Access and Utility: John Cotton Dana and the Antecedents of Information Science, 1889-1929

During John Cotton Dana's forty-year career as librarian, fundamental changes occurred in librarianship that helped lay the groundwork for information science. Two of those changes, greatly increased access to sources and a utility-driven broadening of the range of materials collected, owed much to Dana. This article posits that librarianship, information science, and related fields were involved in an evolutionary process in which a practical approach to information and its use supplanted an elitist ideology of culture.