unfortunate, because the overview essays, lists, and statistics it provides are authoritative and fascinating for anyone who wants to nerd over history and trends in our profession. I have been using it mainly because of its succinct, annually updated information about the Library Services and Construction Act, a federal program that funded dozens of library buildings, cooperative networks, and innovative projects in Pennsylvania during the 1960s through the 1990s. However, Bowker's can be helpful for many other inquiries.

1960s editions of The Bowker Annual,
a classic in the field of librarianship.
Photo by the author.

A decade ago, when I was researching the history of public librarianship during the 1900s-1940s, I struggled to wrap my head around a subfield called "Documentation" which was emerging at the time. As best I could tell, it was of high interest in academic, government, and special libraries where users were keen to find journal articles, technical information, government records, statistics, and other materials that weren't easily searchable in library card catalogs. While librarians are infamous for speaking in "Librarianese" that everyday people don't understand, documentalists used a dialect that can be inscrutable even to fluent Librarianese speakers like me! 

Too bad that I didn't have the 1962 edition of Bowker's at my side, because, in it, there is "A Dictionary of Documentation Terms" that *only* appears that year. Compiled by Frank S. Wagner, a librarian at the Celanese Corporation of America (a chemical company in Texas), it consists of 14 pages of concisely defined terms from "abridgement" to "Zipf's law." I spent 20 minutes of my lunch break poring over it and having a blast.

Some of the words may not have been on the tip of every librarian's tongue in the early 1960s, but they are quite familiar to librarians of today, especially to those who frequently use periodicals databases. For example, Wagner's dictionary includes "abstract," "keyword," "subject," and "thesaurus" -- terms that I use all the time when teaching students how to search ERIC, PsycINFO, and PubMed. There are other words that may have been highly familiar to librarians in the book-centric environment of 100 years ago, but are seldom used now unless you are in the rare books field: "collophon," "concordance," "forel," "imprint," "lacuna," and "virgule." Wagner also included plenty of words that flashed on and off the scene at mid-century. For instance, a full column of his dictionary consists of terms beginning with "micro" -- not only "microfilm," but "microcard," "micro-opaque," "microtransparency," and others that remind us that reducing texts into teensy sizes used to be the (only) solution for libraries that were running out of storage space. Finally, there are a few doozies that I'd love to use in casual conversation, like "amphiboly" (the condition of having 2 or more meanings), "filiatory" (hierarchical), or "penumbral" (partial interest or activity). 

The first full page of Frank S. Wagner's "Dictionary of Documentation,"
published in the 1962 edition of 
The Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information.
Photo by the author.

Having worked in libraries for 35 years, all the while watching my profession transition from a print-based world to a digital one, there are 2 things that I greatly miss. Today, we obtain a lot of information from online sources where content is overwritten anytime the creator or host decides to update the site. Unless it's captured by an archiving initiative like Wayback Machine, we can't see annual snapshots and, through them, the long historical arcs that resources like Bowker's provide. Also, so many of our searches are initiated by keywords and processed by algorithms that lead us straight to what we ask for (or something kinda close!). It's definitely more efficient, but the joys of finding fascinatingly weird items such as "The Dictionary of Documentation" are farther and fewer in between. 

Call me an old crank, but sometimes I prefer my research old-school. 

A Pastor Brings Books to Bars, Prisons, Public Housing, and Thrift Stores

Over the past few months, I've found numerous books and articles from the 1960s-1970s about outreach to what were then called "disadvantaged" populations. While historians have found that libraries have been trying to engage with socially and economically marginalized people long before that time, the Civil Rights Movement, new federal grant opportunities, and a rising generation of activists refreshed these efforts during the era I'm researching now. It's an aspect of librarianship that keenly interests me, because I believe everyone should be able to benefit from the opportunities that publicly-funded institutions offer. 

This week, I found a fascinating example of such an outreach program within the historical records of Montgomery County - Norristown Public Library (MCNPL). For some, it may be hard to imagine Montgomery County as having "disadvantaged" residents -- certainly, the "Main Line" communities that run along Route 30 are some of the most affluent in Pennsylvania. However, Norristown, which lies a bit northward, currently has a poverty rate of 18.6%. I don't know enough about the area's history to say how and when this economic distress arose, but it is clearly present in the library's records from the 1960s onward. For example, it can be seen in a bibliographic pamphlet called "The Outer City" which the library developed ca. 1963 to help community leaders combat crime, drugs, insufficient tax revenue, and other challenges Norristown was facing. Strain is also apparent in incidents of burglary and theft that seemed to be happening constantly within the Norristown library's building and to parked vehicles nearby. Besides generating booklists and beefing up security forces, was there anything the library could do?

MCNPL had an interesting response. Its director, Pearl Frankenfield, was a public relations maven who had earned multiple recognitions through the American Library Association's John Cotton Dana Award program. Thus, unsurprisingly, her staff took a person-to-person approach. Previously, the library had invited city children to attend events held on Wednesday afternoons within its auditorium, but welcoming people to come inside the library was no longer good enough. Over the course of 6 weeks during the summer of 1970, Assistant Children's Librarian Dorothy Hawthorne (later Suchocki) donned a wide-brimmed hat, tucked picture books, games, and a stool under her arms, and provided pop-up storytelling sessions on city sidewalks. MCNPL wanted to reach kids who were "too shy" to find their own way. 

Dorothy Hawthorne providing an outdoor story hour to Norristown children.
Norristown Times Herald, August 5, 1970; Clipping from MCNPL Scrapbook, 1970, volume 2. 

Frankenfield apparently kept her eyes open to other Pennsylvania libraries that were reaching hard-to-reach constituents in fresh ways. Details in MCNPL's records are scant, but in a March 29, 1971 article in the Penn Hills Reporter, she stated that she was inspired by the work of a library in Upper Dublin that was doing similar work. That year, MCNPL won a 2-year $80,000 federal Library Services and Construction Act (LSCA) grant that enabled it to build upon Hawthorne's beginning and whatever ideas Frankenfield had gleaned from Upper Dublin. She hired Alan H. Reider, a former clergyman, to coordinate a multifaceted effort to place books in community gathering spots, engage with residents that the library hadn't connected with previously, and establish meaningful collaborations with county agencies and nonprofits that were serving them. Reider acquired a Dodge Maxi Van (camper van) and had it customized with a portable book collection, generator, film projector, and other equipment so that he could visit various areas in the county and not have to worry about power supplies and other logistics. Grant funds also paid for workroom furniture and thousands of paperback books, chosen upon the recommendation of Philadelphia and Baltimore librarians, especially to appeal to Black and reluctant readers. MCNPL received an additional LSCA grant in 1972, which enabled it to run the program at least through September 1973.

The centerpiece of MCNPL's outreach program was establishing freely-available book collections in places where lower-income families tended to gather. For example, Reider deposited materials at Rahway Cafe (a bar) and the Theist Temple in Norristown, the Tenant Relations Office and laundromat in Penn Village (a public housing project), the county's geriatric and rehabilitation facility, the Perkiomen Valley Child Health center, the Graterford Bible Fellowship Church at Collegeville, in a  Pottsville community center, a Schwenksville thrift shop, and in The Well (another thrift shop in Conshohocken). He used similar strategies at Crest Manor (an affordable housing project in Abington Township) and with Spanish-speaking residents in Lansdale and in the Telford/Souderton area as well. MCNPL also placed 200-300 books with the men's and women's prisons, the county "work farm," and at the county juvenile detention center. Tabulating statistics on a monthly basis, Reider calculated that users had borrowed more than 12,000 items over the 3-year life of outreach program. 

Alan Reider assisting outreach customer Fannie Johnson
Philadelphia Inquirer, August 5, 1973; Image from Newspapers.com, https://www.newspapers.com/image/180335861/ .

On the storytelling/public programming front, Dorothy (Hawthorne) Suchocki, known alternatively as "The Pied Piper of Norristown" and "The Story Lady,"  continued to provide outdoor readings, puppetry, and games. The library also collaborated with Head Start, which brought young children to the Norristown library, provided them with stories and crafts, and sent each child home with a balloon. Reider also collaborated with volunteers from a drug rehabilitation center in Eagleville to offer adult literacy tutoring. He organized outdoor film viewings, too. On Tuesday nights, the library showed films in Penn Village's playground and in other locations. By 1973, when the movie program was in full-wing, it attracted more than 100 people each week. 

I would love to learn more about Reider, and whether any of the people he interacted with were positively impacted over the long term by his efforts. In writing this brief account, I used several reports that MCNPL provided to the State Library, which oversaw Pennsylvania's LSCA grants. I also consulted Reider's monthly reports to Frankenfield, which are retained within MCNPL's administrative office files. I am also beginning to collect news articles from the library's scrapbooks and through online databases (see preliminary list below). But I'd bet there are many fascinating details yet to be uncovered!

Some news coverage of MCNPL's outreach:

• "Feature Story Lady," Times Herald, July 28, 1970
• "Montgomery Library Receives $80,000 Grant," The Reporter, March 29, 1971
• "For Children Only," Times Herald, July 22, 1971
• "Head Start Project Listed at Public Library, Times Herald, July 27, 1971
• "County Library Center Opens in Penn Village, Pottstown Mercury, July 16, 1971
• "Library Here Showing Films at Penn Village, Times Herald, August 4, 1971
• "Once Upon a Summertime ... There Was The Story Lady," Times Herald, August 5, 1971
• "Consho. Library Opens at The Well," Times Herald, November 30, 1971
• "Outreach Program Continues," The Reporter, April 10, 1972
• "County Prison Opens Library," The Reporter, February 8, 1973
• "Montco Library Puts Books Where People Congregate," Inquirer, August 5, 1973