Houston – Early Efforts to Establish a City Library

The Houston Book Clubs research materials consist of material from 1993-2007, including interviews, surveys, emails, reports, essays, lists, and correspondence between Elizabeth Long and members of the literary community. The files were compiled by Elizabeth Long during her study of the role of women's reading groups for her 2003 book "Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life" (University of Chicago Press). The surveys and interviews were conducted with Houston area book clubs from 1999-2007 with research focusing on both online book clubs and traditional ones and pertaining to their origins, members, discussions, and processes of book selection. Additionally, the collection contains information from and relating to the 2001 workshop in Cologne, Germany entitled "How literature enters life", sponsored by the International Association for the Empirical Study of Literature and the Media. Research on reading groups is arranged by individual book clubs.