A History of Library Services for Print-Disabled Pennsylvanians

Late 19th Century

The Home Teaching Society for the Blind in Philadelphia were the first services provided to individuals with Blindness. This incorporated volunteers reading to Blind individuals and included the use of pre-Braille Moon type created by Dr. Moon in England.

Early 20th Century-1940s

By the early 20th century, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (CLP) and the Free Library of Philadelphia (FLP) had both been providing braille services to readers.

When the Pratt-Smoot Act was passed in 1931, both were included in the original network of 17 libraries for the blind headed by the Library of Congress (LC), Division for the Blind located in Washington, D.C.  When the “talking book” phonograph record was developed in 1934, CLP and FLP began circulating both braille and recorded books, and eventually record players as well.  Most of the braille materials and all of the recorded materials were provided by LC’s Division for the Blind.  A subsidy to the postal service to support Free Matter for the Blind was part of the original federal legislation.

1950s-1990s

CLP’s Library for the Blind services and collections originally resided at CLP’s Main Library.  Late in the 1950s, CLP moved the services to their Allegheny Regional Branch on the North Side of Pittsburgh.  In 1968, CLP’s library service to the blind moved to its present site of LBPH at 4724 Baum Boulevard.  The original location of FLP’s LBPH program was in the east-side of the Central Parkway building on Vine St. In the early 1930s, FLP’s LBPH was moved to a large building at 1700 Spring Garden Street, 2 blocks from the current LAMP location. The building was torn down and is now part of the Community College of Philadelphia. Since the move of CLP’s LBPH to Baum Boulevard reduced space considerably, and FLP’s LBPH had enough space to house the entire braille collection, the decision was made to move braille services for the entire state to FLP.  Up to this point CLP’s LBPH had been serving West Virginia as well as Western PA with braille materials.  When the braille collection was moved, FLP’s LBPH took over serving West Virginia with braille as well as the entire state of Pennsylvania.

In 1967, the Pratt-Smoot Act was amended to serve people who had a visual impairment but were not necessarily legally blind, and people whose physical disabilities prevented them from holding a book or turning pages.  Disabilities that had a physical basis to prevent the use of books were also included in the definition.  Thus, services became available to those individuals who had a physically-based reading disability and others such as those who had stroke-related aphasia.  This led to changing the name of the Library of Congress’s Division for the Blind to the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS/BPH).

Until 1966, the two LBPHs had been funded by their administrative agencies only, FLP and CLP.  That year, the Pennsylvania Assembly passed a bill authorizing State funding for Pennsylvania to provide NLS/BPH services statewide to the visually and physically disabled residents of the state.  The bill is still in effect today, as the State of Pennsylvania through Commonwealth Libraries continues under contract to pay either rent or mortgage debt service as well as an administrative fee to FLP and CLP.

In 1971, NLS/BPH introduced the audiocassette book which became the mainstay of the LBPHs’ collections, although talking books were still produced on phonograph records until 1996 and both media were distributed concurrently into the early 2000s.  The number of patrons increased dramatically, and the service and collections grew.