Background

Jewett was born on August 12, 1816, in Lebanon, Maine, the brother of John Punchard Jewett. His father, the Reverend Paul Jewett, was settled as a Congregational minister in the town where Charles was born. His mother was Eleanor Masury Punchard of Salem.

Education

Prepared for college in Salem, Jewett enrolled first at Dartmouth but transferred to Brown University, where he graduated in 1835. After two years of teaching he entered Andover Theological Seminary and graduated in 1840, with the intention of becoming a missionary.

Career

After a year of teaching, however, Jewett was appointed librarian at Brown, and subsequently elected professor of modern languages and literature. In 1843-1845 he visited Europe, studying, inspecting libraries, and purchasing books for the University Library at John Carter Brown's expense.

On his return he devoted himself to teaching until March 1848, when he resigned to become assistant secretary and librarian under Joseph Henry in the recently founded Smithsonian Institution. His Notices of Public Libraries in the United States of America, published by the Institution in 1851, was the first extended collection of facts and statistics on American libraries. His plans for building up at the Institution a comprehensive bibliographical collection included the compilation of a union catalogue of American libraries by clipping and mounting titles from printed catalogues, and the development of an original method of preparing stereotype plates of individual book titles which by successive new combinations might be used for printing catalogues of various different libraries, joint catalogues of two or more libraries, and even a union catalogue of all the libraries in the country.

In 1853 the New York Conference of Librarians, over which he presided, discussed the new plan with enthusiasm and recommended that the Smithsonian Institution publish at stated intervals joint catalogues of all libraries that would cooperate, but the time was not yet ripe, and mechanical invention was not yet sufficiently advanced, for such an undertaking. Jewett's original bibliographical projects had been warmly approved by Henry, but when he insisted that the Smithsonian should become primarily a great reference library instead of an instrument of scientific investigation, he came into sharp conflict with the Secretary and the Regents, and Henry at length summarily removed him, July 10, 1854. Leaving Washington, he was soon occupied in the congenial task of selecting and purchasing books for the newly established Public Library at Boston. He was appointed superintendent in 1858 and thenceforward to the end of his life directed the policy and further growth of the library. He inaugurated the practice, then unusual, of permitting easy access to the books with the fewest possible restrictions and introduced many new and simplified methods, such as the use of separate slips instead of a bound volume for recording loans. The catalogues prepared under his direction marked a distinct advance in library practice and met with praise from experts both at home and abroad. His Plan for Stereotyping Catalogues was translated into Italian and printed in Florence in 1888.

He died from apoplexy at his home in Braintree, on January 9, 1868.

Achievements

• Jewett is best known for his work as Superintendent of the Boston Public Library. He held a union catalog of all the public libraries in the United States. This catalog would give scholars access to important books, point out differences in intellectual fields, and generally act as an aid to the evolution of knowledge while making the Smithsonian Institution the pre-eminent center for research. He spent the greater part of his life developing guidelines toward this end.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Notices of Public Libraries in the United States of America, Pr. As an Appendix to the 4Th Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Inst. (Smithsonian Reports).

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Index to the catalogue of books in the Bates Hall of the Public Library of the city of Boston

    (Index to the catalogue of books in the Bates Hall of the ...)

  • Notices of Public Libraries in U.S.A

    (This is a reproduction of a classic text optimised for ki...)

  • On the Construction of Catalogues of Libraries and their Publication by Means of Separate

Membership

Jewett was one of the members of the American Antiquarian Society.

Connections

Jewett was married, April 5, 1848, to Rebecca Green Haskins.

Father:

Paul Jewett

Mother:

Eleanor Masury Punchard

Spouse:

Rebecca Green Haskins

Brother:

John Punchard Jewett

References

• Smithsonian Catalogue System: -1850
• Books, Maps, and Politics: A Cultural History of the Library of Congress, 1783-1861 (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book)
• Age of Jewett: Charles Coffin Jewett and American Librarianship, 1841-68 (The Heritage of librarianship series)