Mutual Improvement and Library Activity: Overviewing the Evidence

This study focuses on mutual improvement, an early lifelong and social learning ideology, which originated in the late seventeenth century and survived in various forms into the early twentieth century. It embodied the idea that people learn more as part of a group and this also brings benefits to society at large. The study relates mutual improvement to subscription library activity and considers mainly the eighteenth century, when the concept was most actively applied to library activity. Mutual improvement was first linked to subscription library activity in Philadelphia in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin and first appears, and in a highly developed form, in the rules of the Leadhills Reading Society, founded in 1741 (the rules date to 1743). The concept was subsequently applied to other subscription libraries in Scotland and was widely discussed. Mutual improvement survived into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but was challenged by utilitarianism and fell into decline. Research into the subject has been complicated by its increasing variety in the nineteenth century and the varying interpretations which have been put on the concept by different types of historian.