Thank you, Liz. It's nice to be here. I'll start my talk with a quote.
All of this is so close to my heart that I'm sure if anyone cut me open, they'd find a map inside with rivers and roads for veins.
This was spoken by Anna L Young said at the end of her forty five year career working with maps.
Began her career in an almost lucky way, with a friend recommending she apply for the job.
When she was hired in January of 1917, Young was a typist and general assistant to Leon Dominion and J.R. Wallace,
who were the maths curator and assistant curator of the MAP Department of the American Geographical Society, respectively.
Young's duties at the time included filing sorting maps and other general office jobs.
After six months in employment, she went on a two week vacation in August, only to return as the sole employee of the department,
saying the maths library was left high and dry with only me to look after it.
After a few years in her role as the only maths department employee, she negotiated with the Agius director to be made the curator.
He gave her a yearlong trial period, but she ended up staying in that role for the rest of her working career.
Young earned her job at the end of this nationwide shift of males leaving clerical work and other types of jobs similar to librarians.
Most women entering the workforce at this time fit the mould of white, educated and middle class.
In addition to remaining single to fulfil their professional lives. Young fits into the category of all four of these.
Librarianship as a career for women during this period of the 1910s and 1920s was considered
especially appropriate because they drew on their natural talents of nurturance,
sympathy, domestic management and self-sacrifice, end quote.
One interesting development of the switch from Land Dominion to Young in 1917 was that the map department went from three full time employees to one,
despite Young's eventual triumph in her domain. The Shirley,
the Aegeus and its director did not think that one woman with only six months experience
in this new field could successfully cover the extent of what was at the time,
a very large collection. A likely theory is that the Agius simply did not have the bandwidth to hire for the position.
In 1917, they was hosting the US Commission of Enquiry, a precursor to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace,
which would eventually go to France following World War One.
Her role as the de facto map curator would have her thrown headfirst into the business of map reference and
not even just general reference because experts in their field would be asking her questions about maps.
And Atlas's to fulfil their role for the enquiry.
Young also found herself on the tail end of the transition from gentleman librarian to women being mainly in library roles.
Up until the late 19th century, men's jobs in libraries came through.
What a joint pass it. Historian of librarians described as the virtue of life experience.
Degrees in other fields or through a network of personal contacts.
Most of my librarians had degrees in other fields which qualified them to be library or advanced their focus as librarians.
Up until now had them focussing on their own research.
This notion of the gentleman librarian prevailed throughout the eighteen hundreds and even into the 20th century,
despite the feminisation of the profession. That happened in the 19th centuries, last two decades, with examples like Lee on Dominion.
Curator of the edgiest maths department and predecessor Too Young.
In 1970, 1915 to 1917, visibly Phillips, the first head of the geography and maths division of the Library of Congress from 1897 to 1924,
and Lawrence Martin, the second head of the Geography and Maps Division of the Library of Congress from 1924 to 1946.
The wording of gentleman librarian came from a Janice Monk article regarding the women workers of the ages.
Throughout its history, she used the phrase to describe men who are part of a library without training.
No relevant experience in library science was needed by this type of person.
And by virtue of being men with other advanced degrees, they were awarded jobs in libraries.
In furthering this definition. The gentleman librarian terminology specifically applied to map librarianship.
The gentleman library and four men who had degrees or specialities in other fields and worked by virtue of that experience in maths libraries.
Maths librarian and historian of maths librarianship Walter Restyle term geographer,
a librarian is a similar type of figure to the gentleman librarian.
This employment amongst their field of study allowed these men to work on their personal research
projects with the very materials that they administer to the phenomenon of the gentleman,
librarian may have happened less often in public library spheres and more in archives and special collections, such as a map library.
Since the material lends itself better to a particular area of study and less on circulating a collection for the general public.
The notion of the gentleman librarian in a specialised library setting.
Was it evidenced by a person who was not trained to be a librarian but is an expert in their fields,
which can often be seen from the perspective of historians of cartography?
The people with expertise in this field have detailed knowledge of maps and geography, likely through throughout different areas,
and have the knowledge to teach his material while lacking the information science background to communicate the knowledge.
As the field of map librarianship began to develop in the late eighteen, hundreds, mostly men, were librarians and administrators.
And as time passes, female librarian ships enter the ranks compared to general librarianship.
However, the women of the number of women stays relatively low.
For example, in a young of ages was Walter Rissoles,
mentor for much of the first year of his entrance into maths librarianship, which was 20 years after Young began her career.
His trajectory, his career had a trajectory of advancements, further proving maths.
Labour in was the exception to the rule when it came to the feminisation of the profession.
Specifically in terms of the literature published by mob librarians,
the male author is overwhelmingly more present in the field from eighteen fifty three
to nineteen forty of the ninety three articles written about Mac librarianship.
Sixty eight of the articles were written by men. Four were written by women.
And then eleven came from unknown or anonymous persons. The next batch of articles from 1941 to 1956 introduced two hundred and fifty publications,
one hundred and sixty two of those were written by males, sixty one were written by females, and twenty six came from unknown or anonymous persons.
With 73 percent and 65 percent mail written articles, respectively,
for each batch of articles, map librarianship proved to be a male dominated profession.
Even if the number of female librarians was high, the viewpoint from the viewpoint of general librarianship.
Most of the map librarians were men because of the amount of articles they'd written.
Their voice was stronger in the profession or louder.
In addition to being the authority figures in the fields, reinforcing the narrative of the gentleman librarian that dominated maths ranger.
Young had a unique place following the gentleman librarian era and bridging into the modern map, library and era.
Another historian of.
Matchplay brain chip Walter Bristo stated that the first generation of map librarians, American map librarians, was of necessity, self trained.
The 1930s was a period in which librarianship more generally was becoming more professionalised in 1934.
Gilbert H. Dunn, the author of The Librarian as writer,
he put a call out for librarians to bring more writing into their field so that the field of librarianship could be taken more seriously.
This excluded special library and special libraries like maths, librarianship or archives.
But the thought is there. If you professionalise yourself, then you get more respect for the field.
Based on Young's work documents from the Archives of The Aegeus, she began to establish herself more at this point with more examples of
exhibits that she'd curated and acquisitions that she'd made before that point.
She had mentioned herself in past. In the past tense.
So she wrote a. A little history of herself, and that's where I gotten most of my information about her early career.
And she doesn't actually begin making her own work documents and saving them until the 1930s, the 1940s.
She began to join professional societies like the newly formed Special Libraries Association, the Geography and Maps Division,
the United States involvement until World War Two brought about a 15 to 20 year period of intense
popularity in maps and the increase of scholarship related to maths libraries was astounding.
The United States government and private media made use of maps to a much greater extent than in World War One, as maths librarian Bill Woods argues.
The library community, parallel to the feelings of the United States as a whole,
began to see the respectability of maps as legitimate material for collecting in reference.
Not only are there more maths libraries than ever in the years following World War Two,
but there are more libraries needed guidance from the professionals who have
become pillars in an established but largely unpublished and unrecognised field.
To further help these newly minted maths librarians with their newly acquired Army Map Service and Federal Depository Library Programme maps in 1950.
Library Journal published a special issue entitled Maps in the Library, in which eleven articles were published.
This denoted another milestone for the fields Risto almost refers to at a turning point in his article.
What about maps? Researchers hope that this kind of exposure of the field to the rest of the library science world shines through in his writing.
Additionally, the excitement of all the authors, all the authors show and getting to publish in Library Journal is evident in their writing.
Young, the curator of the maths department at the time,
was the editor for this issue owing to her status as a member of the Special Library Association in New York City Division.
She edited 10 articles and wrote her own contribution entitled These Maps Are Essential,
which instructs a novice maths librarian about which maps Atlas's and MAP series are good foundation for a collection.
Her contributions as an editor and writer in this article series helped to prepare the next generation of map
library and professionals who might be receiving maps without having other important maps in their collections.
This period saw more maths librarians than ever be graduates of Library School,
my master's degree programme, which further proved the legitimacy of this profession.
It also shows the trajectory of the profession as now it would be very hard pressed to find a map library.
Didn't have some sort of advanced degree. Young managed to navigate the waters of the gentleman,
lumbering geopolitics and her workplace and the strange contrast between the strange contrast of being part of a Liberian ship that was not feminised.
Her predecessor, Dominion, and her co-workers with Agius were examples of Gentleman Leverenz.
And somehow they were listed as pillars of the agius. When Young, a forty five year instalment of the society was not in geography,
in the making book, what I Jaquet write about the first hundred years of the Aegeus.
Geopolitics sure work from the beginning with the enquiry and again during World War Two.
She undoubtedly helps with reference services for all kinds of questions of the United States government had for the maps of the collection.
This narrative ends with the older retirement in 1962.
But even after her retirement, she remained an active figure in the Map Labour inch world by consulting on collections internationally.
She also wanted to write her own paper about the history of cartography,
specifically about the work of Lieutenant George Wheeler and his work in the United States west of the 100th Meridian.
She sadly never finished this work as she passed away on December thirty first nineteen seventy one.
Her legacy lives on in the collection, now housed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with the Library of the Aegeus was moved in 1978.
The black dedicated to her, to her in New York City, now hangs at the entrance to the raw materials room in the current location
of the American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin,
Milwaukee. A tribute to the maven of map librarianship. The plaque reads her lovely quote, which I started with.
All of this is so close to my heart that I'm sure if anyone cut me open, they'd find a map inside with rivers and roads for things.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much indeed for that lovely talk, which which opened for us, that whole world of map librarianship, which has been so important,
I found intriguing the fact that you point out that map librarians were maybe to a certain extent
are valued more for their independent scholarship than the service that they provide to readers,
that the way of achieving status and certainly in the early days was not the
normal route that we might think of things we value in a library collection.
And I wonder if you could talk about that element of of service and public helping the
public to use maps as something that that fits in with a sort of expected gender roles.
Well, I think as a recent graduate of the library science programme, like we prioritise access and things like that, information literacy.
And I could definitely see in early documents of my librarians who are men.
It was their all their scholarship was their own research about the maps themselves.
Like a lot of the papers we've seen today would fit into what they would have talked about and less so about like articles about how
to be a maths librarian like we saw in the 1950s with that Library Journal series where all eleven articles were by both genders.
That said, all genders. That said, how to effectively administer your collection, how to get people to see it.
An unhappy is that mesh with the sort of feminisation of the of the profession?
Do you think? I think in a lot of ways it just a.
There were so few people, so few women that were library librarians,
like you'd see a lot of, you know, filer's typist, that kind of thing working in that role.
So I think when the profession opened up to be shifted to be more women, you didn't see it as much with the library, with maths librarianship.
But I do think that that had a big role in why that changed.
Thank you. Well, I think your paper draws us very elegantly to the end of our session today, reminding us as we broadcast from the Bodleian,
reminding us of the importance of map collections in facilitating scholarship and in opening up maps to as wide an audience as possible,
as well as obviously curating and conserving maps.
So but they they can be accessed by future generations.
So thank you very much for for your paper, which brings things very, very nicely to an end.
Thank you so much.