In the Service/Surveillance of the UCLA School of Library Service

Using the historical beginnings of University of California, Los Angeles School of Library Service, this article will show how self-surveillance and racializing surveillance were enacted under the guise of professionalization through higher education institutions. Bringing Simone Browne’s concept of racializing surveillance into the history of library education, this article argues that whiteness was preserved in professionalization, supporting a white supremacist system, amid concerns about status and value in white institutions during the 1960s. The story of the origins of the UCLA School of Library Service, including Lawrence Clark Powell’s influence in its formation, curriculum, courses, and administrators, as well as students such as Marion K. Cobb and Helen Amestoy, reveals how graduate-school education had intentions that delineated who was a professional and who was not. That is, the professionalization of librarianship enacted a type of racialized self-surveillance technology on library students, limiting the past and present possibilities of librarianship.