Ball State University's Center for Middletown Studies has initiated a major effort to document reading habits and library usage in middle America during the 1890s and first years of the twentieth century. Through a stroke of good fortune, Frank Felsenstein, Reed D. Voran Professor of the Humanities at Ball State, uncovered a unique cache of surviving library records that document the books each borrower took from the local public library in Muncie, Indiana—the city featured in the famed "Middletown" sociological studies—for a period of approximately ten years. Historians of print culture in the U.S. have long sought this sort of evidence of reading behavior among ordinary people. The Center for Middletown Studies is completeing the labor-intensive process of creating a database that will permit scholars to conduct a wide range of inquiries into the print culture of turn-of-the-century America.
This extraordinarily rich body of materials provides an opportunity to explore the sociology and cultural history of the book in the United States in unmatched depth. The ledgers provide information about who used the library and what books they checked out between 1891 and 1902, an era famously described by Holbrook Jackson as one that experienced "a quickening of life" that made it seem to "be something more than a coincidence that placed this decade at the close of a century." Drawing on census manuscripts and city directories as well as library records, our researchers have begun to create a digital database that allows scholars to explore the social history of reading. Christine Pawley, the author of the only comparable study in the U.S., has noted the "tremendous potential for extracting detailed empirical answers to many of the questions being posed by historians of the book" offered by these sorts of records. Pawley's study of the Osage (Iowa) Public Library was based on a much less complete set of records that were one tenth the size of those found in Muncie. Our project includes over 6,000 patrons, 13,000 books, and 400,000 transactions. That these records have been discovered in "Middletown," long considered a representative American community, makes them even more attractive. The Center for Middletown Studies, which has sponsored or supported a number of major research projects and public programs, will make the "What Middletown Read" database fully accessible to interested researchers, whether members of the scholarly community or the general public. The database will become a valuable addition to the burgeoning field of print culture history.
We have already begun the process of creating the database. During the 2004-2005 academic year, Felsenstein and James Connolly, Director of the Center for Middletown Studies, along with two graduate-student researchers, compiled complete records for three one-week periods. These included the names of all borrowers, their social profiles (class, race, age, sex, etc.), the books they checked out, and the characteristics of these books (fiction, non-fiction, etc.) We used this pilot database to create a versatile data entry program with the assistance of Ball State's University Computing Services staff that has helped us accelerate the data collection process. With the support of internal and external grants we have employed several additional student researchers and begun compiling the social profiles of borrowers, and classifying books in the library catalog. The Muncie Public Library, which owns the records, has also supported the project and has allowed Ball State to digitize the records to preserve them and make them easier to use. The Center plans to complete the database by 2009.
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