Traces the early origins of Soviet education for librarianship in the early 20th century.

This paper seeks to understand the interaction between library knowledge organization practices and the social role of public libraries through an examination of the development of the Dewey Decimal and Soviet Library-Bibliographic classifications. I show that in spite of significant differences in the ideologies motivating the ontological design of the classifications themselves, the methods and motivations behind creating these classifications were very similar, whether the location was late nineteenth century America or early twentieth century Soviet Russia. Both classifications are highly instructive as snapshots of thinking contemporary to their creation, and in the Soviet Union, library classification was construed as one more layer in the process of information control and indoctrination in Marxism-Leninism. As products of a modern (as opposed to postmodern) intellectual climate, the overall tendency of these classifications to serve as a public common ground, a set of generally accepted knowledge principles, makes sense, however misguided any particular set of principles might have been. Today’s society, however, no longer wants or needs the kinds of unifying narrative that public library classifications speak to, raising questions as to how appropriate these modern classifications are for a postmodern world whose priorities have shifted radically in the last thirty years.

A guide for researchers planning to undertake work in archives and libraries in the former Soviet Union, principally in Russia or Ukraine. Loads of practical information for each institution from people who've worked in them recently.

Regrettably, the name Harriet G. Eddy is not well known in the profession of librarianship today. No entry for her can be found in the Dictionary of American Library Biography or in any of its supplements or even in the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science; furthermore, one will find nothing in Cannon’s Bibliography of Library Economy. For that matter, no one seems to have written a doctoral dissertation on her pioneering work nor is there any entry in Library Literature for analytical articles about her, much less book-length monographs about her contributions, despite the fact that a rich resource exists in the California State Library and at the California State Archives. Notably, too, Eddy is not on the list of the 100 most influential librarians of the twentieth century either; and, there is barely mention of her in the secondary literature.