Black’s new book, Libraries of Light, published by Routledge

Libraries of Light book
Alistair Black
Alistair Black, Professor Emeritus

Professor Alistair Black’s latest book, Libraries of Light: British Public Library Design in the Long 1960s, is now available from Routledge.

Description: For the first hundred years or so of their history, public libraries in Britain were built in an array of revivalist architectural styles. This backward-looking tradition was decisively broken in the 1960s as many new libraries were erected up and down the country.

In this new book, Black argues that the architectural modernism of the post-war years was symptomatic of the age’s spirit of renewal. In the 1960s, public libraries truly became ‘libraries of light,’ and Black further explains how this phrase not only describes the shining new library designs—with their open-plan, decluttered, Scandinavian-inspired designs—but also serves as a metaphor for the public library’s role as a beacon of social egalitarianism and cultural universalism.

A sequel to Books, Buildings and Social Engineering (2009), this new book takes his fascinating story of the design of British public libraries into the era of architectural modernism.

Libraries of Light foregrounds the social determination of technology. “More interesting and challenging than the identification of the social effects of technology,” said Black, “is the examination of the ways in which technology is shaped by society, by its ideologies, aspirations, and trends. The technology that is the library building is no different in this regard, historically and now.”

A full professor in the iSchool since 2009, Black is currently researching the history of the British War Office Intelligence Division, 1873-1914; the design of the new British Library in the context of the 1960s "Two Cultures" debate; and the early public library movement in Britain in the context of attitudes to state intervention. He is the author of several books, including A New History of the English Public Library (1996) and The Public Library in Britain 1914-2000 (2000). He is coauthor of Understanding Community Librarianship (1997); The Early Information Society in Britain, 1900-1960 (2007); and Books, Buildings and Social Engineering (2009). With Peter Hoare, he is co-editor of Volume 3 (covering 1850-2000) of the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (2006). He currently serves as the general editor of the journal Library Trends.

Tags:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Faculty receive support for AI-related projects from new pilot program

Associate Professor Yun Huang, Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma, and Assistant Professor Haohan Wang have received computing resources from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a two-year pilot program led by the National Science Foundation in partnership with other federal agencies and nongovernmental partners. The goal of the pilot is to support AI-related research with particular emphasis on societal challenges. Last month, awardees presented their research at the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting.

iSchool participation in iConference 2025

The following iSchool faculty and students will participate in iConference 2025, which will be held virtually from March 11-14 and physically from March 18-22 in Bloomington, Indiana. The theme of this year's conference is "Living in an AI-gorithmic world."

Carboni joins the iSchool faculty

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Nicola Carboni has joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He previously served as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in digital humanities at the University of Geneva.

Nicola Carboni

Youth-AI-Safety named a winning team in international hackathon

A team of researchers from the SALT (Social Computing Systems) Lab has been selected as a winner in an international hackathon hosted by the Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence. The LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon brought together over 3,000 students, researchers, and practitioners from 127 countries to build and showcase innovative work in large language model (LLM) agents, grow the AI agent community, and advance LLM agent technology.

Chan to present "Predatory Data" work at named lectures

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan will present research drawn from her new book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, at two named lectures this month. The lectures, which celebrate Women's History Month, will be held at the University of Minnesota and Carnegie Mellon University.

Anita Say Chan