The 1853 Conference

Prior to the foundation of the American Library Association in 1876, librarians and booksellers organized a convention to establish annual meetings and a permanent professional organization. In 1853, a conference of eighty-two attendees was produced by the work of at least five organizers: Charles Coffin Jewett (librarian at the Smithsonian Institution); Charles Benjamin Norton (bookseller and publisher); Seth Hastings Grant (librarian at New York Mercantile Library); Reuben Aldridge Guile (librarian at Brown University); and Daniel Coit Gilman (assistant librarian at Yale). [1]

Beginning in the summer of 1852, a series of irregular Norton’s Gazette editorials proposed and developed an audience for a library conference. By the following spring, a location was determined and a call for participants was made. Then in the early summer of 1853, only one year later, a September date was set for the 1853 Conference. Norton’s Gazette editorials can be read below.

Formal calls for a library conference included the names of prominent librarians who agreed to endorse and to attend the conference. These professional endorsements assured interested conference attendees that the conference was a legitimate event and that attendance was beneficial. In the middle nineteenth century, conference transportation required a significant amount of time and money than conferences of today. Two calls can be read below.

On September 18, 1853, 82 people attended the convention in New York and Jewett was elected president of the group. Other prominent librarians discussed their experiences and work with other interested librarians. Two prominent examples include:

The 1853 Convention Proceedings were published in the October 15, 1853 Norton’s Literary Gazette and Publisher’s Circular and in Norton’s Literary and Education Register for 1854. Later, in 1915, it was reprinted by The Torch Press of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

 

In the Archives: the 1853 Convention of Librarians

 

[1] Utley, George Burwell, The Librarians’ Conference of 1853, Chicago: American Library Association, 1951. Mr. Utley proposes that Mr. Norton gave the idea to Mr. Grant and Mr. Gilman who became the early convention promoters who contacted Mr. Jewett and Mr. Guild.