John Y. Cole | |
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| Born | July 30, 1940 |
| Education | |
| Occupation(s) | Director of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, 1977-2016. Historian of the Library of Congress (2016-2021) |
John Y. Cole (born July 30, 1940) is an American librarian, historian, and author. He was the founding director of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress and in 2016 became the first official historian of the Library of Congress.
John Young Cole was born in Ellensburg, Washington, July 30, 1940. [1] [2] [3] He graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1962, going on to earn a Master of Library Science degree from the University of Washington School of Librarianship the following year. [4] He later earned a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and a Ph.D. from George Washington University in American civilization in 1971. [4]
From 1946 to 1966, Cole was chief of the library branch of the U.S. Army Intelligence School, stocking the library's collection on foreign intelligence from books in the Library of Congress surplus books program. [5]
Cole was hired at the Library of Congress in 1966 as an administrative assistant. [6] He also worked in the Library's Congressional Research Service and in the Reference Department as a collection development librarian. [6] He researched and wrote articles on the history of the library, focusing his Ph. D. dissertation on Ainsworth Rand Spofford, the nineteenth century Librarian of Congress who expanded the library from a small reference collection to a national institution. [5]
Cole's knowledge about the history of the organization led to his role on a yearlong planning task force initiated by Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin. [7] [5] Boorstin recommended Cole to lead the new Center for the Book, created in 1977 to use the resources of the Library of Congress to promote literacy and reading. [5]
Cole served as the executive director for the Center of the Book from 1977 to 2016. [5] [6] He worked with Laura Bush and James H. Billington to launch the National Book Festival in 2001. [8] He opened the Young Readers Center to encourage reading by young people, and created the Library of Congress Literacy Awards, providing recognition and financial prizes for organizations that promote increased literacy. [5] The role that John Cole played in promoting the study of the history of the book is documented in the essay, “The Center for the Book and the History of the Book.” [9]
In 2016, Cole was named the first Historian of the Library of Congress. [10] The position is dedicated to research and documentation of the history of the Library of Congress. [10]
Cole has received many awards, notably the first "Champion for Literacy" award, presented by the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy in 2016, [11] and the 2000 Joseph W. Lippincott Award, presented by the American Library Association for distinguished service to librarianship. [12] The Lippincott Award statement praised Cole for having "exposed the American people to the power of the written word through dozens of national reading and library promotion projects including the landmark Read More About It series on CBS Television." [12]
Since 2003 Cole and his wife, Director of the Smithsonian Libraries Nancy E. Gwinn, have maintained endowments to support the internships of library and information science students at the Smithsonian Libraries and at the University of Michigan School of Information. [13] [14] They also fund an endowment for supporting the operations of the technical services of the University of Wyoming Libraries. [15]
The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world.
Daniel Joseph Boorstin was an American historian at the University of Chicago who wrote on many topics in American and world history. He was appointed the twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress in 1975 and served until 1987. He was instrumental in the creation of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress.
The US Library of Congress Center for the Book was founded in 1977 by Daniel J. Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress, to promote literacy, libraries, and reading and an understanding of the history and heritage of American literature. The Center for the Book is mainly supported by tax-deductible donations.
James Hadley Billington was an American academic and author who taught history at Harvard and Princeton before serving for 42 years as CEO of four federal cultural institutions. He served as the 13th Librarian of Congress after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, and his appointment was approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate. He retired as Librarian on September 30, 2015.
John Russell Young was an American journalist, author, diplomat, and the seventh Librarian of the United States Congress from 1897 to 1899. He was invited by Ulysses S. Grant to accompany him on a world tour for purposes of recording the two-year journey, which he published in a two-volume work.
A law library is a special library used by law students, lawyers, judges and their law clerks, historians, and other scholars of legal history in order to research the law. Law libraries are also used by people who draft or advocate for new laws, e.g. legislators and others who work in state government, local government, and legislative counsel offices or the U.S. Office of Law Revision Counsel and lobbying professionals. Self-represented, or pro se, litigants also use law libraries.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to library and information science:
Wayne August Wiegand is an American library historian, author, and academic. Wiegand retired as F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies and Professor of American Studies at Florida State University in 2010.
Dorothy Louise Porter Wesley was a librarian, bibliographer and curator, who built the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University into a world-class research collection. She was the first African American to receive a library science degree from Columbia University. Porter published numerous bibliographies on African American history. When she realized that the Dewey Decimal System had only two classification numbers for African Americans, one for slavery and one for colonization, she created a new classification system that ordered books by genre and author.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an independent agency of the United States federal government established in 1996. It is the main source of federal support for libraries and museums within the United States, having the mission to advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development.” In fiscal year 2023, IMLS had a budget of $313.58 million. As of 2023, IMLS currently has 70 full-time employees, many of whom still work remotely. In 2022, the employees voted to unionize, joining hundreds of thousands of federal workers who have joined the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) to “build power and have a voice at work.”
Robert Wedgeworth is an American librarian who was the founding President of ProLiteracy Worldwide, an adult literacy organization. He is also a former executive director of the American Library Association, served as president of IFLA, served as Dean of the School of Library Service at Columbia University, and was university librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has also authored and edited several major reference works, and has won many awards over the course of his career. In 2021 the American Library Association awarded him Honorary Membership, its highest award.
Camila Alire is an American librarian and was president of the American Library Association from 2009 to 2010. She was the first Hispanic president of the ALA. She was previously the president of REFORMA, National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-speaking, in 1993-1994.
Aliteracy is the state of being able to read but being uninterested in doing so. This phenomenon has been reported on as a problem occurring separately from illiteracy, which is more common in the developing world, while aliteracy is primarily a problem in the developed world. In 2002, John Ramsey defined aliteracy as a loss of a reading habit usually since reading is slow and frustrating for the reader.
The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C. that serves as the library and research service of the U.S. Congress and the de facto national library of the United States. Founded in 1800, it is the United States' oldest federal cultural institution. The library is housed in three elaborate buildings on Capitol Hill, with a conservation center in Culpeper, Virginia. The library's functions are overseen by the Librarian of Congress, and its buildings are maintained by the Architect of the Capitol. The Library of Congress is one of the largest libraries in the world. Its collections contain approximately 173 million items, and it has more than 3,000 employees. Its collections are "universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundary, and include research materials from all parts of the world and in more than 470 languages".
Carla Diane Hayden is an American librarian who is serving as the 14th librarian of Congress. Since the creation of the office of the librarian of Congress in 1802, Hayden is both the first African American and the first woman to hold this post. Appointed in 2016, she is the first professional librarian to hold the post since 1974.
The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) formed in 1991 in the United States on the initiative of scholars Jonathan Rose, Simon Eliot, and others.
Flora Belle Ludington was an American librarian and author. Ludington served as the head librarian for Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, from 1938 until 1964.
Nancy E. Gwinn was an American librarian and administrator. She was the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, the world's largest museum library system, from 1997 until her retirement in 2020. Gwinn died on April 29, 2024, at the age of 78.
Mary Niles Maack was an American librarian and scholar known for her work on comparative librarianship and the history of the book.
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