Video shows UI librarians' quest to settle the West in 1908
By Christine Des Garennes
Sunday November 23, 2008
John Dixon
Lisa Renee Kemplin, senior library specialist at the University of Illinois, looks through Ida Kidder's 1908 letter from Salem, Ore., at the Archives Research Center in Urbana. The letter and other documents catalog UI librarians' trips to the West 100 years ago.
A timid, hair-wrapped-in-a-bun, pince-nez-wearing spinster.
Is that the image you have of a librarian from 100 years ago?
Try this one on instead:
Gun-toting, horseback-riding, walk-2-miles-to-work-in-a-blizzard type of woman.
Those were the kind of librarians who settled the West.
Around the turn of the 20th century, graduates of the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science (then called the Illinois Library School) headed to places like Texas, North Dakota, Idaho and Oregon.
Mission: to bring culture to the West.
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