Academic Library Reform and the Ideal of the Librarian in England, France, and Germany in the Long Nineteenth Century

In Western Europe in the late eighteenth century, complaints were rife about the disorganization of libraries and the character of their librarians. Not only from the perspective of library users, but also from within librarians’ own ranks, the sentiment became more widespread that librarians should strive to be more industrious and effective, and that libraries should aim to be better organized in order to promote use and access. The strong ‘public service’ orientation to nineteenth-century European library theory lay at the heart of the major practical or ‘technical’ innovations — notably in the fields of classification and cataloguing — which transformed librarianship into a profession towards the end of the century.

This article aims to explore the impact of these innovations on the role and image of the librarian in the nineteenth century, with particular reference to academic libraries and librarians in England, France, and Germany. It is suggested that as a characteristic set of ‘librarianly’ virtues — prime among these being love of order, conscientiousness, selflessness, and the willingness to serve — rose to pre-eminence against the background of technical innovations in the field (and also, incidentally, as a reaction against the ‘scholar librarians’ of an earlier era), the seeds were sown of a crisis in the librarian’s professional image and self-image with implications which may even reach into the present.