The Sixteenth International Conference on Books, Publishing & Libraries

Abstract

In the digital age, technological change and evolving scholarly practices have transformed the ways in which university faculty communicate their work. Such a revolution, however, is not new. In the nineteenth-century United States, the need to create and to disseminate scholarship was just beginning to develop and evolve into the modern scholarly communication system. American scholars had long placed a strong emphasis on “practical” knowledge of use to industry, and in the nineteenth century, tied their own identities to professional middle-class scientific societies. By analyzing the socio-historical reasons for professionalization in the United States, particularly the creation of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Chemical Society (ACS), two of the earliest professional scientific societies, and by performing textual analysis of nineteenth-century American journals, such as the “American Journal of Science and the Journal,” of the American Chemical Society, it becomes clear that American scientific scholarship was created as a professional activity tied to the market needs of a growing industrial economy. The question is, should scholarship remain the same in a changing social world?