Community Libraries

Connecting Readers in the Atlantic World, c.1650-c.1850 University of Liverpool academics secured an £800K AHRC grant to create an open access, digital reconstruction of Enlightenment culture, by studying which books were most frequently borrowed from libraries during the period. Until now, scholars researching the influence of ideas on significant... historical events between 1731 and 1800 such as the French or American Revolutions would look to the major philosophical texts written at the time. But this project, entitled Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic, led by the Universitys Professor Mark Towsey , will seek to construct a database allowing users to pinpoint which books were borrowed most frequently, who borrowed them and which tomes rarely left the library shelves; effectively revealing what was read, where, by whom and to what effect. Professor Mark Towsey, from the Department of History , said: We expect that this data will have a transformative effect on how scholars from a very wide range of disciplines study the circulation and reception of 18th-century texts. It will allow the project team and subsequent users of the database to map in unprecedented detail the dissemination of texts in literature, political science, economics, philosophy and history, including the impact of radical new ideas associated with the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions. The project working with nine library partners in the UK, USA and Australia will focus on the role played by voluntary subscription libraries, of which there were around 350 across Atlantic bordering countries by the turn of the 19th Century. A precursor of the modern public library, unregulated subscription libraries grew as a means of providing access to expensive books that were beyond financial reach through individual purchase. The very first formal subscription library was the Library Company of Philadelphia , founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin and a group of like-minded artisans. Professor ...Read More