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This case study situates an early text-to-speech computer developed for blind persons, the Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM), within a broader history of speech synthesis technologies. Though typically no more than a footnote in the technical history of speech synthesis, the KRM was still a powerful symbol of innovation that reveals how disability can be used as a pretext for funding technology development. I argue that various boosters held the KRM up as a symbol of technological solutionism that promised to fully enroll blind people into the US political economy. However, the success of the KRM as a symbol belies its technical flaws, the federal subsidies needed to bring it to fruition, and the structural barriers to its use that were elided by its Utopian promise. KEYWORDS: text to speech, speech synthesis, reading machines, assistive technologies, IN EARLY 1976 WALTER CRONKITE DEFERRED HIS USUAL sign-off on the CBS Evening News to a new text-tospeech computer system, the Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM), named for its twenty-seven-year-old inventor, [...]

ABSTRACT The John Cage Collection at Northwestern University is an extensive archive of manuscripts, correspondence, and other original materials documenting Cage's music, life, and ideas. Established in the early 1970s [...]

ABSTRACT Several years ago, Rutgers University's Special Collections and University Archives was given a checkbox containing fifty-six postcards advertising country and western music shows at venues around New Jersey. The [...]

The centennial anniversaries of the passage of the 19th Amendment (100 years in 2019) and the ratification of the amendment (100 years in 2020) will be a time of celebration. [...]

Privately owned by the Macao Chamber of Commerce, the Octagonal Pavilion Library was the first free Chinese library service as well as the most used Chinese public library in Macao [...]

Corporate libraries of the kind we would recognize today began to appear around the turn of the twentieth century. They were a response to a rapidly changing corporate and commercial [...]

The Huddersfield Female Educational Institute claimed to be the first in England established for working-class women. It had close ties to the men's Mechanics' Institute, and its origins lie in [...]

A majority, of the pioneer settlers of Kansas migrated from cities in the eastern United States. A profound hardship to the newcomers was the lack of books. Women's clubs quickly [...]

After World War I, the library of the University of North Carolina developed into a research library serving a modern university. The dedication of a new library building in October [...]

Oklahoma in the 1930s dealt with severe depression and drought, both of which affected the development of the state's public libraries. While the libraries experienced growth at the beginning of [...]

The chronology below provides an overview of John Y. Cole's career and includes institutional, local, state, and national awards he has won for his leadership at the Library of Congress [...]

Julia Pettee, best known for devising the Union Theological Seminary classification system while head cataloger for thirty years at that library, was a pioneer in the field of cataloging codes, [...]

When I worked at the library, my favorite job was opening up in the morning. Strolling toward the big, wooden doors I felt like the manager in a store of [...]

Between 1918 and 1926, fully 2,500 public libraries were established by the government of the Netherlands East Indies colony, mostly in towns and villages throughout the huge archipelago that became [...]

In 1866 the Board of Direction of the Mercantile Library Association of New York (hereafter referred to as the Mercantile Library) instituted a service in which books were delivered to [...]

Melvil Dewey founded the New York Library Club in 1885. It became an influential forum for exchanging ideas and debating methods and principles among practitioners of an emerging profession. Members [...]

In August 2002 a massive flood struck the Czech capital city of Prague, inundating the collections of the National Library of the Czech Republic and the Prague Municipal Library. The [...]

The purpose of this study is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the library collection at the Scandinavian Association in Rome. Data were gathered from the library catalog and then [...]

The history of women in the West includes little about women as librarians. Librarians who came West were looking for professional and administrative opportunities away from the established centers of [...]

This essay is an analysis of the history of how, when, and if five small public libraries in the rural Midwest acquired ten controversial books published between 1885 and 1951. [...]

Established as a legislative library in 1800 to support the U.S. Congress when it moved from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress--retaining its original name and primary legislative [...]

This study explores the impact of funding for library-related projects from the Julius Rosenwald Fund and the Works Progress Administration on the availability of library services and reading materials for [...]

I ANYBODY FAMILIAR with the records of most of Melbourne's nineteenth-century libraries knows that Redmond Barry, far from being a figure-head in these institutions, was a President or Committee Chairman [...]

The Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions/Institut canadien de microreproductions historiques (CIHM/ICMH), a nonprofit corporation, was established in 1978 at the urging of the Canadian research community. CIHM's initial mission was [...]

Digitization has brought significant benefit to the users of special collections. It will also challenge the relative value given to paper originals of rare materials as digital holdings increase. Special [...]

The celebration of the Navy Department Library's two hundred-year anniversary revitalized an important symbol, its bookplate, and provided an opportunity to investigate the library's history, promote its valuable collections, and [...]

Youth services librarianship--a term that encompasses all library services to youth (children and young adults, ages zero to eighteen) in school and public library settings--has long been considered the classic [...]

In late-nineteenth-century America, access to print varied widely between urban and rural areas. The Wisconsin Free Library Commission (WFLC) set out to provide reading materials to Wisconsin's rural inhabitants through [...]

The question of a national library received much attention in antebellum America, with a number of writers calling for one to be established either at the Library of Congress or [...]

Denied the use of the Houston Lyceum and Carnegie Library, African American leaders organized their own public library in a high school in 1909. Working through native Houstonian Emmett J. [...]

A History of the Book in America, Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840-1880. Edited by Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship. Chapel Hill: Published [...]

Bibliothek und Philologie: Festschrift fur Hans-Jurgen Schubert zum 65. Geburtstag. Edited by Bernd Lorenz. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005. ix, 206 pp. €68,00. ISBN 3-477-05246-5. Philology has played a major role [...]

Libraries to the People: Histories of Outreach. Edited by Robert S. Freeman and David V. Hovde. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2003. x, 245 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-7864-1359-X. We live [...]

The rich musical heritage and vital musical traditions of Brazil are the subject of increasing interest throughout the world. Contemporary popular musicians draw large and enthusiastic audiences in the United [...]

PART 1 BY CAROL JUNE BRADLEY SUNY AT BUFFALO AND ITS MUSIC DEPARTMENT The University of Buffalo was chartered by the New York State Legislature on 11 May 1846. A [...]