The Vespiary Book Binding & Book Conservation

Here in Montana, you can still easily imagine the wildness that was the West during the 1800’s.  Something about the colors of the landscape, or the vast spaces between towns.  It’s intriguing to think that librarians were coming out here at that time as well - resourceful, passionate women with a love for adventure and a missionary attitude towards education and access to knowledge.

Recently, the Chicago Tribune alerted us to a new short video featuring an interview with Betsy Hearne, University of Illinois at Urbana library school professor, about these brave women.  The title of the video is called, “Illinois Innovators: The Women Who Went West.”  Based off of a doctoral dissertation done by Liz Cardman called, “Interior Landscapes: Personal Perspectives on Professional Lives: The First Generation of Librarians at the Illinois Library School, 1893-1907,” Hearne relates brief snippets of some of the lives of these pioneering librarians sent out from the University of Illinois by Dean Katharine Sharp (who has a wicked sounding biography called The Power and the Dignity; Librarianship and Katharine Sharp).

I’ve posted the video here, but you can also view it in situ at the UI “Here & Now” page.

*The photo at the top of the post is Cornelia Marvin, first Oregon State Librarian.