The development of knowledge about management history sometimes is based on a relatively straightforward cache of publications, records, archival collections, contemporaneous media coverage, publications of professional associations, oral history and the preceding academic literature. However, at other times, it faces a problem of the near-absence of original sources, modest secondary sources and only a minor literature. Associated with this kind of obstacle is that sometimes the records existed, such as confirmation that a library’s collection or archive at one time held relevant historiographic materials, but that those records have either disappeared or there is documentation it was destroyed. The purpose of this paper is as a case study of two unique libraries that played a significant role in the history of the emergence and professionalization of American public management in the 20th century. In particular, the collections of the two libraries included materials that libraries sometimes decline to collect and hold, such as pamphlets, brochures, ephemera and other contents assigned to vertical files. These two libraries were the public administration library at the University of Chicago (1932–1995) and the first emergency management library in the USA (1940–1975). The same person was involved in the creation of both libraries. Louis Brownlow, a major leader and theoretician in the professionalization of American public management, was the founder of the library at the University of Chicago. A few years later, President Franklin Roosevelt and Brownlow invented of the term “emergency management” and then created a new federal agency to oversee this particularized form of public management in the run-up to the American role in World War II. The paper will also highlight the contributions of the two women who founded and managed these libraries, but who have been overlooked by library history. Finally, the paper explores the mysterious fate of the two libraries’ collections when they closed.
Mixed methods qualitative research, particularly triangulation of primary sources when available, including archives, professional publications, government records and contemporaneous media coverage. Use of secondary sources to try to fill out missing pieces of the historical narrative.
First, the collections of these libraries, particularly their holdings of ephemera and other nontraditional materials rarely collected by libraries, were unprecedented and probably irreplaceable for historians. Second, they were founded, developed and managed by two women who dedicated large parts of their lives to the libraries. Reflecting the mores of the times, one was unmarried, the other was married but had no children. This paper contributes to ongoing efforts to address the neglect of the role of women in management history and of gender matters, in general. Third, the fate of the libraries’ collections when they closed remains a mystery.
The difficulty of resolving management history mysteries. Incomplete records required an indirect strategy of identifying secondary and ancillary sources that a management historian would often not use when primary sources were sufficient. This indirect approach required unorthodox efforts to fill in the historical narrative to the fullest possible extent, no matter how incomplete it may still have been. Something is always better than nothing.
The record of two seminal public management libraries that provided the informational and research resources underpinning the rise of public and emergency management, their overlooked female managers and the search for the libraries’ collections.
