The current Fairmount Heights Branch opened in 1974 after an unusual history including time as a project of the University of Maryland School of Library and Information Services. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.

This article was first published on December 8, 2020. The history of Prince George’s Library System remains an interesting topic and we wanted to share the piece with you again.

In the late 1960s, the town of Fairmount Heights, in central Prince George’s County just outside the District, was the site of an important but controversial experimental library that is still well-known by librarians, but has largely been forgotten about in the county. The pilot program at High John Library was one of the first in the country to tie libraries to services for low-income communities. While its implementation was far from perfect, its goals pioneered a model that exists around the US to this day.

Fairmount Heights gets a new library

In 1948, the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System (PGCMLS) opened its first branch that had not previously existed as a town library in a room in the Town of Fairmount Heights municipal building. The municipality continued to host the branch until 1959, when it was moved to a building rented by the library system. But the branch was closed only two years later, in 1961, due to low patronage, making it the only PGCMLS branch to close until 1987.

In 1967, six years after the original Fairmount Heights Branch closed, a new public library opened in Fairmount Heights. Called the “High John Library” after an African-American folk hero, the branch was a pilot project of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s Office of Education, the University of Maryland’s College of Library and Information Services, and PGCMLS.

The High John Library was intended as an outreach program to provide library services tailored for the under-resourced, low-income, and predominantly Black community in Fairmount Heights. This was a revolutionary idea at the time, as the prevailing orthodoxy among librarians was that librarians were guardians of knowledge who should cater to middle- and upper-middle-class needs and expectations. Services planned included cultural adult services, children’s storytelling and films, measles vaccine outreach, and field trips for children.

Due to difficulties in obtaining funding for the original plan, however, the High John Library was established primarily as a learning laboratory for the University of Maryland’s Master’s in Library Science graduate students, with most of the staffing done by students. The Fairmount Heights community was not consulted before the opening of the library because of the organizers’ belief that residents were tired of “surveys and promises, plans and proposals.” To this day, the project remains the only attempt by a university library science program to operate a public library.

The library, which was located in a rented three-bedroom house, was run loosely and informally, with wooden tokens rather than library cards to check out books, a staff room with no door, picture books scattered in a sandbox-like arrangement instead of shelved, and no traditional cataloguing. It primarily served children and young adults, partly because the project’s organizers felt that population would be more open to a library run by outsiders.

The program was more focused on the library students’ experiences than on the Fairmount Heights community it was intended to serve, and the students’ culture shock limited their effectiveness at providing library services.

In the 1960s, the Washington Post called the High John Library "gaudy" and "hip." Image by The Washington Post’s Panorama, January 9, 1969: G1.

The collapse of the High John project

The High John project only lasted about two years, and its collapse led to bitterness between the library system, the Fairmount Heights community, and the University of Maryland’s School of Library and Information Sciences. The school of library science dean, Paul Wasserman, complained that the project had not reached the truly deprived, but only “the white Negroes — the ones who are after the usual middle class values,” suggesting a rather disturbing and patronizing view of the community the library had served.

On the other hand, a University of Maryland Library and Information Sciences professor who had not been involved in the project, John Colson, published criticisms of the project as planned without community input and based on “criteria developed by liberal, white librarians with only marginal knowledge of the community,” rather than a true collaboration between the librarians and the community they hoped to serve.

After the project collapsed, PGCMLS director Elizabeth Hage sharply criticized the University of Maryland faculty for their conduct on the project. She claimed that when federal grant money was cut off after eighteen months, the university “dropped the project like a hot cake,” leaving the library system to pick up the pieces and find funding to maintain services.

While it seems to have been poorly conceived, the High John Library was popular with Fairmount Heights residents and Hage reported that the project’s collapse led to “bitter disillusionment [in] a community that had grown to regard the branch as a bright spot in an otherwise poverty-ridden and long-neglected area.

Federal funding dried up at the end of 1968 and the University of Maryland abandoned the project. PGCMLS continued to provide library services in the three-bedroom house that had hosted the project for another year, before abandoning the location as inadequate for running a library. A year later, in 1971, it reopened — newly renamed the Fairmount Heights Branch at the request of the local community, and fully integrated with the rest of the library system — in a trailer while today’s building, which was completed in 1974, was under construction.

High John’s legacy and lessons

After the University of Maryland School of Library and Information Sciences abandoned the High John project, it did continue attempts to train librarians to serve low-income, disadvantaged urban communities, this time with stronger and better-articulated social justice goals. The Urban Information Specialist Program that followed the High John project was based on educating librarians to advocate for the communities they served and to help ensure their access to information they needed, while also recognizing patrons as active decision-makers who best understood what their communities needed.

Although the University of Maryland’s High John project only lasted for three years, it had a permanent effect on the library science profession. In the 1960s, librarians largely saw themselves solely as the keepers of books and archives and libraries generally did not have community-driven missions or try to serve as social resource centers. Many professional critics of the project argued that it was inappropriate to educate library students specifically to work in underserved communities and objected to the library’s use of language tailored to the community.

In response to this backlash, students and faculty involved in the project organized a series of protests that pushed the American Library Association to create its Social Responsibilities Roundtable, which still exists today and promotes social responsibility, equity, diversity, and inclusion as core values of librarianship.

In recent years, more and more US libraries have embraced their role as social service providers. Today, libraries serve as a hub for internet access, English as a second language, civic space, career services and literacy. Some serve free meals to children in the summer; others host free legal clinics. In 2018, the Chicago Tribune estimated that more than 30 library systems had social workers on staff.

The High John project seems to have had a positive impact on the development of modern librarianship, and on the approach by the University of Maryland School of Library and Information Sciences (now College of Information Sciences) to educating future librarians to serve disadvantaged communities. However, the project also serves as a lesson in how not to do public outreach work, the need to collaborate with communities in developing services for them, and the need to plan such projects for the long-haul rather than creating and then quickly abandoning them.

Sources

Two articles on the High John Library were published in early 2020. University of Maryland College of Information Sciences news article “The High John Library (1967): Shaping the Future of Libraries as Community Resource Centers,” by Hayleigh Moore (11 February 2020) gives a rather positive description of the project, while the article “Never Forget the High John Experiment,” by Laurier L. Cress (17 June 2020), published in the academic journal Library Journal, is more critical.

I was able to find several contemporaneous reports and papers by the professors who ran the High John Library project:

Three contemporaneous Washington Post articles also provided useful information for this article:

  • “Pr. George’s to Try New Kind of Library,” Washington Post-Times Herald, (19 October 1967).
  • “How Long Will Hip Library Swing,” by Michael Kernan, Washington Post-Times Herald, (9 January 1969).
  • “Group Raps Plan to Shut Library,” Washington Post-Times Herald, (20 January 1970).

The High John library project is also discussed in the library science literature:

Some information on the history of libraries in Fairmount Heights comes from the internal PGCMLS document “History of Prince George’s County Memorial Library System,” which was provided to me by the librarian John M. Krivak from the Hyattsville Branch and by the library system’s public relations department.

This is the third article in a series about the history of the Prince George’s County library system. Read parts 1, 2, 4, and 5.