2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

During the early 1940s, engineering librarians in the United States organized professional communities within the Association of College and Reference Libraries (ACRL) and the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education (SPEE), which in 1946 was renamed the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE).[1] After the war, the librarian communities in ACRL and ASEE grew quickly, fostering professional development, networking, information sharing, research, and advocacy. This paper seeks a deeper understanding of the engineering librarian community in the 1940s through the analysis of data compiled from the Directory of College Engineering Library Personnel, published in 1949 by the Engineering School Libraries Section of ACRL[2] and supplemented by data from other sources[3]. The Directory is a rich source of data that includes details such as position titles, degrees earned, career histories, professional memberships, and lists of publications. Biographical sketches of individual engineering librarians are also provided. The emergence of an engineering librarian community is discussed in the context of broader developments in librarian education and the engineering profession in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1948, ALA passed a resolution calling for librarian education at the graduate level only; new accreditation standards were implemented in 1951. Only three engineering librarians in the Directory had an MLIS. In the 1940s, engineering was almost exclusively male. Only a handful of women studied engineering and fewer served as faculty at engineering schools.[4] Librarianship, on the other hand, was a female dominated profession. Nearly 80 percent of engineering librarians in the Directory were women. In comparison, 99.2 percent of engineering faculty and 76.6 percent of library administrators in the Directory were men. Although some engineering librarians, mainly men, had backgrounds in science or engineering, most had earned degrees in the liberal arts or education. Increasing professionalization and specialization among librarians increased the pressure to recognize them as academic staff on par with faculty. In 1944, the University of Illinois was one of the first universities to do so. The Directory of College Engineering Library Personnel is a unique snapshot of the engineering librarian community in transition.
References
[1] M. J. White, "The History of the Engineering Libraries Division, Part 1 - 1893-1960," presented at the 2016 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference, New Orleans, 2016. https://peer.asee.org/26170
[2] Directory Committee, Engineering School Libraries Section, Directory of College Engineering Library Personnel. Chicago: Association of College and Reference Libraries, 1949. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001646029.
[3] D. E. Cole, ed., Who’s Who in Library Service: A Biographical Directory of Professional Librarians in the United States and Canada, 3rd ed. New York: Grolier, 1955. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001164207
[4] A. S. Bix, Girls Coming to Tech!: A History of American Engineering Education for Women. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.