ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the history, growth, membership and collection development of the Penang Library in Malaysia from 1817 to 1957. It examines the library’s place in the lives of its subscribers and its role as a vetting tool utilized by the ‘select people’ in determining the clubbability of the indigenous elite. This chapter assesses the impact of five major changes – the murder of the honorary librarian Dr. Ong Chong Keng, the regional library surveys of the British Council, the hiring of Patricia Lim as the Penang Library’s first professional librarian, the founding of the United States Information Service (USIS) Library in Penang and the British Council’s attempt to seize control of the Penang Library on the eve of Malaysian independence – upon the conversion of the Penang Library from an antiquated nineteenth-century subscription library into a modernized twentieth-century institution.
