Community Bibliography Project · LIS Historical Commons
LIS has always had a bipolar relationship with information itself. Nowhere is that bipolarity more visible than in its festschriften — the volumes it produces to honor its own, and the remarkable ambivalence with which it has regarded them.
166 LIS festschriften documented across 83 years and 6 continents — with known gaps, pending entries, and entire traditions of non-Western and digital-born festschriften still to be recovered. This is where you come in.
The Form
Festschrift
From the German — literally celebration writing. A volume of essays offered in honor of a scholar's life and work, a professional association's anniversary, or an institution's legacy. The honoree may be living or deceased; the contributors are typically colleagues, students, and collaborators; the publication may be a book, a journal issue, an institutional volume, or a born-digital collection. What unites these forms across cultures and centuries is the act of collective gratitude expressed through scholarship.
The festschrift tradition takes different names in different scholarly cultures — and parallel traditions of collective tribute exist in many communities that may not use any of these terms or surface in Western bibliographic databases at all.
A Short Genealogy
The relationship between librarianship and its own festschrift tradition is not simple. Tracing it requires a short genealogy of impulses — from serious bibliographic recovery to professional satire to something closer to grief, and finally to the recovery project you are now reading.
The Profession Speaks — 1983 & 1985
"I wish, however, the tribute had taken another form. It is neither too late nor too early for librarians to band together forming an eternal alliance. We'll call it 'Librarians against Festschriften' (LAF, or perhaps LAF, for short). And, since organizations cannot survive based on purely negative motivations, ours shall have this positive goal: We shall strive to create a new journal. It will be called Festschrift International; beginning as an annual and moving quickly through the gears to become a weekly. The obvious result will be fifty-two Festschriften per year, surely enough to meet the world's needs. To the delight of librarians it will be indexed in a major indexing service thus eliminating the need for analytics and individual subject cataloging."
— David Laird, review column, College & Research Libraries, 1983
Two years later, Edwin Gleaves titled his essay on the festschrift and librarianship:
"A Watch and Chain and a Jeweled Sword; or,
The Graveyard of Scholarship"
— Edwin Gleaves, 1985
Laird's satire and Gleaves's elegy — appearing within two years of each other — mark a genuine crisis of legitimacy for the form in mid-1980s American librarianship. Laird's joke also precisely diagnosed the bibliographic problem that persists today: festschriften are composite works whose essays are analytically invisible without individual indexing. A field that struggled to celebrate its own was also a field that could not find what it had produced.
Why This Project
A field's festschriften are a mirror — of who it honors, whose contributions it deems worthy of collective gratitude, and which intellectual lineages it chooses to celebrate. The LIS festschrift tradition spans more than eight decades and six continents. No single open bibliography has brought it together — until now.
This bibliography is part of the LIS Historical Commons, a growing set of open bibliographic and research infrastructure projects. It is a working document — known to be incomplete, especially for 1976–1979, and for traditions outside the English-language mainstream. Community knowledge is essential to completing it.
The Scope
LIS festschriften from 1942 to present — books, journal issues, institutional tributes, and born-digital collections from library science, information science, archival studies, and closely related fields including iSchools, communication, and book history.
The Sources
Cross-checked against Danton's Index (1970), Danton & Pulis (1979), and the IJBF (1980–present). Your community knowledge fills the gaps these indexes missed — especially for non-Western, non-English-language, and digital-born traditions.
The Recovery Lens
Adaptive infophilia asks whether bibliographic recovery leads to flourishing — for the scholar, for the traditions recovered, and for the field itself. It draws on arivu, anbu, aram from the Thirukkural — knowledge, care, and right action — on Robin Wall Kimmerer's reciprocal epistemology, on Rosi Braidotti's and/and rather than and/or logic, and on anekantavada, the Jain principle of many-sided truth. A bibliography that documents only what was easily indexed is not a bibliography but an artifact of prior indexing failures from which we can learn to improve field innovation. Bibliographic completeness contributes to wellbeing and flourishing for all. Making it open is an act of care.
Why You
Library historians and community members hold knowledge that catalogs and databases don't — awareness of publications never indexed, traditions that don't fit Western bibliographic categories, and works that exist only in institutional memory.
Known Gaps — Actively Sought
Recovering these traditions and unveiling the intellectual history of LIS through this form is a primary goal of this bibliography — and of the larger research program it anchors.
Contribute
You can submit a festschrift not yet in the bibliography, a correction to an existing entry, a pending entry you've been able to verify, or notes about scope, tradition, or related works. Partial information is welcome — submit what you have. All submissions go directly to the compiler for review.
Fields marked * are required. Your contact information is never published — used only if we have questions about your submission. Submissions go directly to festschriften@infophilia.org and are reviewed before being added to the bibliography.