In a time when library schools were all but nonexistent, Alice Jordan embraced incoming youth services librarians and championed youth patron services.
The Boston Public Library defined children as ages twelve to fourteen and considered them a nuisance, interfering with library services for adults. There were no books for children nor a way for them to browse adult titles; until 1895, children had to fill out call slips for staff to retrieve adult books from closed stacks.
The West End Branch opened in 1896 and was the first BPL location to hire a dedicated staff member to work specifically with children. Luella Leavitt’s first assignment was to create a catalog of children’s book titles used at the West End Branch and the Central Library. Trustees attempted to shape tastes by having the library purchase books that the public did not want to read instead of purchasing popular fiction because children “are likely to read fiction to an injurious extent.” Staff criticized children for dirtying books, and children stole books because they were under the age of 12, which was the minimum age to receive a BPL card. In 1900, after 400 books went missing from the Children’s Room, it was proposed that BPL staff should act as bouncers, stationed at doors to determine if children had stolen any books.
In 1902, Alice Jordan was recommended to be the next Custodian of the Children’s Room at the Central Library because she was a high school graduate with teaching experience. Jordan took a crash course in children’s librarianship by touring children’s departments in Newark, Providence, and Springfield public libraries as well as the Pratt Institute. This was Jordan’s first experience networking with other children’s librarians. Anne Carroll Moore was in charge of children’s services at Pratt and later became the first children’s librarian at the New York Public Library; she and Jordan became lifelong friends and professional peers.
Jordan plunged into her new role, serving the children of Boston “full of schemes for the enlightenment of youth.” She attended ALA conferences, making connections and discussing collaboration with schools, non-profits, and other librarians.
Six months in, Jordan booked the BPL’s first Story Time; 500 or 600 children and 50 adults filled the BPL’s lecture hall, and journalists were present to document the event. Trustees were skeptical, insisting that the library’s mission was not to amuse the public. Jordan justified the program as a way to introduce children to the library. Three years later, Story Times were offered regularly, including programs held at the Brighton Branch and the South End Branch. By 1911, Story Times took place throughout the library system as a way to support literacy and academic work.
Jordan had significant influence on children’s librarianship by working closely with librarians across New England and beyond, attending American Library Association conferences and advocating for funding for youth services in libraries. In 1906, Jordan launched a new initiative, known as the Round Table. Librarians from communities surrounding Boston attended meetings and discussed broad and narrow topics, including promotion of library events, school connections, and policies around fines and age limits. By 1943, over 100 librarians from all over New England were attending the Round Tables.
Jordan began to devote time to recruiting and training, taking on interns and teaching at Simmons College, where she taught from 1911 to 1922. She lectured at other schools, influencing students to study library science.
In 1919, Jordan took advantage of some changes in borrowers’ cards to allow children under the age of ten admitted as cardholders; prior to this, underage children had to sit outside of the library with a policeman while their older siblings used the library. Jordan advocated for younger patrons, saying that if they could read and write their name, they could be issued a card. Circulation soared after the under-ten crowd was invited in, and Jordan requested that a collection be created for branches and the Central Library. Twelve out of fourteen branches had children’s rooms separate from the rest of the library at this point.
By 1922, Jordan was struggling with health issues and stopped teaching at Simmons College; she also missed out on the Round Table and the 1922 ALA conference, where the first Newbery medal was awarded by the Children’s’ Librarians Section.
After 1922, the BPL parted ways with Simmons and launched their own training school; no tuition was charged, and training was offered to existing library staff as well as applicants who wished to be employed by the library. These external applicants needed to be either high school or college graduates between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, with preference given to Boston residents. If appointed to a library position after training, they were asked to remain at the BPL for at least two years.
By 1936, children’s librarians at the BPL were required to be high school graduates and to have completed a college course. Candidates who had attended library school needed five years of library experience, including three at the BPL and at least two in a children’s room. Personal qualifications included good health, pleasing voice and manner, poise, tact, good judgment, sympathy with children, sincerity. There was concern that these requirements were setting the bar too high, but Jordan persisted. These standards impacted how people would see the value of children’s librarianship. Children were eager for library access and would mob branches with up to 600 children visiting in a day.
Jordan was collegial with her staff of children’s librarians, asking for their input on literature, inviting them in groups for tea, launching book selection meetings, and setting up a system-wide summer reading club in 1935. Around this time, Jordan advocated for schools to have their own libraries, which resulted in sub-branches opening in Boston Public School locations. Students were checking out 500 books a week with this improved access to library materials, and reading scores were rising dramatically at the schools that housed these sub-branches. Jordan was overjoyed by these results and wanted to expand outreach to include high schoolers, disabled children, and children living in orphanages; unfortunately, the sub-branches were plagued with theft and destruction of materials, and this misuse resulted in a dissolution of the BPL’s presence in the schools.
Jordan faced mandatory retirement from BPL in 1940 but continued her robust work with children’s literature including a ten-year period of reviewing books for The Horn Book. Jordan wrote a book titled From Rollo to Tom Sawyer and Other Papers that was published in 1948; it was comprised of an essay read at the 40th Anniversary Meeting of the Round Table of Children's Librarians of New England at Swampscott, Massachusetts and essays that had appeared in The Horn Book Magazine.
Alice Jordan died in her sleep in May of 1960. In 1967, the Alice M. Jordan Research Collection of Children’s Literature was founded in her memory with a donation of $1000 from the Boston Chapter of the Women’s National Bank Association. The goal was to “provide for research a comprehensive worldwide selection of children’s literature.” In the early 1970s, historic materials withdrawn from the circulating collection at the BPL were added along with gifts from other libraries.
The number of items in the Jordan Collection reported in 2002 was 157,000. 74,623 of these are digitized on the Internet Archive. The Jordan Collection is comprised of several smaller collections:
- Paul and Ethel Heins Collection – 4,500 children’s books, conference programs, artwork, memorabilia, periodicals, and sound records.
- Eileen Kneeland Collection – more than 200 titles and storytelling videotapes from Lady of the Bookshelf, which aired on WBZ-TV from 1951 to 1956.
- NCTE Award for Poetry for Children Collection – 1977-1982, 106 titles
- New England Round Table of Children’s Librarians – correspondence, membership rosters, program flyers, bibliographies, oral histories, videotapes, memorabilia, and photographs.
- Jordan Reference Collection – national and international works on authors and illustrators, histories of children’s literature, dictionaries, surveys, bibliographies, and indexes
Guidelines for accessing The Jordan Collection include:
- Research Library catalog on microfiche
- On-line Research Library catalog (1974-)
- Titles cataloged since 1980 are on the OCLC system Guidelines
- Items do not circulate and are housed off-site, requiring at least 24 hours for retrieval.
- Items must be viewed in Rare Books.
- No photocopying without permission – not all items may be photocopied.
- Credit the Collection when referencing items consulted for publication.
To learn more about the legacy of Alice M. Jordan, check out this book — which helped inform this blog post — from the Boston Public Library:
The Education of Alice M. Jordan
Alice M. Jordan Research Collection of Children's Literature Mission Statement (2022):
A relevant resource for researchers, educators, students, and librarians, the Alice M. Jordan Research Collection of Children’s Literature is a comprehensive research collection that highlights diversity, cultural importance, historical significance and fosters passion for children’s literature. Books added to the Jordan Collection should be titles that impacted the field of publishing and children’s literature, titles that are distinctive in their representation of race and gender roles, and titles that will show the growth that the field of children’s publishing has experienced on its path toward equitable representation in both the characters depicted and the authors and illustrators who created the work. With priority given to publications by BIPOC authors and illustrators, the Jordan Collection strives to include marginalized voices that have been historically shut out of children’s publishing. The Jordan Collection endeavors to reflect the citizens of the City of Boston by focusing on meaningful representation in research materials. A celebration of literary excellence and its ability to impact the lives of children, the Jordan Collection is a unique treasury of both literary and popular literature for youth.
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