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Title: The public library
Author: Ernest A. Baker
Release date: July 28, 2025 [eBook #76583]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Daniel O'Connor, 1922
Credits: Carla Foust, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PUBLIC LIBRARY ***
THE PUBLIC LIBRARY.
[Illustration: KING’S LIBRARY, BRITISH MUSEUM.
_Photo by Donald Macbeth_
]
THE
PUBLIC LIBRARY
By ERNEST A. BAKER, D.Lit.
PUBLISHED IN LONDON
BY DANIEL O’CONNOR
90 GREAT RUSSELL STREET,
W.C.1. 1922.
France and England literally, observe, buy panic of each other; they
pay, each of them, for ten thousand thousand pounds’ worth of terror,
a year. Now suppose, instead of buying these ten millions’ worth of
panic annually, they made up their minds to be at peace with each
other, and buy ten millions’ worth of knowledge annually; and then
each nation spent the ten thousand thousand pounds a year in founding
royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal museums, royal gardens, and
places of rest. Might it not be better somewhat for both French and
English?
RUSKIN: _Sesame and Lilies_.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE
I.--HISTORICAL SKETCH 1
II.--WHAT IS A LIBRARY SERVICE? 32
III.--LIBRARY EXTENSION 96
IV.--RURAL LIBRARIES 135
V.--A NATIONAL LIBRARY SERVICE 169
VI.--TRAINING IN LIBRARIANSHIP 211
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
KING’S LIBRARY, BRITISH MUSEUM Frontispiece
_To face page_
LAMBETH PALACE LIBRARY 12
CENTRAL PUBLIC LIBRARY, NOTTINGHAM 22
READING ROOM OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM 44
GUILDHALL LIBRARY 52
READING ROOM, STEPNEY PUBLIC LIBRARY 56
PATENT OFFICE LIBRARY 74
LIBRARY OF THE INSTITUTE OF ACTUARIES, STAPLE INN HALL 90
LIBRARY OF THE SOUTH-EASTERN AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE, WYE 162
READING ROOM OF THE GENERAL LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 178
THE ORATORY LIBRARY 200
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, GENERAL LIBRARY 214
READING ROOM OF THE GOLDSMITHS’ LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 226
PREFACE.
Our Public Libraries are entering upon the critical period of their
history. They have been saved by the Act of 1919 from imminent
bankruptcy; but the efforts of the Adult Education Committee to find a
place for them in a national scheme of reconstruction seem to have come
to naught. An Act which it was hoped might have been a new charter, and
have ensured their utilization as a chief instrument of adult education
and the intellectual and spiritual development of the people, did away
with two heavy grievances the abolition of which was long overdue; it
left a programme of constructive reforms unfulfilled.
In this brief account of our public libraries, the work they have done
and the far greater work they are capable of doing, many points have
been suggested that call for more comprehensive legislation. The one
hope now is that the urban and rural libraries already existing or soon
to be may be co-ordinated into a national system, or group of systems,
worked on economic lines, and empowered to act the part they were
surely destined for in a civilized world.
Sociologists, including those treating of education in the widest
sense, have paid scant attention to the part played by the public
library in social life, in the present or the future. Even such an
inventory of our intellectual assets as the Cambridge History of
English Literature has in its fifteen big volumes no reference to the
effects of the Ewart Act or to the vast collections of literature
amassed and thrown open to the people through its operation. This book
will be a small addition to a very small group of works on various
sides of a momentous subject.
The author is deeply indebted to Mr. W. C. Berwick Sayers, Chief
Librarian, Croydon Public Libraries, for his kindness in reading the
proofs and for many useful suggestions, and to his daughter, Miss Ruth
Baker, for indexing the book.
E. A. B.
I.
HISTORICAL SKETCH.
In the period of reconstruction after Waterloo, there was, among other
analogies with the present time, a keen popular desire for education
and opportunities for self-culture. It met with both encouragement and
discouragement from the governing classes, more of the latter than
the former, much more of direct opposition than dare show its head
to-day. The state of the universities and the public schools had been
since the middle of the last century more backward than ever before
in history. Both universities still shut their doors to Dissenters.
They had no sympathy with and probably no consciousness of the needs
of the masses for self-improvement. In spite of earnest writers on
education, and manifold discussions of Rousseau’s doctrines, even in
the ingratiating form of fiction, nothing could stir the sullen apathy
of the ruling powers; and in educational machinery and practice England
lagged far behind both Germany and France. Samuel Whitbread introduced
an Education Bill in 1807 which was rejected by the Lords. After his
death, Brougham became leader of the group of educationists in the
House of Commons, and in 1816 secured the appointment of a Select
Committee to inquire into the education of the lower orders of the
metropolis. The report of this committee furnished material for two
Bills. The first, for the reform of educational charities, passed in
1818, after its best features had been pruned away by the Government;
but the Education Bill of 1820, which would have extended to England
the excellent parish school system of Scotland, was thrown out. Not
until 1833 was the work already being performed by voluntary agencies
approved, by the grant of an annual sum of £20,000 to assist in the
erection of school buildings. Not until 1839 was there any recognition
of the national responsibility for primary education. In that year,
a committee of the Privy Council was appointed to superintend the
application of grants for educational purposes. This was the forerunner
of the Education Department to be established in 1856. Roebuck in 1833
had failed to carry a resolution in the Commons in favour of universal
compulsory education. On the eve of the Education Act of 1870, it was
computed that there were nearly as many children without any kind of
schooling as there were attending all the state-aided and private
schools put together. So slowly had education advanced.
But, whilst Parliament was engaged in repressing or ignoring
educational demands, or debating whether it was wise or safe that
the commonalty should be educated at all, the people, headed by those
who had faith in an educated nation, were establishing the requisite
machinery for themselves. There had been elementary schools of a
sort in existence in most parts of the country for nearly a century.
The academies set up by the Dissenters after the Toleration Act,
the charity schools of the Society for the Promotion of Christian
Knowledge, the schools founded by the Methodists and the Society of
Friends, provided a general education based primarily on the principle
of moral and religious instruction. Many of these schools catered for
grown-up persons as well as children; the Sunday Schools, for instance,
which sprang up after 1780, taught reading and sometimes writing to the
illiterate of all ages. There were also private schools in the towns
and many villages where the rudiments were imparted, unsatisfactorily,
for a few pence. These organized efforts were mainly the work of
middle-class evangelicals and philanthropists intent on the moral and
religious improvement of the people. But new motives came into play
in the new century, and the people themselves began to take an active
part in the movement, with far-reaching results. Political agitation
might be repressed, but an intellectual awakening could not be
extinguished. Knowledge was demanded for its own sake; it was demanded
also for economic reasons. The artisan who saw wonderful mechanical
inventions enabling him to perform his operations with undreamt ease
and efficiency, or depriving him of his job, was roused to an intense
interest in science and a desperate desire to fit himself for a place
in the new industrial order. The country was flocking into the towns;
the major part of the population was becoming industrial. Education was
perceived to be a necessity of life, and a necessity that concerned,
not merely the rising generation, but even more momentously the adult
workman. A passionate demand for education was faced with a sporadic
supply, and it was a demand for education in other directions than had
been contemplated by the promoters of charity schools and Dissenting
academies.
Whitbread and Brougham, Bentham, Place, and Mill encouraged and
directed these aspirations. Philosophic Radicalism affirmed the right
of every citizen to an elementary education, which the State was in
duty bound to provide. Further, such education must be unsectarian; and
here were the beginnings of the age-long strife between the advocates
of secular education and the defenders of voluntary schools, which
were now being planted all over the country by the National Society
and the British and Foreign Society. Throughout the nineteenth century
the history of education was chequered by these conflicts over the
rights and wrongs of religious teaching. Another thing that hampered
progress was the temptation to provide schooling on the cheap, by the
monitorial system and other contrivances, which were maintained for
reasons of economy long after they had been discredited. We shall find
this British failing again and again crippling the finest schemes, and
entailing costs in the long run incalculably greater than the saving at
the outset. It is a form of economy that is not economic.
How deep and sincere was the working man’s desire for enlightenment
is illustrated most tellingly by the co-operative institutions which
it now brought into being in almost every industrial centre. The
Mechanics’ Institutes were not gifts from a railway company or a large
firm to its employees, but the creation of the operatives themselves,
established and kept up mostly from their own unaided resources.
Apart from the schools and classes for children and adults carried on
by the religious bodies in the eighteenth century, these Mechanics’
Institutes, with their lectures, classes, study-circles, debating
societies, libraries, and other educational activities, were the real
beginnings of adult education in this country. They were the immediate
forerunners of the municipal library, and, at a further remove, of the
modern technical college and the polytechnic. Thus adult education
begins in a spontaneous movement, ready for large self-sacrifices to
achieve its practical ideals; and, at the outset, the library is
recognised as an integral part of its scheme. The great mistake in
the Public Library Acts, we shall find, was that they failed to build
on the combination of reciprocal activities in this promising model,
and thus divorced the library from the other departments of adult
education. Conversely, the weakness of many admirable schemes for adult
education has been neglect or omission of the library as an essential
part. Once the separation had taken effect, it became very difficult
to establish relations again. Librarians have since learned the
impossibility of making one part of the social machine work properly in
detachment from the rest. The Mechanics’ Institutes were not troubled
with unprepared and indifferent readers. They led their horses to the
stream and had no difficulty in making them drink. The troughs provided
by their municipal successors were larger and handsomer, but the
excellent supply of water was too often unappreciated.
Ewart and his coadjutors in 1850 concentrated on the single object,
libraries; and libraries they got, their bare object--bare at first
in the literal sense of the word, till they were later on allowed to
spend money in furnishing them with books. As a consequence of this
policy, libraries and art galleries, schools, technical education,
university extension, tutorial and continuation classes, have carried
on their work on separate lines, though labouring for identical ends,
and though they might have worked in unison much more effectively and
economically. The problem now is to bring them into harmony again.
Perhaps the time was not ripe for such a comprehensive alliance.
Perhaps, also, had such an idea been realized it would have had
to undergo the blighting influence of the examination system and
payment by results. On the other hand, a popular institution might
have contained the antidote to those delusions. At all events, it
is a matter for lasting regret that a great opportunity was missed.
Nationalized Mechanics’ Institutes, cured of the imperfections due to
their dependence on the voluntary support of the unwealthy, with their
numerous activities developed, their technical and utilitarian classes
supplemented by humanist, non-vocational teaching, and the recreative
side fully expanded, would have been an invaluable instrument for
the great social effort which was then and is now required. And the
initiative would have come from below, not from above; the danger of
bureaucratic and academic projects for other people’s welfare would
have been avoided. A central part of this many-sided organism would
have been the library, a part ministering directly to every other
part. Such a conception is still useful. In town life the different
agencies may have to work side by side, though there need not be dense
partitions between. In the villages, where there are no museums or
picture-galleries, and the club is too often only a well-meaning but
aimless substitute for the public-house, institutes of such a composite
and elastic type are obviously the very thing required.
The first of these promising institutions came into existence in 1823.
George Birkbeck had given free courses of lectures to artisans at the
Andersonian Institution in Glasgow, where, after his removal to London,
there had been a schism. The seceding members set up for themselves
the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institution, and elected Birkbeck their first
president. Next year, the London Mechanics’ Institution, now Birkbeck
College, was started in emulation, speedily enrolling some 13,000
working men as members. That same year saw the establishment of an
institute at Manchester, which had had a Literary and Philosophical
Society since 1781, an offshoot of this, the College of Arts and
Sciences, being a sort of prototype of the new working men’s
institution. Huddersfield, Leeds, and other industrial towns followed
suit next year; and by 1837 the West Riding had so many that a union of
mechanics’ and similar institutions was formed, to be followed in 1839
by a Metropolitan Association, and by a Lancashire and Cheshire Union
in 1847. “In 1851 it was estimated that there were 610 institutes in
England with a membership of over 600,000, that the number of lectures
delivered in 1850 was 3,054, and that the number of students attending
classes was 16,029.”[1] In 1849, four hundred Mechanics’ Institutes had
between three and four hundred thousand volumes, with a circulation of
more than a million.
In his Practical Observations upon the Education of the People,
Brougham, one of the four trustees of the London institution, announced
the programme of what Peacock in _Crotchet Castle_ nicknamed the “Steam
Intellect Society.” Lectures and conversation classes, on the lines of
a modern tutorial class, libraries and book-clubs, were to be provided;
and, as a more extended enterprise, elementary primers and other cheap
works on science and the useful arts were to be published for the
benefit of the working classes. Brougham was the first president of
the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded in 1827 to
give effect to this second part of the scheme. Dr. Folliott tells the
company at Crotchet Castle how his house was nearly burned down by his
cook taking it into her head to study hydrostatics, in a sixpenny tract
published by the Steam Intellect Society, and reading what he calls
“the rubbish” in bed. Other persons, besides Peacock, were disturbed by
this portentous “march of intellect.” The Mechanics’ Institutes spread
to all parts of England and Scotland, but they failed, from lack of
means, to find the qualified lecturers and experienced teachers that
their well-meaning but ambitious aims required. Good teachers were very
scarce in those days. It was more than combinations of the lower middle
classes unaided by public funds could be expected to achieve. When, in
the course of two decades, the first enthusiasm faded, the buildings
fell more and more into the hands of those who could afford to maintain
them as comfortable lounges and literary clubs. This educational
failure and the secular nature of the education that they sought made
them unsatisfactory in the eyes of the Christian Socialist group,
who in 1854 founded what they considered a better type of mechanics’
institute in the Working Men’s College. But the Mechanics’ Institutes,
though most of them were transformed or absorbed into a different
kind of institute, did not cease to exist; a number have survived to
this day or the eve of it, and some have carried on work of priceless
importance, side by side with the public libraries, which were now
about to arise.
To say that there were no free libraries for the people before 1850
is practically though not literally true. Those interested in the
history of libraries can point to many older examples, certain of which
were open to all comers. Long before the nineteenth century idealists
schemed to provide every reader in the nation with access to books,
as for instance the Scottish grammarian James Kirkwood, author of a
pamphlet in 1699 entitled “An Overture for Founding and Maintaining of
Bibliothecks in every Paroch throughout the Kingdom,” and of a project
for erecting a library in every presbytery or at least county in the
Highlands. The project was approved by the General Assembly, but had no
great results. In the Middle Ages, many of the monastic libraries were
nominally open to the public; but as a reading public hardly existed
the fact does not amount to much. Nor is it of more than antiquarian
interest whether London had a public library as far back as the early
fifteenth century, the joint foundation of Sir Richard Whittington and
William Bury. Readers did exist at the beginning of the next century,
wherefore the appearance of a city library here and there is of more
significance. Norwich claims to have the oldest of these that has never
perished, founded in 1608 and preserved in the public library there
to-day. The library founded at Bristol in 1615 came under the operation
of the Public Library Acts when these were adopted by that city in
1876. The venerable Chetham Library at Manchester dates from 1654,
when the books were placed in the quarters they still occupy in the
college built in 1421. The number of volumes is vastly greater, but the
Chetham Library has not changed in character or in the atmosphere of a
still remoter antiquity that it had at its beginning. Dr. Bray and his
associates established 78 parochial libraries and 35 lending libraries
between 1704 and 1807, which were meant for the use of poor clergymen.
He also secured an Act “For the Better Preservation of Parochial
Libraries;” but this in time became a dead letter. The British Museum
was established by Act of Parliament in 1753, opened to the public
in 1759, and gradually absorbed various royal and other collections,
forming a great storehouse of books for scholars and other literary
workers. London, nearly a century later, when the public library
agitation was in progress, had four public or semi-public libraries,
those at Sion College and Lambeth Palace, and Dr. Williams’s and
Archbishop Tenison’s libraries. In a number of large towns, readers of
the better class enjoyed the advantages of good reference and lending
libraries belonging to the Literary and Scientific Institutions.[2] The
library work of the Mechanics’ Institutes has already been described.
But the libraries of various kinds that were in existence, most of
them subscription libraries or otherwise restricted to a narrow class
of users, served only to whet the appetite of the ardent seeker after
knowledge, and to provide the apostle of popular culture with an
illustration of the possible.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Langley & Sons._
LAMBETH PALACE LIBRARY.]
The campaign which led to the Public Library Acts of 1850 and 1853
opened in 1844, when Richard Cobden presided at a public meeting in
Manchester to consider the means of improving popular taste. Joseph
Brotherton, the member for Salford, laid the proposals carried at this
meeting before the influential William Ewart, member for the Dumfries
Burghs, a rich, well-educated, much-travelled person, who was an old
parliamentary hand, with a general desire to see his country provided
with library facilities at least equal to those which he had found on
the Continent. Brotherton, a Liberal of the Manchester school and a
strict Nonconformist, had a profound belief in an educated people, and
a special confidence in the Lancashire operative; he was returned again
and again for Salford, holding the seat continuously 1832-57. These two
public men found an energetic and well-informed coadjutor in Edward
Edwards, a supernumerary assistant in the British Museum, who had cut a
prominent figure in the parliamentary inquiry into the administration
of that library, writing pamphlets and appearing as an expert witness
before the second Select Committee in 1836, after forcing himself
into notice by his severe handling of the evidence laid before the
committee of 1835. His wide knowledge of libraries at home and abroad
and his thorough acquaintance with the methods of the British Museum,
particularly on their defective side, together with the freedom and
far-sightedness of his criticisms and suggestions for reform, impressed
the committee, and led, rather surprisingly, to his being given his
post in the Museum in 1839. Later, his independent attitude led to
friction with his chief Panizzi, and he left abruptly in 1850.
Edwards was broad-minded enough not to pin his faith on libraries alone
as an engine of intellectual progress; he took part as a pamphleteer
in the warfare over London University in 1836, persistently maintained
that libraries and schools were complementary to each other, and
pointed out that libraries should fulfil a very definite function in
promoting the intellectual life of all classes. His radical views on
the extension of hours and the opening of the reading room in the
evening, on branch libraries for the utilization of duplicate books,
on improved catalogues, the better supply of foreign literature and
materials for research, and on numerous points of administration at the
British Museum, have been fulfilled in large part since his time; yet
some still remain a counsel of perfection.
His aid was enlisted by Ewart and Brotherton after he had published
some long articles, packed with statistics, on the inadequacy and
inaccessibility of the library resources of Great Britain and Ireland,
and on the liberal provision enjoyed on the Continent, which had a
great deal to do with making converts and securing votes when public
library legislation was before Parliament. Edwards probably exaggerated
his case, and painted too glowing a picture of the wealthy Continental
libraries, at any rate in the freedom of access said to be enjoyed
by every citizen. But his instances of British scholars put to undue
expense and compelled to live abroad in order to have libraries of
historical material at hand were relevant enough. Gibbon complained
that he had the greatest difficulty in consulting books and had to
obtain them from abroad at a heavy expense; he found himself better
provided when living in Switzerland or France than in his own country.
Buckle, later on, and, still later, Lecky and Acton had to seek their
material in Continental libraries. One telling point Edwards made, that
England was unrivalled in its private collections, though so poor in
those open to the public--a state of things by no means wholly remedied
yet.
Meanwhile, Ewart and Brotherton having put their heads together,
a piece of legislation was secured that would and did ensure the
establishment of a certain number of public libraries, rate-aided if
not entirely rate-supported. This was the Act of 1845 for “Encouraging
the Establishment of Museums in Large Towns,” first-fruits of the
proposals passed by the Manchester meeting of the previous year. It
authorized the levy of a halfpenny rate, in towns of not less than
10,000 inhabitants, for the erection of museums of science and art;
it did not allow public funds to be used for purchasing books or even
exhibits; and it was supposed that salaries and other maintenance
charges would be defrayed out of the penny-fees for admission. Timid
and inadequate as such measures were, the Act was followed at once by
the opening of museums at Warrington, Salford, Canterbury, Liverpool,
Leicester, Dover, and Sunderland, the first three towns forming
collections of books as well. In 1848 Warrington provided the first
free reference library under the Act, and also a lending library for
the use of subscribers. Brotherton, with the aid of a local benefactor,
saw to it that a library and museum were opened at Salford in 1850.
Thus, although looking back we may think it strange that museums should
be started before libraries, they did prove a stepping-stone to the
greater necessity.
Ewart now applied himself to inducing the House of Commons to appoint
a Select Committee on the question of public libraries, and availed
himself of the services of Edwards in preparing evidence and framing
proposals. Edwards was the chief witness before the first Committee
appointed, in 1849, and a special motion of thanks for his services
was appended to their Report. He gave an account of the resources,
conditions, and relative accessibility to the public of 35 British
libraries, the majority of which were university or college foundations
and only two, the Warrington and Chetham libraries, public in a true
sense; he drew an elaborate comparison with 383 libraries of not less
than 10,000 volumes apiece which, he affirmed, were open to every one
on the Continent, and with about a hundred in the United States. In
his examination by the Committee, he pleaded for grants from the Privy
Council to supplement local contributions, as were already being given
for elementary education; the inspection of libraries by the Committee
of Council on Education, and the institution of a Ministry of Public
Instruction charged with the control of public education and the
supervision of public libraries; the establishment, not as a tax on
publishers but at the national expense, of public depositories for all
books published in the United Kingdom; the international exchange of
books for the encouragement of libraries. Edwards urged other advanced
ideas, some of which, such as the provision of a different class of
public libraries for country parishes, have generations later begun to
be put into actuality. A second Select Committee was appointed early
next year to report on the best means of extending the establishment of
free public libraries, and Edwards was again in request as a witness.
An article of his in the British Quarterly for Feb., 1850, had no doubt
considerable influence on the passage of the Public Libraries Act on
March 13th, in spite of damaging criticisms of his statistics.
The Ewart Act, as it is often called, “for Enabling Town Councils to
Establish Public Libraries and Museums,” was purely permissive. A poll
of burgesses was required before the Act could be put in force, and
a two-thirds majority was prescribed. The promoters believed that if
buildings were put up, suitable contents would be forthcoming from
local benefactors. Accordingly, no power was granted to buy books. The
rate levied must not exceed a halfpenny, the same as had been allowed
by the Museums Act, of which this was merely an extension. The debate
on the second reading is remarkably interesting. The arguments of
Ewart, Brotherton, the father of Labouchere, and even John Bright,
were essentially utilitarian. “Nothing,” Bright was sure, “would tend
more to the preservation of order than the diffusion of the greatest
amount of intelligence, and the prevalence of the most complete and
open discussion, amongst all classes.” Brotherton said, “Here were
£2,000,000 a year paid for the punishment of crime, yet honourable
gentlemen objected to tax themselves a halfpenny in the pound for the
prevention of crime. In his opinion it was of little use to teach
people to read unless you afterwards provided them with books to which
they might apply the faculty they had so acquired.... He was satisfied
that expenditure upon this object would be productive not only of
immense moral good but of very material public economy in the long
run.” The adverse arguments were likewise utilitarian and, as a rule,
economic in the purely mercenary sense. Roundell Palmer, afterwards
Earl of Selborne, “was most truly desirous to see learning extended,”
but protested against compulsory rating, which he loftily said would
put a positive check on the “voluntary self-supporting desire for
knowledge which at present existed amongst the people.” One obstructor,
who “did not like reading at all, and hated it when at Oxford,” said,
“However excellent food for the mind might be, food for the body was
what was now most wanted for the people;” and that he would have been
“much more ready to support the honourable gentleman if he had tried
to encourage national industry by keeping out the foreigner.” Summed
up, the objections were four: that increased taxation was undesirable;
that it was unjust if not unconstitutional to make non-users pay
for the upkeep of the new institution; that too much knowledge was
a dangerous thing; that there were ulterior objects in the project,
and that libraries might become centres of political agitation, awake
feelings of discontent, and encourage economic unrest. The same
arguments, observe, were heard in the brief debates accorded to the
abortive amending Bills in the decade before the last Public Libraries
Act. Yet the Ewart Act, at this interval of time, looks a timid,
experimental, and by no means far-sighted enactment, defended against
excesses by clauses that could scarce fail to make the very existence
of the institutions it brought forth precarious and unfruitful. Such
clauses could hardly have been accepted had not the framers of the Bill
contemplated further legislation at an early date, and concentrated
their efforts on making a small but irrevocable beginning.
The operation of Ewart’s Act was extended to Ireland and Scotland in
1853, and the same year the Act was amended with respect to Scotland,
raising the rate limitation to one penny. Ewart brought in a Bill
in 1854 for raising the rate limit in England and Wales to the same
figure, and authorizing expenditure of the rate income on books. By
this time thirteen towns had adopted the Act. As the Government opposed
the Bill, it was dropped after the second reading; but next year he
brought in a new Bill, which, after a keen debate on the proposal to
provide newspapers out of the rates, passed with little demur. The rate
limit was now one penny, and places of 5,000 inhabitants or more were
entitled to the benefits of the Act; clauses dealing with borrowing
powers, the acquisition of sites, the mode of adoption by a poll of
ratepayers, and the special circumstances of the City of London, were
included. There were amending Acts in 1866 and later years, but this
remained the principal statute for England and Wales till 1892.
The first town to set up a municipal reference and lending library
under the Act of 1850 was Manchester. A subscription reaching £12,823,
of which £800 was collected by a working men’s committee, was raised;
the Act was adopted by an enormous majority of ratepayers; Edward
Edwards was appointed librarian, and books were acquired in readiness
out of the voluntary fund. The original building in Campfield
was opened on September 2nd, 1852, with great ceremony, Dickens,
Thackeray, Lytton, and Monckton Milnes being among the statesmen and
other personages on the platform. Dickens described the Manchester
undertaking as “a great free school bent on carrying instruction to the
poorest hearths.” Thackeray improved upon Hogarth’s contrast of the
wicked mechanic reading Moll Flanders and the good mechanic reading
the story of the apprentice who became Lord Mayor, by picturing the
Lancashire mechanic reading Carlyle, Dickens, and Bulwer. John Bright
looked forward to when the farmer and country labourer would have a
library service. Norwich and Bolton were actually before Manchester
in adopting the Act, Oxford and Winchester were almost as prompt.
Liverpool obtained a special Act in 1852 to raise a penny rate for
a library and museum. Brighton had got a local Act in 1850, but was
late in establishing its library. Sheffield and Exeter refused at
first to adopt the Act, but reversed their decision in 1853 and 1870
respectively. Blackburn, Cambridge, and Ipswich voted for libraries in
1853; Maidstone, Kidderminster, and Hereford, in 1855. Airdrie was the
first town in Scotland, and Cork the first in Ireland to adopt the Acts
pertaining to those countries. Birkenhead, Leamington, and two parishes
in Westminster adopted the Acts in 1856, Walsall, and Lichfield in
1857, Canterbury in 1858. In London progress was slow and chequered.
Adverse polls were recorded in the City of London, Islington,
Paddington, Marylebone, St. Pancras, and Camberwell, though several
wiped out the stigma later; Hackney, Whitechapel, Putney, Cheltenham,
Bath, Hull, and other places were likewise recalcitrant; but Cardiff,
after voting down the proposal by a majority of one in 1860, adopted
the Acts in 1862. Leicester, Burslem, Warwick, Oldham, Dundee, Paisley,
Nottingham, Coventry, Leeds, Doncaster, and Wolverhampton, were among
the forty-six places that had accepted public library legislation by
1868, the year taken in a parliamentary report dated April 11th, 1870,
from which it appears that fifty-two libraries had been established,
nearly half a million books acquired, and an annual issue of 3,400,000
attained. This was the year of the Elementary Education Act, which
was to do away with the enormous amount of sheer illiteracy that
still prevailed, and to raise up potential readers in their millions,
though it was yet too early to ask for that intimate co-operation
between schools and libraries which would have taught the people not
only to read but also how and what to read, and tended to make the
results of even a brief elementary education deep and permanent.
[Illustration: CENTRAL PUBLIC LIBRARY, NOTTINGHAM.]
The library movement made most headway in the northern counties and
the midlands; the southern towns were slow in coming in. Scotland also
was late in adopting the Acts--a curious fact, probably due to the
way Scotland is used to the private endowment of public foundations.
The Scots are frugal and saving; but no people are so generous in
works for the common weal. Hence it is not difficult to understand the
reluctance of Glasgow to saddle itself with a library rate, when it
already had its Baillie’s Institution and Stirling’s Library, and the
Mitchell Library was coming--it actually came in 1877. Edinburgh also
rejected the Acts, obviously on similar grounds, until in 1886 an offer
of £50,000 from Andrew Carnegie induced the city to change its mind,
at first however, levying only a halfpenny rate. Ireland was very much
behindhand.
The following table shows the relative rate of growth, down to 1909,
of public libraries established under the Acts; it does not include a
number provided by voluntary agencies or under special legislation.[3]
England. Wales. Scotland Ireland. Totals.
1840-1849 1 -- -- -- 1
1850-1859 18 -- 1 1 20
1860-1869 12 1 1 -- 14
1870-1879 38 5 5 -- 48
1880-1889 51 5 9 5 70
1890-1899 121 17 15 8 161
1900-1909 125 29 42 12 208
---------------------------------------------------
366 57 73 26 522
---------------------------------------------------
Accelerated growth from the seventies onwards was due to various
causes, first and foremost the general advance in education, especially
when the effects of Forster’s Act of 1870 began to tell. Successive
amending enactments, down to the consolidating Act of 1892, each
removed some obstacle. Thus the resistance of London ratepayers was
conciliated by an Act in 1877 permitting them to vote a lower limit
than one penny. More libraries were opened as a consequence, but
the handicap of an exiguous income militated against their welfare.
Many gifts of funds, buildings, or special collections of books were
received from time to time, often with a proviso that the municipality
should build and maintain a library. The old objection to the public
endowment of libraries, that it would discourage private bounty, was
thus shown to be against experience as it was against reason; though
British generosity in this respect cannot stand comparison with that
of rich Americans. It was calculated by an English librarian, Thomas
Formby, in 1889, that in the last thirty-five years British libraries
had received a million pounds from private sources, and American
libraries six times as much.
A stimulus of far-reaching effect came into operation towards the
close of the century, when Andrew Carnegie began to make systematic
contributions, first to Scottish and then to other British
municipalities, for the establishment and extension of public
libraries. The benefactions of an English philanthropist Passmore
Edwards, though more modest in amount, had relatively a more salutary
result, because they were more carefully adjusted to local needs. The
policy of Mr. Carnegie was, however, very sagacious. As a rule, he gave
money for buildings and fixtures alone, on the understanding that the
maximum rate allowable should be raised. The expectation was that, once
started, the library enterprise was bound to go on, and that with a
building free from debt it was bound to thrive. The sequels were not
always so satisfactory. Many places were tempted by the free gift to
build more expensive premises than they had the wherewithal to maintain
efficiently. Some embarked on ambitious schemes that left them with a
heavy burden of debt. Large buildings meant, of course, large staffs
and heavy establishment charges; but the income was strictly limited.
Hence many libraries were unable to pay their way, and at the same
time afford a proper service of books. There was a judicious clause in
the Scottish Act which ought to have been inserted in all, by which
authorities were forbidden to raise a loan of more than twenty times
one quarter of the annual rate income.
The insufficiency of the penny rate was early and acutely realized.
It weighed heaviest on places with small incomes. The larger the
establishment to be kept up, the smaller the ratio of establishment
expenses to maintenance. The limitation had been fixed so low that
most towns with a population between 50,000 and 100,000 had to pursue
a hand-to-mouth policy, and content themselves with spending on books
such sums as happened to remain over when all fixed charges had been
defrayed. The main reason for the library books, had to be neglected
for the sake of the building, the mere case that held the books. The
inadequate staff that looked after both cost still more, yet were
overworked and underpaid. Larger towns were better off, not merely
through being able to apportion expenses more economically, but also
because they had more chances of getting legislative concessions.
Furthermore, the civic spirit is usually stronger in big cities: it
is one of the reasons why they are big cities. There, in the great
industrial centres, the old Mechanics’ Institutes were born. They have
been strongholds of educational endeavour; they were the pioneers of
the library movement. Thus it is not surprising to find Wolverhampton,
Swansea, Warrington, Sheffield, Manchester, Salford, Birmingham,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Oldham, St. Helens, Walsall, Preston, Wigan,
Sunderland, and several smaller industrial towns obtaining increased
rating powers and widening their library provision. Many other towns
would gladly have sought the same privileges, but for the cost of
promoting a special Act.
For many years before the great war it was borne in more and more to
the minds of friends of the movement that not all was well with public
libraries, and a series of amending Bills to do away with the obsolete
restriction of income and introduce various constructive reforms were
brought into Parliament and steadily blocked. The various Acts for
England and Wales had been consolidated in the Public Libraries Act of
1892. This harmonized several conflicting enactments, laid it down that
adoption of the Acts should be by resolution of the local authority,
except in London, and allowed neighbouring districts to combine for
library purposes. It left the rate limitation where it was. Some
infinitesimal relief came from the Museums and Gymnasiums Act of 1891,
whereby the upkeep of museums could be charged to a special museum
rate. The Local Government Act of 1894, on the other hand, introduced
some complications into library law, and made it even more impossible
than heretofore for rural districts to come under the Acts. Amending
Acts for Scotland and Ireland passed that year.
In certain points, the Scottish Acts, which had been consolidated
in 1887, had advantages over the English. The precaution against
extravagant building loans has been mentioned already. Further,
committees must contain not less than ten and not more than twenty
members, half the number being appointed from the local magistrates or
councillors and half from other householders. Many if not most English
authorities draw their committees exclusively from their own body.
The disadvantages are twofold. The ordinary borough councillor is an
overworked person, attending many committees, among which the libraries
committee rarely, in municipal politics, counts as the most important.
He is apt to regard his duties on that committee in a perfunctory way.
The ordinary member of a council, moreover, is elected oftener than not
for very different objects from the welfare of a public library, it
may be simply to keep down the rates; and his qualifications for these
objects may very well tend to disqualify him for enlightened service
on the governing body of a public library. A book sub-committee with
hardly a single member that reads, has, unfortunately, been no rarity
under the conditions that still prevail, with a chairman standing
for an obscurantist and reactionary policy towards this despised
department of the municipal entity. Hence the peculiar desirability
of having outsiders with liberal views, a liberal education, and some
familiarity with books and libraries, added to the representatives of
the council. This question will arise again when the possibilities of a
new regime come in for discussion.
From time to time it was suggested by critics and would-be reformers
that public libraries ought not to remain a series of isolated
institutions, able to co-operate neither with each other nor with the
schools and other intellectual activities. Edward Edwards and also his
biographer Thomas Greenwood, one of the wisest and most disinterested
friends the library movement has ever had, looked forward to the
co-ordination of all these departments of the body politic as a body
intellectual under the supervision of a Government minister. The same
reform was mooted by J. J. Ogle, a public librarian and a secretary of
education, who, in _The Free Library_ (1897), easily disposed of the
argument that State inspection and State grants would mean uniformity
of method. In 1904 the Library Association at their annual conference,
after several sessions had been devoted to considering the pros and
cons, passed a strong resolution affirming “That the public library
should be recognized as forming part of the national educational
machinery.”
Thus the ideas of close interaction promoted by central control and
of intimate correlation of libraries and the other instruments of
public education had been well-debated, long before they were taken
over, along with the more pressing question of the rate limit, as
obvious items for the agenda of the Adult Education Committee, which
was appointed in July 1917 as a sub-committee of the Reconstruction
Committee, to be merged presently in the Ministry of Reconstruction.
How this Committee handled the constructive proposals will be shown
later on. Two of the reforms they recommended were embodied in a
Government Bill, which became law on December 23rd, 1921. Both of
these were, in essence if not in form, the abolition of illogical and
obsolete disabilities, inherited from the early days of the Ewart Acts.
The first grievance to be removed was the rate limit. When even the
advocates of the public library thought it would be mainly the working
classes that would use it, there was some reason for keeping down the
cost, economic reasons as well as reasons of policy. When libraries
had been in existence for more than half a century, and every class in
the community used them without distinction, it was monstrous that a
municipality owning a library should be debarred from keeping its own
property up to the mark if it was willing to pay the bill. Bankruptcy
was already threatening many library authorities even before the war;
before the end of it, some were being shut up, numerous others were
cutting down their services to the vanishing point. Councils were
forbidden by law to pay the ordinary war bonus to their library staffs,
who had before these changes been the worst-paid of their employees. It
was a question of life or death. Relief must come at once, or half the
libraries in the country would cease to exist. Relief was vouchsafed,
and with it a second restriction was ended, that which debarred County
Councils from setting up a library service for the villages. Systems
of rural libraries were already springing up through the monetary
grants of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and were being carried
on, legally or illegally it was doubtful which, by the Education
Committees. To do something to stimulate an intelligent social life on
the land was indispensable, if the dreams of recolonizing Britain and
reviving agriculture were to come to anything.
The Bill passed, without an echo of the strenuous opposition that had
greeted its many predecessors, which had made much smaller demands
on the public purse. It removed two crippling disabilities, but the
constructive proposals of the Adult Education Committee it did not
touch. Two most formidable obstructions had been cleared away: the
forward leap was yet to take. Was it to be deferred indefinitely,
or might the Act be accepted as prelude to a comprehensive library
charter, to be prepared as soon as the Committee’s numerous
recommendations could be reduced to legislative form?
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Adult Education Committee. Final Report, p. 14.
[2] e.g. That at Edinburgh (dating from 1725), London (1749), Liverpool
(1758), Manchester (1781), the Newcastle “Lit. & Phil” (1793).
[3] Professor W. S. B. Adams. Report on Library Provision and Policy
(Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1915).
II
WHAT IS A LIBRARY SERVICE?
There is an enormous difference between the library service enjoyed
in the more progressive municipalities, where public opinion has been
properly educated and the authorities mean to do their best, whatever
the financial impediments, and have a clear conception of what is the
best, and the perfunctory service in places where the library is an
unwelcome addition to the municipal family, which cannot be got rid of
but must be prevented from becoming a burden on the rates. The most
progressive of librarians and library committee-men would freely admit
that no public library in this country is doing all that it might for
the community, or anything like what it will do when the library habit
has been instilled into the average citizen. The most progressive are
but leading the way; the goal is still in the future. Accordingly, an
account of the best work now being done by the best libraries will
serve two purposes: it will show the possibilities that are actually
being attained; it will help the reader to build up mentally a complete
type of what a library service might be.
LENDING LIBRARIES.
“The jug and bottle department,” as it has been cynically called by
illiberal critics, is the oldest and, in a sense, the fundamental part
of a public library service. There were lending libraries before 1850,
but none that could be regarded as its prototype. It was a consequence
of the new democratic idea. In earlier times a library simply provided
books to be read on the spot. Circulating libraries, such as began to
be common in the eighteenth century, were shops that lent out books,
chiefly light literature, to subscribers of the leisured classes.
The literary and scientific institutions allowed their books to be
borrowed, without troubling to divide their stock into distinct
collections, or worrying themselves with the standing puzzle of the
modern librarian, should this book, which is neither a novel nor an
encyclopædia, go on the lending or the reference shelves?
The strongest argument for rate-supported libraries was that the
studious person who could not afford to buy books, or the no less
meritorious person who wished to enjoy good literature in an armchair
but could not pay a subscription, should be enabled to read at home.
Access to libraries was an excellent thing, and every seeker after
knowledge was entitled thereto, but a supply of books in the home was
a greater boon, and one that would have a far deeper effect on the
mental life of the nation. Even a Freeman could not work in a reference
library, but had to borrow--or buy. Circumstances of a different kind
make the library of the British Museum, and even the local reading
room inaccessible, or at any rate insufficient, to most busy people.
The existence of the London Library--the finest lending library in the
world--is proof enough of the most serious kind of reader’s need for a
home supply of books.
Catering for all classes, for all ages, and for users having all sorts
of motives for reading, the municipal lending library will not admit
any petty or restricted purpose to limit the scope of its contents.
Costly books, if it acquires such by purchase or gift, and works of
the atlas or dictionary type, will for different but equally obvious
reasons go into the reference department, however small that may happen
to be. Very cheap books, with certain exceptions, it will not supply.
College text-books may be refused, on the score that students should
have them for their own, unless there are circumstances that justify
a different course. Some books may be rejected for reasons of public
morality, though a narrow-minded puritanism must not be tolerated.
Otherwise, the lending library should develop on the most catholic
lines.
The light literature that was the staple of the old-fashioned
circulating library will, with the rubbish sternly and drastically
sifted out, form a considerable proportion of the stock-in-trade. In
the minds of some short-sighted people, indeed, the public library is
identified with over-thumbed and dog-eared novels, and supposed to
be a purveyor chiefly of books for private amusement at the public
expense. The statistics that seem to authorize such a view are
misunderstood. Half-a-dozen novels usually take less time to read than
does a single substantial work of science, history, or even the other
kinds of belles-lettres; and make six times as much show in the record
of issues. If allowance be made for this obvious fact, study of the
figures will usually reveal that a greater amount of reading having
a serious value is going on than of reading for mere pastime. One
ought to apply a different kind of calculus; but till a sort of mental
foot-pound, a unit of energy expended effectively in self-development,
has been fixed, we can merely ask that statistics should be interpreted
with a due consciousness of what humane literature is, and with common
sense. Over-thumbed novels are no argument against public libraries,
but a very strong argument for making sure that the supply of fiction
is of the best, and for doubling, quadrupling, and multiplying further
the supply of first-rate novels. If there are always enough of these
to go round, critics on the one hand and grumblers on the other may be
disregarded.
The workshop theory, which is on the face of it a sound guide for the
development of the reference library, though by no means a complete
statement of its functions, applies also to the lending department. On
the one hand, this should minister to our recreations and our æsthetic
and spiritual needs; it will be well-stocked with excellent novels,
the best poetry, drama, essays, and humane literature in general. On
the other hand, it will cater for the student and serious reader in
all branches of knowledge, and will provide all the books it can of
general use for industrial and amateur craftsmen, shopkeepers and
other business people, and the professional classes. The librarian
and the book-selecting committee will have a keen eye for the needs
of teachers, journalists, ministers of religion, and all who are in
any way intellectual leaders. One healthy consequence of the workshop
theory is the rule that a library must never be cumbered with dead
stock. Books that have been superseded or have outlived their interest
must be ruthlessly discarded. The workshop library has no room for
any but live books. Such from the first have been the aims of the
great bulk of our public libraries, with, naturally, some laxity
here and there, and in rarer instances too much strictness in regard
to education and mental improvement or the cult of mere utilitarian
efficiency.
There are between five and six hundred library buildings under the
Public Library Acts in this country, and with few exceptions each
contains a lending library, and some hardly anything else. A corollary
of this distributing service is the branch library. Liverpool had two
branches by 1853, and other towns quickly followed suit. A very large
proportion of these buildings are branch libraries, established so as
to bring a stock of books for lending as near as may be to your door.
To-day, the biggest provincial cities have each from a dozen to a score
such district libraries; the average town or metropolitan borough has
two or three. Some places are content with delivery stations; some
have these and branches as well. The delivery station is a device for
bringing books that have been asked for from the central reservoir to
the nearest point, and is a convenience to readers who have not the
time, or do not think it worth while, to visit the library in person.
Given a first-class catalogue and intelligent readers, the delivery
station is a useful makeshift. But there are weighty reasons why
it is much better to invite Mahomet to the mountain--why a service
through district libraries will have more valuable results than one
through delivery stations. The best systems combine the advantages of
both methods, making the reader free of all the branch libraries in a
town, with the right of direct access to the book-shelves, and at the
same time bringing books from other branches to the one nearest the
reader who is unable or finds it inconvenient to visit the library
in person. Manchester and Glasgow, for example, have a motor-service
whereby all the books in a score of district libraries are pooled as
one vast stock, accessible, with a minimum of expense, difficulty,
or delay, to the borrowers situated at any point in the civic area.
Make your library area big enough, and you can provide the maximum of
opportunities at the minimum cost.
During the last two decades, public libraries have been reverting to
that old and sensible mode of working which, on its reintroduction,
was styled “Open Access.” Practice varied in former times between
letting the reader loose among the books and shutting these behind
doors or shutters. When the new era began in 1850, the new race of
librarians beheld themselves confronted with an unprecedented and
hazardous problem. Here was the multitude of famished readers, who had
never experienced the civilizing influence of libraries, who might be
dishonest, and who certainly had to be served expeditiously and in
large numbers; and there was the stock of books, which must be kept in
working order and unpilfered. Hence the closed library--the books on
one side of a counter and the reading proletariat on the other. Then,
in an ill-omened moment, indicators were invented, and the proletariat
could not even see the books at a distance, but must try to find out,
first, what it wanted from a catalogue, perhaps an abbreviated form of
hand-list conveying little meaning to the unbookish and then, through
a numerical system compared to which Bradshaw or a census competition
is an intellectual delight, whether there was a chance of getting what
it wanted. The library movement would have spread with far greater
rapidity, and its results on the national mentality would have been far
deeper and more extended, but for the long reign of the closed system.
Very large libraries must keep the main bulk of their accumulations in
a place apart; otherwise they could not contain them at all. When the
stock begins to approach six figures, a librarian begins to think of
having a stack, or some analogous form of magazine, accessible to none
but officials and attendants. But in libraries of moderate dimensions
there is no reason why the public should be locked out, and the most
convincing reason why it should be invited and persuaded to come
in. One must be something of a book-expert to know always precisely
what book one wants; and then one may fail to obtain it through the
mechanism of a catalogue and an indicator. The ordinary person will
assimilate more mental food from browsing among the shelves than he
would in thrice the time from reading what the chance of the indicator
brought him under this discredited system. It may be that more books
will disappear; but a certain percentage of losses may be faced with
equanimity; it is one of the running expenses of true efficiency, and
the results are well worth the cost.
In all the most recent public libraries, and in a very large number of
the older, reorganized in the light of this reform, the public have the
inestimable advantage of handling the books, and seeing, as it were in
a bird’s-eye view, their relations to the other books in the sphere of
knowledge or of art, before deciding what they want now and will want
later on. This has had an immeasurable effect on the quality of the
reading--on the education of the public taste. Only librarians know how
difficult it used to be to lift a certain class of reader out of an old
rut, to persuade him, or more often her, to try an unfamiliar author.
Once get over the difficulties of an introduction to George Eliot,
Thomas Hardy, or Tolstoy, and the devotee of Guy Boothby and Charles
Garvice, who was stone-blind to the blandishments of the printed
catalogue, will march on steadily in the new world that has been
opened. It is the first step that counts in his literary salvation, and
in an open access library the first step is pretty sure to be taken, if
the contents have been well and tactfully selected.
An inducement to read other things than fiction is offered in many
progressive libraries. This is a general permission to borrow two books
at a time, provided only one is a novel. Teachers and other privileged
persons are often allowed as many as half-a-dozen at once. There is
indeed no reason except insufficiency of stock why any intelligent
reader should not be able to have three or four books together, and a
great many arguments for liberality. Three are regularly allowed at
Coventry, and in American libraries, generous concessions are made on
any reasonable grounds; in some the daring principle of “Take as many
as you like” is in vogue, and many libraries lend freely to all comers
without the irritating insistence on local residence or local guarantee
which rules over here. To a man pursuing a serious course of study it
is a manifest advantage to have several works in hand; the habit should
be encouraged. The cost will be considerable; but it will be a cost in
books not buildings, since the extra books will usually be in the hands
of readers and not in need of house-room and larger premises. The cost
can and ought to be borne now that library incomes are more elastic,
if authorities take a serious view of their responsibilities and the
part they should play in the business of education. Look at the empty
shelves in almost any popular library, and the nature of the problem
will be apparent.
The actual situation is significant. The need is for more books, and
better books, rather than more buildings. The one essential to a
successful library service exists, a great public demand--wanting
more guidance, perhaps, and susceptible of education in the wiser use
of books, but still vigorous, spontaneous, and unsatisfied. There is
an unprecedented demand for books, fully commensurate with the demand,
all over the country, for educational facilities. And there is an
unprecedented shortage of books on the lending library shelves. During
the war, expenses were kept down, and the gaps due to wear and tear
were not filled up. Binding was allowed to fall into woeful arrears.
Now, the cost of bookbinding has gone up threefold, the price of books
has doubled. Yet under these disabling conditions, many a provincial
town and a number of London boroughs have an annual issue of a million
or thereabouts. Manifestly, the municipal lending library is a mighty
power in the land. One librarian, in a borough where, it has recently
been affirmed, the average intelligence is eighty under proof, tells me
that out of 690 volumes of Rider Haggard’s various novels, which have
to be duplicated over and over again, he would not expect to find more
than sixteen on the shelf at a given moment. Sir Henry Rider Haggard is
not a classic; he lies on the border between the kind of fiction to be
tolerated and the kind to be encouraged. Nevertheless, empty shelves
are a powerful argument.
The following paragraph surely speaks with a most convincing eloquence
of the work public libraries are performing; it is from the prospectus
of the latest London borough to set up a library system, the borough
that has the largest population of the lower middle class and the
poor. This system is still in its infancy, yet it has achieved an
annual issue of nearly a million volumes, and the separate uses of
its libraries and reading rooms are estimated, on a count, to number
3,496,000 during the year.
“The cost of the Public Libraries to each inhabitant of Islington is
one-fifth of a penny per week. For this outlay each person has at his
or her disposal: Lending libraries containing 75,000 volumes; Reference
Libraries containing 10,000 volumes; Children’s libraries containing
10,000 volumes; Reading rooms containing all the best current
newspapers, magazines and periodicals of importance; and all these
resources are constantly increasing.
“A penny newspaper daily costs 35 times as much as this extensive
service.”
Books are not the only wares in which the lending library deals. Most
of them circulate music in bound volumes, in sheets, in portfolios;
some lend pianola records. Ordnance Survey maps are issued to ramblers
and tourists, geological maps to students; prints and technical
diagrams and other articles of use to the scientist, craftsman, or
student are sometimes among the circulating stock.
REFERENCE LIBRARIES.
The lending library is for study and recreation, the reference library
for study and information, the latter term covering the sources to
be explored by the research student. A reference library is a much
more expensive thing than a lending collection of the same numerical
extent. Dictionaries, miscellaneous modern encyclopædias, atlases,
many-volumed treatises, books having costly illustrations, and the
numerous and rapidly multiplying books of inquiry, directories,
year-books, and other compendiums of information, bibliographies
and other registers--all these find their appropriate home in this
department, where also are stored calendars of state papers, Annual
Registers, Hansard, bound periodicals, transactions of learned
societies, and other long sets, the risk of mutilating which renders
them unsuitable for lending out. Such works as the Cambridge History of
English Literature and the Mediæval and Modern Histories are usually
duplicated, one set at least being available for lending; a host of
smaller works, even the expensive ones, are likewise duplicated when it
can be afforded.
In the large centres of population, reference libraries were opened
soon after the passing of the Ewart Act, and they have grown apace, to
no small extent as the result of windfalls in the shape of gifts or
legacies of private collections amassed by amateurs and other experts.
In the lesser towns, the lending department bulks large in comparison
with the reference department, which too often has had perforce to be
neglected. The one has been regarded as a necessity, the other as a
luxury that must wait for better times. The places in the kingdom where
a scholar could live and pursue his tasks with most of his material
within easy reach, in public or semi-public libraries, can still be
counted on the fingers of one hand: London and Edinburgh, the two
ancient university cities, perhaps Manchester, and possibly Dublin.
These towns have been favoured by other dispensations than the Public
Library Acts. Yet Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow each command at
least a quarter of a million books in their reference libraries; and
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff, Nottingham, and indeed
most towns with over 100,000 inhabitants, possess reference collections
respectable in the size and quality of their contents.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Donald Macbeth._
READING ROOM IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.]
To regard this department as merely a luxury is a bad mistake. True,
it is not a daily necessity of life to the average man; but there was
a time--there still is a time in many parts of the country--when even
a lending library is not supposed to be that. Yet the more lending
libraries are used to good purpose, the greater will be the average
man’s need for a place where he can seek or verify information of
every sort; where the student may consult the larger works of which
his text-books are but elementary abstracts or expositions, and find
encyclopædias, lexicons, atlases, and commentaries to aid and elucidate
his reading; where the busy worker, whatever his occupation, may see
the expensive technical treatises and illustrated monographs that are
indispensable to an intelligent pursuit of his calling. The political
and social worker will find here the statistical returns, the inventor
the Patent Office specifications, the researcher, if he cannot get all
he wants, will discover where it is to be found from a liberal supply
of catalogues and bibliographies.
Reference libraries are the obvious complement to a service of books
for home consumption. The boundary between their domains is not
easy to mark out, nor will any attempt be made here to answer the
favourite question of the gravelled examiner in library routine: What
distinguishes a reference book from one for the lending library?
In most cases the distinction is obvious; in the more difficult,
local circumstances may settle the point. Librarians in charge of
comparatively small libraries may well shirk a final verdict, and
allow much latitude in the use of reference books for lending, and the
converse when the lending library book is in. Thus the whole stock of
books on the premises is at the reader’s disposal without any pedantic
restrictions. As an American authority sensibly puts it, “Obviously
there is no book that may not be used for ‘reference.’ A reader who
consults one of Anthony Hope’s stories to ascertain the name of a
character or to refresh his memory in regard to some incident, without
reading it consecutively, is using it as a reference book.”[4] Even a
magazine or review may be a work of reference. Back numbers of all that
are worth taking in are worth preserving for reference purposes; and
these, with the bound sets of past years, should be always available
for use. Energetic librarians index all the important articles as
they come out; the published indexes to periodicals forming a key to
the older numbers. Lastly, the very newsroom has its place in the
reference scheme, its contents being a daily appendix to the stores of
information in the library. No department of the library economy should
work in isolation.
In London, principally through the circumstance that the twenty-eight
boroughs now existing were preceded by eighty-two parishes, two-thirds
of which had set up libraries for themselves before the present library
districts and borough authorities came into being in 1902, there are
far too many reference libraries in proportion to lending libraries.
Most of these are of indifferent or inferior quality, and, if they
were suppressed and their collections centralized in a series of large
district reference libraries, few would miss them, and the general
gain would be enormous. All the same, more numerous ready-reference
libraries are wanted. Every branch library should have a collection
of dictionaries, atlases, and general encyclopædias, in short all the
books that a business firm, a school, or the like usually provides
for daily use. But, since reference libraries are so expensive,
it is a vain and wasteful policy to duplicate them at random; and
the result is merely a scattered series of middling libraries, far
inferior to those open to all the world in Birmingham, Liverpool,
and Manchester, with a crippling of resources in other directions.
This is not said to belittle local effort. The point is that, though
Islington, Westminster, or Chelsea may each build up a reference
library not inferior to that found in the average provincial town of
like population, Islington, Westminster, and Chelsea are, after all,
parts of London, and the Londoner ought to be vastly better off than
the average provincial--else why should he stay there?
Though to one acquainted with the exacting needs of all grades and
varieties of readers the deficiencies of our reference libraries are
evident enough, it is none the less true that the richness of their
contents and the value they yield to judicious users are realized by
only a fraction of the public. Librarians have never been allowed to
advertize their wares; a notice in the press such as a university or
a State department would not consider beneath its dignity would have
called down a reprimand and probably a surcharge from the Government
auditor. In a strange town, the visitor may have some trouble to
find out, first whether a public library exists, and then where.
Advertisements in tramcars and finger-posts in the street are usually
looked for in vain. Things being so, it is better to lay stress on what
the reference library can and does do than on any delinquencies, since
public opinion is sure to learn in time from the books that are there
to be read, the immensity of the desiderata. In the cities previously
mentioned as possible abodes for a worker among books, one may acquire
a competent idea of this immensity. In other large towns and in several
London boroughs, one may find reference libraries sufficing for the
ordinary demands of all but the specialist and the researcher, and, in
addition, one commonly finds special collections that attract readers
from far away.
Thus Manchester, besides the ample provision of general works that
everybody would expect to find on its reference shelves, and a large
mass of works on textiles which would also be anticipated in the
metropolis of Lancashire, has a fine collection of English dialect
literature, others on music, the gipsies, and shorthand, and in the
Greenwood collection the largest library of works for librarians
in this country. The magnificent Hornby Library of engravings at
Liverpool is as great a pride to the city as its Walker Art Gallery.
Birmingham is famous for its Shakespeare Library, and possesses smaller
collections relating to Milton, Byron, and Cervantes. The Boulton
and Watt collection is also there. Stratford-on-Avon, again, is a
depot for Shakespeare literature, having the memorial building and
the valuable collection housed at the birth-place as well as the town
library. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, owns the Bewick collection, Northampton
the library of the poet Clare, Nottingham another accumulation of Byron
literature and association books, Kilmarnock a Burns library, Glasgow
among its many special sections a vast collection including not only
Burns material but Scottish literature in general; Bristol is rich in
works concerned with Chatterton, Cardiff specializes in Welsh books,
though the National Library of Wales, at Aberystwyth, designed to
be a British Museum for the principality, is fast outstripping this
as a storehouse of Celtic literature in the wider sense. A library
is fulfilling only its obvious duty by specializing in the staple
industry. At Stoke-on-Trent, however, the valuable library of ceramics
collected by Louis Solon, and acquired after his death by the Carnegie
United Kingdom Trust, has been placed, not in the public library,
but in the National Pottery School, where the library of the Ceramic
Society is also housed.
Many London libraries specialize in the same useful way, sometimes
in response to local needs, sometimes as the accidental result of
local associations. At Guildhall is the national Dickens library, at
Hampstead the Keats collection, at Chelsea one devoted to Carlyle. The
Bishopsgate Institute vies with Guildhall and St. Paul’s Cathedral
Library in a huge collection of London books, prints, maps, and other
miscellanea. The typographical library at the St. Bride Foundation
contains the notable collection of William Blades, biographer of
Caxton. But to consider London without taking into account the public
and semi-public libraries that are not under the Acts, many of them
highly individualized in the nature of their resources, and fitted to
fulfil definite functions in the national library machine, would be
absurd; and to treat them properly would require a volume. In fact, the
volume exists, though it makes only modest and tentative suggestions
for the wider application of all this intellectual wealth, much of
which is lying dormant or only half-used.[5]
It goes without saying that every provincial reference library worthy
of the name has a local collection of some importance. Most county
towns collect county literature, and other large places have their
regional collections. Regional surveys are largely carried on now
by schools and local organizations, often with the library and its
local collections as their central depository, and at all events
helping and helped by the library. Some public libraries have been
made depositories for the local records, and there is a strong case
for conferring or imposing this duty upon them by law. A librarian,
properly trained in palæography and the treatment of archives, is the
right sort of custodian; a well-appointed library is the right place
for the safe preservation, calendaring, and public use of documents.
The historian, social student, biographer, and genealogist would always
know then where to go for local information not to be found in London.
There are many other abiblia which Charles Lamb himself would approve
that are rightly supplied in generous measure by a good reference
library: modern maps, both of our own country and of the world, those
of the neighbourhood within a wide radius, including large-scale
Ordnance maps, accompanied by older maps of historical importance;
prints and drawings in well-organized series, and lantern-slides for
illustrating library lectures, or even to be issued on loan. The
systematic collections of lantern-slides at the Croydon Public Library
will be mentioned again later on. In this enterprising library numerous
other things are collected and made accessible for general use; for
example, illustrations, cut out and preserved, not because of their
individual merit as prints, but because of the value they acquire
in organized sets illustrating definite subjects. They are mounted in
uniform style and classified in vertical files; thus they are available
for reference purposes, and may be borrowed by teachers to illustrate
lessons in class. Croydon has about 12,000 such illustrations, and
the stock is constantly growing. Photographs of lace, woodwork,
astronomical phenomena, and other subjects are collected on similar
lines, and lent in sets to artists, craftsmen, and students. The
vertical file in which the Manchester commercial library stores its
press clippings and other items of information will be mentioned
later; it is an object-lesson in the preservation, classification,
and indexing of material which was erstwhile discarded as soon as it
had served the moment’s use, a lesson in the value created out of the
well-nigh valueless by mere organization; and teachers and business
organizers have not failed to bring their pupils and their staffs to
study what sheer method can accomplish.
[Illustration: GUILDHALL LIBRARY.]
But the whole library should be an object-lesson of high educational
value. A large, well-organized collection of books, especially if the
public be admitted to the interior, is a graphic example of method and
order, not to mention the enormous increment of value given to any
stock of material by systematic indexing. The art of classification
is not only an excellent mental discipline, but may be applied
with advantage in every province of business and life. Though a
classification of books is not the same thing as a classification of
things, and may depart widely from the exactness of logical theory,
there is no better way of inculcating the benefits of system than by
allowing the reader to find his way from shelf to shelf, and follow
the tracks pointed out for him to other book-cases the contents of
which are more distantly connected with his subject. It is superfluous
to point out the assistance the library gives in the choice of books,
not only to the reader who relies on it for his whole supply, but
on the book-lover and the purchaser of books. Of the aid offered to
the student and the potential student, over and above the library
organism itself as an efficient reading machine, more will be said
under the heading of library extension. In American libraries certain
members of the staff are told off for “floor duty,” that is, to keep a
sympathetic eye on persons looking out books and to offer guidance. It
is a duty calling for high attainments and insight into the particular
requirements and idiosyncrasies of readers. It would be unfair to
say it is a duty unfulfilled in libraries over here, since the more
active public libraries are beginning to organize themselves as real
bureaux of information; but in the precise form just described it is
practically unknown. Our method is to be ready with advice when it is
asked for; and in big libraries, such as the British Museum, it is
the most useful kind of advice, that of the specialist, which is our
particular forte. Yet we still repeat, “The librarian who reads is
lost!” More specialism, not less, is what we want.
NEWSROOMS AND MAGAZINE ROOMS.
Among the old-established departments the reading rooms where
newspapers and other periodical literature are displayed must, to judge
by statistics of use, take a foremost place. Hundreds of thousands
enter these newsrooms daily, twice as many as come into the lending
libraries. Until the question was raised ten years ago by the late
J. D. Brown, a librarian who attempted reconstruction in library
administration long before the word began to be written with a big R,
it seemed the most natural and unchallengeable thing in the world to
put a newsroom in every library building and furnish it with a motley
array of dailies and weeklies of all denominations. Brown induced the
committee of the Islington Public Libraries to reform the reading room
in a drastic way. No newspaper except the “Times” was provided for
public consumption, though the advertisement columns were cut out from
others and posted for the benefit of the unemployed.
This violent departure from routine did bring out the fact that
newsrooms, at any rate as they were and as they are at present, occupy
a somewhat illogical position. At first sight, there hardly seems any
better justification for their inclusion in a library than that they
also provide reading matter. But it is reading matter, too often, of a
very different and doubtful kind; and the awkward fact that it is not
the same people who use the newsroom that use the library, in short
that the library proper and the newsroom, but for an inconsiderable
overlap, cater for two different publics, gives occasion for thought.
To put it roundly, the proper place in the library scheme for the
newspaper and its like has never been thought out. Brown went too far,
and the library which was the scene of this experiment is now furnished
with a careful selection of newspapers as well as with magazines and
reviews of good standing. But he gave the problem serious thought. In
the various public reading rooms which were under his care, he saw
to it that the right kind of periodicals were provided, and the best
of each kind. Among his many publications on library practice was a
classified and annotated list of English and foreign periodicals, which
ought to have done even more than it has to help provide something far
better and more scientific than the mere hotchpotch of journalism with
which too many tables are littered. Here again, economy of the baser
sort has been the offender; for the poorest journalism is, of course,
the cheapest, and a steady provision of the high-class periodicals
recommended by Brown is an expensive drain on slender funds.
[Illustration: READING ROOM, STEPNEY PUBLIC LIBRARY.]
The library cannot do without the newspaper any more than it can do
without the review, the technical periodical, and the learned society’s
journal. All of these are necessary supplements to the books, since
they are records of new knowledge; and they require the same care in
selection, the guiding principle of which must be a clear idea of
what they are there for. The much-debated dictum that history is past
politics and politics current history needs no debate as a reason why
the leading newspapers and the weekly reviews should be accessible
in public libraries. Almost every one takes in a paper suited to his
opinions: the public newsroom should give the opportunity of studying
other opinions, and also of checking information by comparison of
different sources and versions that conflict. The newsroom is to the
library as the open-air excursion to the botany class, the laboratory
to the lecture-room. Here theory and doctrine are seen in action;
applied politics, applied sociology, all the different phases of the
science of life set forth in books illustrated, tested, verified,
or confuted. Which study is of more importance than the other?
Fortunately, that is a futile question: the relevant one is, how
incalculably each gains by conjunction with the other.
There is no need to provide the paper that every one buys. Nor are
those that deal in police news, divorce cases, spice and sensation, the
journals that a public institution is called upon to buy. The most
authoritative journals, representing each of the recognized parties,
weekly reviews of similar credentials, and the leading provincial
organs, are all that need be supplied in this group. Even in a large
and prosperous library, it is better to duplicate such than to make
too wide a selection. Subsidized journals, sent gratis by political
or social cliques or by advertising agents, might as well be rejected
altogether; where they are accepted, the approved course is to
pigeon-hole them until there is an applicant. The least approved is to
employ this worthless stuff to cover serious gaps, and offer the public
a stone when it asks for bread. A library committee should feel the
same responsibility for a newspaper as for a book. By admitting either,
they virtually give it a public guarantee.
But if the newspaper is to be treated as the organ of current history,
then the newspaper room should be equipped with every facility for
rendering current history real and intelligible. Maps of every part
of the world should be hung over the reading stands. The room itself
should be in the closest contiguity with the reference library, and
should contain a ready-reference collection on open shelves, enabling
readers to consult dictionaries, encyclopædias, statistical year-books,
compendiums of geography, and other sources of general information as
they read. That it should not be separated from the reading room where
the periodical magazines and reviews are kept goes without saying.
Files of such as are preserved should be close at hand. All this
means that the reading room for newspapers will be another expensive
department; yet the policy of making it a vital part of the whole
library undertaking is in the long run economic. Here, surely, that
training for citizenship which so many are preaching may be carried on
without the features that make it objectionable to the old-fashioned
party man. The existence of public newsrooms where the daily papers
are read intelligently and their pronouncements checked and compared,
might, in the course of time, react healthily on the daily press itself.
As to the lighter class of periodical, the same discretion has to be
exercised in shunning the frivolous and worthless as an intelligent and
responsible committee, not devoid of a sense of humour, would display
in handling fiction. It is high time that the policy of treating this
department as a kind of bait for the unregenerate, something to make
the library popular, were abandoned. It is a delusive policy, grounded
on two false assumptions--the first, that it is our duty to get people
to read, no matter what they read; the second, that if you start them
reading and bring them into the library they will eventually proceed
to higher things. Every librarian knows that the habitual consumer
of silly and pernicious reading-matter never can, without some almost
miraculous change of mind, be taught to read and enjoy anything else.
If you lure him with rubbish, you are encouraging tastes that are a
greater obstacle to library progress than absolute illiteracy; you are
putting obstacles in the road you propose to take him. The remark of an
American librarian about certain popular novelists, that the people who
like that sort of thing would be more sensible and better educated had
they never learned to read, applies even more forcibly to the besotted
victims of our periodicals of the baser sort. But the mere fact that
the public who kill time with this sort of chewing-gum are not the
public that borrow books or use the reference library, at once disposes
of such a plea. By all means, let us have light literature, but let it
be literature, and not an unrecognizable imitation.
Much, however, and far the largest amount of the material in a
well-appointed reading room will not be literature at all, but simply
information. In the chief London and many provincial libraries a large
number of scientific and technical periodicals are taken, including
publications of research societies and a good many foreign periodicals.
More are required, and, as our public libraries are able to spend more
money, one at least in each large area of population ought to be as
well provided in this respect as are the science libraries at South
Kensington, the university libraries, or, say, the Manchester Literary
and Philosophical Institution, to take a good provincial example. These
publications are as necessary as it is to keep editions of scientific
and technical books thoroughly up to date. Their contents should be
fully accessible, and to ensure this every library must subscribe to
the Subject-Index to Periodicals. A practice increasing in frequency
is that of indexing the current periodicals as they arrive, and
mounting the entries in a mechanical guard-book or vertical file.
Such libraries as possess a stock of long sets will naturally be
provided with Poole’s and the other older indexes to periodicals; even
libraries not possessing such long sets ought to have the indexes, for
the same reason as they have other bibliographical guides, namely,
to show inquirers in what books or periodicals information exists,
an intelligent staff being relied upon to point out in what nearest
libraries the books or periodicals are to be found.
SPECIAL READING ROOMS.
Not much is to be said nowadays in favour of separate reading rooms for
ladies; the segregation of the sexes is going out of fashion, even in
railway travelling. Yet they are still provided; for instance, the fine
library building now all but completed at Dunfermline has a ladies’
room worthy of its scale and dignity. Far more urgent is the need for
separate rooms where students can read and write in peace and quiet;
children’s reading rooms will be discussed under another head. The
Adult Education Committee wisely emphasized this desirability. “It is,
in our view, essential that in all public libraries, in addition to the
usual reading room where newspapers and magazines are consulted, there
should be a room for the purposes of study. It is too often forgotten
that many students have no place where they can study in comfort. It
is also most desirable that all public libraries should possess a room
large enough to be used for classes, lectures, and discussions.”[6]
The latter requirement should have been framed differently. A lecture
room is not a good class room. Every library should have its lecture
room; it should also have one or more small rooms suitable for classes,
tutorial or other, of the cosy size and character that help so much
to bring out comradeship and intimacy. Whoever has tried to conduct a
seminar numbering more than a dozen members will have experienced how
difficult it is to break down shyness and evoke a frank and genuine
exchange of thought. Rooms that are small and intimate are wanted for
reading circles and discussions; at a pinch, the study room can be
utilized; but both purposes must be served, and often at the same hour.
The need for still other rooms dedicated to special uses will appear
when we deal with the various forms of library extension.
THE CHILDREN’S DEPARTMENT.
During the nineties of last century a good many libraries began to
allot separate reading rooms to the children, at first, as a rule,
to boys only, but later to boys and girls, sometimes in separation,
sometimes together. At first experimental and subsidiary, this
children’s reading room, usually combined with a children’s library,
has come to be an essential part of the modern public library: those
that are without it have no claim to be considered modern. Its relative
importance varies according to the views of different committees and
librarians, and also according to the local ability or willingness
to meet the heavy cost of running such a department on proper lines.
When we remember that the children are our future reading public, and
when, taking a broader view, we imagine what it would have meant had
every man and woman been trained from childhood in the intelligent
use of books, we see how impossible it is to overrate this side of
public library work. We must treat the child in the library in the most
liberal, sympathetic, and respectful way. We must give the child in our
libraries and reading rooms, from the outset, all the privileges and
dignity of a citizen, and the future of our libraries and reading rooms
will be ensured.
Birkenhead seems to have been the first town to become alive to the
need of special provision for the youngest readers. Child readers
enjoyed the advantage of a special section in the lending library
there as long ago as 1865, and a few years later they were furnished
with a separate catalogue of the children’s library. At Nottingham,
a benevolent M.P., the late Samuel Morley, gave a sum in 1882 to
found a separate building for children. These English libraries laid
the first stone; but it was in American libraries that most of the
building now took place. In the United States, the mere children’s
corner rapidly developed into the separate library and reading room,
and then gradually into a very peculiar and admirable thing, the
children’s room--a distinct department, under the control of persons
trained to work with children. It is a sort of autonomous children’s
institute, combining something of the kindergarten with a well-planned
school library ministering to both teaching and recreation. There are
readable books to be read on the spot or taken home; works of reference
to help in doing school work and make this more interesting; pictures,
statuettes, and miscellaneous exhibits, which have more meaning given
them by reading courses, talks, and illustrated lectures; and, finally,
there is the story-telling--an art on which the American librarian
pins much faith as a mode of awakening interest and evoking the right
atmosphere before a child reads books on any given subject.
In this country, the Junior Library at Croydon is perhaps as near an
approach as any we have made to the American idea. It occupies one of
the largest rooms in the central building, and combines the functions
of lending and reference library and magazine room. There is a platform
and a lantern screen; ferns and other plants are dotted about. Any
child of school age is admissible on the recommendation of a teacher.
The librarian in charge and the one assistant do nothing but work
for children; the children make it possible for them to carry out an
extremely full and varied programme by acting as voluntary helpers,
and are trained to serve at the counter, put books back in classified
order on the shelves, and act as monitors. Others are drilled in groups
for various duties, such as cutting out and mounting pictures for
the great cyclopædia of illustrations, lettering posters, writing up
bulletins of topical information for their fellow-readers. Lectures
are delivered once a week at least, and story hours come much oftener.
The children’s librarian takes classes brought from the schools, and
explains the value of classification or the use and pleasures of books.
Teachers, also, are allowed to use the children’s library at times as
a class-room, illustrating lessons from the books and other exhibits
there. Sometimes a class is brought and the children are simply
allowed to browse at will. The collection of pictures is utilized in
many ways. Sets of illustrations are hung on green baise screens to
illustrate current events, the seasons of the year, the birthdays of
notable men, and so on, with lists of the books in the library on the
subjects to which the children have been introduced. A large part of
the librarian’s time is taken up with showing the young readers how to
find their way about among the reference books, and how to make the
easiest and most remunerative use of these in their school lessons and
their private hobbies. But the children are also gradually trained to
help each other, and eventually to help the librarian in the daily
routine of what they soon come to regard as their own library; they
grow, in fact, into a sort of union society, running all sorts of
affairs on their own account, with the official but not too officious
eye directing and assisting rather than controlling their efforts.
They might be compared to a group of patrols under a scoutmaster. The
library in the children’s room contains about 4,000 volumes, and issues
from 1,000 to 1,200 every week; in the period of five months from the
report on which many of these details are taken, 1,200 new borrowers
enrolled themselves.
Discipline, of course, must be maintained; this is essential to smooth
working; but it must be evoked rather than imposed. Only the right
sort of person, having had the right sort of training, even if born
with the right disposition, is competent to evoke it and at the same
time keep the children friendly, happy, and occupied with interesting
things. Scores of children’s reading rooms have been a failure from the
lack of this well-qualified superintendent. It is a waste of time to
try running them as a minor department, to be committed to the hands
of each junior assistant as his turn comes on the time-sheet. A mob
of youngsters idling their time away and making the pleasant place a
bear-garden would be the certain result. One common mistake that has
a bad initial effect is to make the junior readers enter the library
at a separate door, usually guarded by a special custodian who is a
martinet. This preliminary insult to a child’s dignity is, perhaps
unconsciously, resented; it strikes a wrong note. The idea that he or
she must be segregated from grown-up readers subtly provokes a spirit
precisely the opposite of that which needs to be cultivated. It is more
fatal than the contrary mistake of pampering and idolizing children.
Put him or her on nearly the same footing as their elders; mutual
deference is infinitely better than the eighteenth century doctrine
that every child is either a limb of Satan or a little imbecile.
To attain full success, librarian, teacher, and parents must learn
to co-operate. Few parents take any interest in what their children
read, and those few often take too much; they do not understand that
coercion, or even a too didactic purpose, is fatal to the true object
of an apprenticeship to reading, and will assuredly not lead children
to love and enjoy reading, or to discover for themselves the values it
can give to their own interests and pleasures. Until parents in general
are capable of taking a wise interest, it is better perhaps that they
should remain as indifferent as most parents are. In the fulness of
time, when our children’s rooms are less markedly inferior to those
across the Atlantic, when each has an adequate staff of persons trained
for this highly specialized work, and teachers understand how much can
be done by suggestion to direct the child’s reading and so lighten
their own labours in teaching, by then the parent will doubtless have
learned to take a proper share of interest and responsibility. All this
cannot be achieved in one generation. We have now had public libraries
for three-quarters of a century; but, for the arrears of intelligent
use we have to make up, we might have only just begun experimenting
with them.
The secret of success is to bring out the child’s own initiative.
This, it may be taken for granted, is not a tendency to original sin.
Good taste, like good art, is at bottom a natural thing: a misguided
belief that it must be painfully instilled has done more than aught
else to pervert it. Children perceive as much instinctively; hence
their suspicion of well-meant efforts to put them on the right paths.
A boy will hate even _Robinson Crusoe_ if he is told he must read it;
rather let him discover the realms of gold for himself. All which means
that children want handling in matters of taste with a refined skill
to which the mere common sense and tact required by the adult reader
in a library is nothing. It means, again, that though the children’s
librarian is sometimes born, when he, or rather she, has to be made,
the making is an important and highly specialized process.
Other obvious points must be borne in mind, by teachers, parents,
and librarians. The mere posture in reading, and the need for a good
light at the proper angle, are not minor points, for bad habits in
this respect are ruinous and alarmingly common. Many children read far
too much. They must not be allowed to become bookworms; the parent
ought to see that they have a healthy outdoor life, and the teacher
that the charms of the book-world do not lead to the neglect of tasks
set at school. Steady co-operation with the teachers in leading
children to find in books aids to the business and the pleasures of
life, is characteristic of those library systems where the children’s
department has been given its due place in the scheme, and is not a
mere side-show, ignorantly mismanaged and not thought worth spending
money on. It is characteristic, for instance, of the admirable group
of children’s libraries and reading rooms in the Islington Public
Libraries, with its stock of 10,000 volumes set aside for the junior
clients. There are numerous others in London and the provinces where
co-operation is carried on in some form or another; but differences
of opinion on the comparative merits of school libraries and of the
library in the children’s reading room make for differences of method.
Yet access to a school library does not render the public library any
the less valuable to an intelligent child; and there ought to be the
fullest mutual understanding and the keenest desire to help each other
between librarian and teacher.
The fare provided in the children’s department consists, not only
of books, but also of the best juvenile magazines, together with a
sprinkling of illustrated weeklies and monthlies intended by the
producers for readers of any age. Easy French magazines are sometimes
provided. On the reference shelves stand suitable encyclopædias,
atlases and gazetteers, dictionaries of several languages, works on
local history and topography, illustrated natural histories, the works
of the poets, and many other books that are likely to prove useful to
children in their home work. The choice of books for children is a
different thing now from what it was before the advent of Kingsley,
Kingston, and Kipling. With a few exceptions, the didactic trash that
constituted the whole stock of children’s literature a century ago may
now be jettisoned, along with a still greater volume of more recent
lumber depressingly written down to the childish intellect. Any modern
author, for children or any one else, knows, if he knows his business
at all, that the first thing to avoid is the habit or affectation or
process of writing down to an inferior mind. Lewis Carroll, Sir James
Barrie, Walter de la Mare conquered the child by writing as children
themselves, and writing their best, writing with all their genius and
with all the gusto due to things that are high and serious. Didactic
writing is always bad. It cannot help being bad. The moment a writer
begins to think of his audience instead of his subject, he becomes
self-conscious and artificial. Worst of all when he has the effrontery
to think of that audience as inferior to himself, and tries to adapt
his thoughts to feebler understandings. Children are not slower than
those of riper age to detect the false note, and be insulted by the
condescension. Thus it is far better to offer children books that have
been written for their elders than such as have been manufactured on
the plan of mild adulteration. In fact, a very large proportion of
the best books in the junior library belong to this higher category.
_Robinson Crusoe_ and _Gulliver_ are obvious examples; _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_ is another; _Kidnapped_ will be received as warmly as _Treasure
Island_ or _The Black Arrow_, and if _Lavengro_ has not such a
universal appeal there will be no hesitation about _The Cloister and
the Hearth_. Many of the novels of Blackmore and Stanley Weyman, most
of Dickens’s, some of Thackeray’s and all of Scott’s are on the shelves
of every good children’s library; and Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, and
some at any rate of George Eliot’s novels will meet the taste of girls.
Many works of travel, some histories, and biographies not a few,
such as the delightful life of Frank Buckland, are as much in place
here as in the senior library; and among the poets and essayists the
same freedom of choice may safely be exercised. Both publishers and
librarians are now at one in seeing that there is nothing shoddy in
the format of the books provided for children any more than in their
contents; good paper, readable print, and illustrations of artistic
merit, are becoming the rule. In the last-named particular children’s
books at the present day are immensely superior to the volumes of
popular fiction that seem to be perfectly satisfactory to thousands who
are obviously their elders, but hardly their betters.
The advantages of a closer relationship between education authorities
and library authorities are manifest both in children’s rooms in
libraries and children’s libraries in schools. The library is certainly
part of the educational fabric. On the one hand, the teacher is aided
enormously by the child’s work in the library, all the more if that
work is spontaneous and enjoyable; on the other hand, the children
who find out the vital part a library can play in their work and
recreations, who have become familiar with books of reference and
periodicals, with the uses of catalogues, the vistas opened by files,
albums, and indexes, and the order and intelligibility brought about
by a clear system of classification, will have acquired something of
inestimable value in the process of self-development to be carried on
long after school-days are over. The Adult Education Committee were of
opinion that the intimate relationship required could not exist without
a common administration; and they would accordingly have placed all our
public libraries under the care of the education authorities. There
is no need at this point to discuss their proposals, beyond assenting
to the argument for the closest bond between school and library. Even
if they continue to be managed by different authorities, all library
activities in the schools should be worked from the library. Whether
school libraries are stationary or circulating collections, they should
be administered from the children’s library as the base, and their
complementary relation thereto should be an important fact in the mind
of every child reader.
In England it must not be hastily assumed that every town or even the
majority are blessed with all the facilities described above for the
benefit of children. Only a few have faced the problem seriously, and
hardly any have faced the expense of a thorough service. A town like
Toronto employs twenty-one assistant-librarians in the mere work of
supervising the school libraries, and many American cities have much
larger staffs engaged on this alone. It is obvious, at all events, that
no library authority can be expected to carry on such an undertaking
except at the cost of the sister authority, ready though it may be
to furnish the knowledge and experience of a trained staff. Common
administration, or at least harmonious administration under departments
of the same supreme body, seems a logical consequence.
COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL LIBRARIES.
Libraries, like the books they house and distribute, have multiplex
reasons for their existence. Their highest aim, like that of education
itself, is to promote the mental and spiritual life of the community;
they are humanist foundations. But the race must be conserved; our
daily needs must be satisfied. National safety, liberty to develop
ourselves, the economy of our physical existence, must be assured, or
humanism is a chimera. Our libraries must perform their necessary part
in the functions we label utilitarian, without, however, omitting or
slackening in their higher purposes. A general library, in short, is
concerned not only with human knowledge, but also with every human
interest and activity; not only with science, philosophy, theory,
but with all the practical arts, those which are for the preservation,
as well as those which are for the highest development of humanity.
In the department of the public library now to be considered these
material objects are the main concern. A modern commercial library is
something utterly different from any library heretofore considered.
Here, as an advocate of more and better commercial and technical
libraries puts it, “The humanist will have to give way to the economist
and man of science.”
[Illustration: PATENT OFFICE LIBRARY.]
From their earliest years, public libraries have admitted these claims,
and they have put forth special efforts to supply the peculiar needs of
the working classes. The nature of the industries carried on has been
the chief factor determining the directions in which the stock of books
should differ in any given locality from what may be described as the
standard selection. Text-books on such industries and their subsidiary
subjects, illustrated treatises and other expensive works of reference,
have been provided as liberally as funds permitted; and the same
attention has been paid to the local trades and professions. Certain
obvious restrictions must be allowed for, besides limited resources.
Few places have been able to provide a law library or an extensive
collection of medical books. The solicitor usually has his own
book-case of legal literature, and so with the physician and surgeon;
they also have access to large professional libraries. Nevertheless,
if the public library seems to disregard certain professions, it is
rather on the score of expense and of limited demands than that it
disclaims its duty. A national system of libraries would certainly have
to provide for these classes, probably by organizing a central supply
and loans to the nearest library, in the way proposed for dealing with
the more advanced and costly technical works for industries.
The working mechanic, the small manufacturer, the factory workman,
the technical student, and the tradesman are in a more necessitous
condition; they cannot give a standing order for all the newest
manuals, they have no professional library from which to borrow. In
highly technical industries, only the largest firms can afford to keep
abreast of the rapid growth in scientific knowledge; and to do it
they must install, not only a costly arsenal of books, digests, and
periodicals recording the fruits of research, but also a special staff
to extract, register, and index the most recent information. So rapid
is the rate of progress in all departments of knowledge that books
are quickly left behind, and the proceedings of scientific societies,
technical periodicals, and even the daily press, must be systematically
ransacked by the information bureau, if a progressive firm is to be
sure of utilizing every invention and improvement in the fullest
economic way. Andrew Carnegie said that his own firm wasted hundreds of
thousands of dollars through failing at first to provide their managers
with the fullest information on what had been done throughout the world
in their departments. Is the public library to confine itself to the
narrower mission of assisting the needy worker, or to launch out on
this more ambitious project, and compete with the skilled staff work
employed by the wealthy industrial corporation? After all, the wealthy
corporation has contributed in proportion to its rateable assets to
the upkeep of the library, and has, on the face of it, as good a claim
to some return as the meanest ratepayer, unless the original idea
that the public library was only for the working classes is still to
prevail. If the public library were, in the full sense, a working part
of the machinery for national welfare, there could be no doubt about
the answer. As it is, only a few of the more prosperous and energetic
libraries have accepted the larger obligation; and, even so, no British
library can be compared with the great commercial libraries of America,
with such a foundation as the Commercial Museum of Philadelphia, with
its exhaustive collections of technical and business information and
its staff of consulting specialists, or with the Institute of Commerce
at Antwerp.
The utter inability of the public library service to cope with the
requirements of industry and commerce was growing more manifest
before the war. It was true then as now that no single library could
satisfy the technical needs even of its own district, and that some
system of mutual aid and central supply must be devised to supplement
the finest local provision. With the violent awakening to the lack
of organization of our resources which the war brought about, the
problem came into clearer focus. The Library Association took the
matter up with due seriousness in 1916, first inquiring into the
best methods of developing the scientific and technical departments
of public libraries, and then into the collateral problem of
commercial libraries. The dual subject was before the important annual
conference of 1917, and strong resolutions were passed in favour of
establishing commercial libraries in the chief centres of trade, and
technical libraries in all large manufacturing towns, in both cases
as an integral part of the public library systems.[7] Since then,
the Technical and Commercial Libraries Committee appointed by the
Association has put together a mass of evidence on the subject, and
has carried on a vigorous propaganda. Their views did not, however,
meet with the full approval of the Adult Education Committee, who
inclined to the representations of the Committee of the Privy Council
for Scientific and Industrial Research that an independent series of
technical libraries should be created in connexion with industries
rather than with the existing libraries.[8] The weak point of the
Library Association’s case had been a certain vagueness as to the
methods by which, and the particular authority by whom, their admirable
proposals should be carried into effect. Although they acknowledged
that the work could not be done on a proper scale by the public
libraries unassisted, or without some measure of co-operation, they
hesitated to recommend that the public libraries should be organized
into a reciprocating system for the purpose. They declined to say who,
in their opinion, should set up and who should control the machinery of
co-operation, or precisely what the “measures of co-operation” should
be. This, of course, is the essential point of any scheme for concerted
action, and the rival project of the Adult Education Committee,
unfortunate as it must appear to any one experienced in the working of
libraries and alive to the wastefulness of duplication, at any rate was
free from this defect.
The question between the rival proposals now lies in abeyance. It is
as well that it should lie there, till a more constructive plan is put
forward on behalf of the public libraries. The country cannot afford to
set up an independent system of libraries at a time when expenditure
must be adjusted to strict necessities; it would be uneconomic to do
so at any time. Whatever the shortcomings of the nation’s libraries,
shortcomings due to the nation’s neglect in the past, these libraries
are a going concern, a machine well able to carry a larger load, under
which indeed they would run all the better and at a lower rate per
output. How absurd to erect new machinery when the old wants only a
little oiling! The proposals of the Adult Education Committee are
mistaken; those of the Library Association are defective. The theorist
failed to call in the expert: the expert suffered from obtuseness of
vision. Will they come together now to talk it over?
Meanwhile, the public libraries have been strengthening their
collections of technical literature, and commercial libraries have
actually been established as an offshoot of the central library
at Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Leeds, Bradford, Bristol, and
Manchester, whilst at Norwich, Northampton, Bolton, Croydon, and
Rochdale parts of the library have been set aside as business sections,
and catalogues or guide-books printed showing how their contents may
be utilized with the maximum of ease and profit. The advent of the
commercial library has done more at a single blow to rouse the public
imagination than any other event in the history of public libraries.
Business men, who had been indifferent to mere accumulations of
literature, found in this new species of library, containing hardly a
single volume that Charles Lamb would have dignified with the name of
a book, a bureau performing gratis all the useful services that the
wealthy business concern obtains at exorbitant expense from its large
office library or department of information. Within a year, the Glasgow
librarian was able to report that 30,000 visits had been paid to the
new establishment by business people, and a large number of inquiries
by letter, telephone, or telegram satisfactorily answered. The average
daily consultations during the first year at Manchester, by all sorts
of persons from managing directors to messengers, was three hundred.[9]
In Bristol last year the consultations of books, periodicals, files,
and indexes totalled 51,181. Elsewhere the tale is the same.
A more particular account of the Manchester Commercial Library, the
latest to be opened, will indicate the distinctive features and
functions of these new departments. Its quarters are a large room in
the Royal Exchange, in the heart of the business region of the city:
here it was inaugurated by the Lord Mayor on October 23rd, 1919. A
handbook stating its aims and explaining its uses was issued, in which
it is pointed out that the commercial library is there to provide “any
and every kind of commercial information that may be obtained from
printed matter, and such additional information as it may be possible
to procure from public or private sources; and for the collection,
arrangement, and cataloguing of such printed matter, so as to render it
quickly and conveniently available for inquirers and readers. It is not
a technical library; those who want books on processes of manufacture
must consult the collection in the reference library in Piccadilly. Its
object is to cater for the man who markets commodities, and buys and
sells them; not for the man who makes them.”
In the fittings, furniture, and apparatus many new devices have been
introduced, such as the contrivance for mounting and storing maps on
vertical cylinders, and for displaying them flat on large tables--a
method that has certain advantages, especially when a number of
different maps have to be consulted in turn. But the most striking and
in many respects the most useful piece of library mechanism is the
vertical file. This is a vast accumulation of cuttings from newspapers
and other sources, systematically arranged, in which any item of
information that may be of service to the business man is preserved and
made available for instant reference by a subject index. About 100,000
clippings had been laid in, arranged, and indexed by March, 1921;
and this home-made encyclopædia, this vast inquire-within, enabled
the staff to answer off-hand a large percentage of the miscellaneous
queries coming in from hour to hour.[10] The periodicals taken number
over two hundred, and include a good many foreign publications. The
latest maps are added to the collection as they appear, and the
atlases include several that can hardly be found elsewhere, at least
in places accessible to the public. Thus the contents of the library
are multiform, books, pamphlets, leaflets, charts, tables, as well
as press cuttings; all are minutely classified, and graphic methods
of subject-cataloguing make it easy to trace the most out-of-the-way
information. Here is the summary of the contents given by the official
handbook:--
THE CONTENTS OF THE LIBRARY.
These may be roughly summarized as follows:
_Directories._--These embrace the whole of the United Kingdom, some
of the British Colonies, along with other countries of the world, and
the principal cities of the United States and Canada. Many important
trades are represented by trade directories and year books. There is
a Post Office Telephone Directory for the United Kingdom.
_Periodicals._--A careful selection has been made of over 150 trade
periodicals from all parts of the world.
_Parliamentary Publications._--The varied and most valuable
publications of the British Government, bearing, either in whole or
part, on commercial interests, are received regularly as issued.
_Chambers of Commerce Reports._--These include Chambers at home, and
in many foreign countries--Brazil, Egypt, South Africa, Australia,
India, Norway, Sweden, &c. The collection of Chamber of Commerce year
books is of value as illustrating the industries of the different
towns in the United Kingdom.
_Codes._--A.B.C., Bentley, Lieber, Lieber’s Five Letter, Scott’s
Western Union, &c.
_Dictionaries._--English, French, German, Spanish, Italian,
Portuguese, Russian.
_Tables._--Calculating tables and tables of foreign exchanges.
_Text-books._--Commercial law, banking, advertising, accountancy,
office methods, insurance, business organization, tariffs,
salesmanship, transportation, raw materials, and the commercial side
of textiles and engineering, are represented on the shelves by the
most recent books.
_Trade Catalogues._--These are collected purely from the point of
view of the value of the information contained in them, or as types
of catalogue production. At present a beginning only has been made,
many firms not having published catalogues during the war. The
catalogues are classified and catalogued in the same way as other
books.
_Maps and Atlases._--Commercial routes and different countries are
well represented, and the best of the new maps and atlases will be
added when published.
Parliamentary command papers dealing with commercial matters are
received on publication, and liberal assistance is given by the
Department of Overseas Trade, Chambers of Commerce both home and
foreign, trade societies, business firms, and British consuls and trade
commissioners. Bulletins are issued by the library month by month,
giving lists of books on accountancy, banking, foreign directories,
scientific management, advertising, foreign trade, and similar topics.
Even a manufacturer’s catalogue becomes a work of high utility and
importance when it takes its proper place in such a collection,
often affording valuable assistance to inquirers in search of the
manufacturer of any given article.
The Library of Commerce at Bristol is similarly organized, and has met
with like appreciation. The following is a return of the consultations
from February 1920 to January 22nd, 1921:--
1920 Books. Directories. Maps. Periodicals. Total.
Feb.-June 4378 6102 725 8137 19342
July 837 1502 172 2181 4692
August 735 1276 261 1780 4052
September 823 1402 172 1806 4203
October 986 1510 158 2115 4769
November 1221 1256 161 2079 4717
December 710 1155 133 1739 3737
1921
Jan. 1 (1 day) 21 43 3 81 148
Week ending
Jan. 8 184 333 34 513 1064
Jan. 15 220 326 35 504 1085
Jan. 22 220 301 36 518 1075
-------------------------------------------------------------
Grand Total 10,335 15,206 1,890 21,453 48,884
-------------------------------------------------------------
Here are some examples of the questions that have been asked and
answered--in several instances with the direct consequence that the
inquirer has been saved losses running into very large figures:--
What are the means of communication in Bechuanaland?
Was the 1893 vintage good?
What has been the _monthly_ percentage of the increase of the cost of
living since July 1914 (retail and wholesale)?
What is the procedure for the winding up of a company?
What is the bank deposit rate?
What is the amount payable for brokerage?
What is the state of the wool market in Australia?
Who are the principal makers of knitting machines?
Can the movements of a vessel be traced through 1920?
What is the stamp duty on a form of contract?
What is the position of trade in the Argentine?
What time would a steamer take to go from Hull to the Canary Isles?
What is the difference in the rate of exchange in U.S.A. in September
1919 and July 1920?
What is the duty on wine and spirits?
What is the position of the Belgian industries?
What is the time-limit for stamping a form of agreement?
Several inquiries for help in coding and decoding cables.
The width of the River Tees from Stockton to Middlesbrough.
Names of Portuguese shipowners trading with English ports.
Owners of steamers sailing between Dover and Calais, and particulars
of service.
The latest information re Indigo in India.
The flat rate of pay for seamen.
Price of bunker coal in New York in July, 1920.
At Leeds, the commercial library is combined with the technical
library--an unusual arrangement, but one for which there is a good deal
to be said as well as against. Technical libraries exist for the supply
of information, and also to subserve technical education: a commercial
library is for information simply. There are inconveniences attached to
the combination; it is not a mere question of logical differentiation.
Commercial libraries are open during business hours, and closed in the
evenings and on Saturday afternoons, the very time when the technical
student would use the library most. The one, again, is arranged
and furnished to facilitate rapid consultation, not as a place for
prolonged study. Logically, of course, it seems absurd to separate the
literature on making a thing from the literature on selling it, the
production department from the sales department. Big libraries may some
day divide naturally into a modern side and a humanist side, and this
might prove as convenient a dichotomy as it is suited to the logic of
modern life. At any rate, the experiment at Leeds is worth watching,
and public expedience must settle the point.
These commercial departments have enlarged the ordinary province
of the public library, and have developed into something like the
intelligence bureau of a large industrial firm. The staff is prepared
to supply, not only the means of information, but also information
itself. Many years ago, in the Cardiff and some other public libraries,
a new institution called the information desk came into vogue,
where a trained assistant sat at the receipt of questions, oral,
postal, or telephonic, which he answered forthwith, or after search
in directories, dictionaries, and other compendiums of information,
including the file of inquiries already handled. In a commercial town,
this departure from old-fashioned practice was welcomed as extremely
useful. Public libraries suddenly became popular with a class who had
hitherto scarcely noticed their existence. The new commercial libraries
perform the same function much more effectively, because they have far
larger masses of information tabulated and mobilized, and are ready to
lead up their reserves at any moment.
The Adult Education Committee criticize this transformation of part
of the library into an intelligence bureau. There seems to be a fear
that it may compete with the commercial intelligence department of
the Government or with the chambers of commerce. Admitting that the
boundary between the province of these organizations and that of the
commercial library is not easy to define, they protest “that the
function of the commercial department of a local library is primarily
to provide books concerned with the theory and practice of commerce
and cognate subjects, rather than detailed information on matters of
trade.” Here the mind of the theorist, the stern logician, is again
at work, making havoc of expediency, and also of common sense. If the
commercial library is doing the work so well, and doing it cheaply
into the bargain, then if you are going to shut up anything, shut up
the Government department: the trade association will be only too glad
to be saved doing the job over again. Give the library its proper
equipment in money and privilege, give it room and opportunity to
develop into an institute of commerce, and the taxpayer and many other
people’s pockets will be spared.[11] These outside organizations,
whether run by the Government or by the traders, are in fact working
under disadvantages so long as they are not lodged in a first-class
commercial library and carried on by a staff trained in library
methods, the results are less satisfactory and more costly to produce.
Every library, in one of its aspects, is an information bureau.
Pedantic classification may draw a sharp line between one sort of
information and another; experience and expediency point to the library
as the right place for the retail of intelligence, whether practical or
theoretic.
[Illustration:
_Photo Pictorial Agency._
LIBRARY OF THE INSTITUTE OF ACTUARIES, STAPLE INN HALL.]
The commercial library or the technical library provided by the
municipality will not lead to the extinction of the library belonging
to the private firm; rather may it be expected to tend to the
multiplication and development of these, just as access to books in
public libraries has led to more book-buying by readers, who have
learned the value of books, and feel the need to have certain works
always by them on their own shelves. The great immediate benefit is
to the smaller firms and the individual worker; but even they will no
doubt acquire eventually far more books for themselves, and a much
better selection of books, as a direct result of access to a public
business library, familiarity with its contents, and realization of the
enormous advantage of being in constant touch with the latest sources
of information. In the United States, which are incomparably better
off than this country in all sorts of commercial, technical, and other
special libraries provided by public funds, there are now about 2,500
business libraries established by progressive firms.[12]
BOOKS FOR THE BLIND.
As long ago as 1857, the Liverpool Public Libraries set the example of
providing books in raised type for the blind. At Nottingham, one of
the first to follow this lead, I remember many years later visiting
the room set apart for the blind, and watching several blind people
at work producing new pages in embossed print from another sightless
person’s dictation. Along the walls were deep cases enclosing long
sets of portly quartos or folios--novels by Scott or Dickens in eight
or ten volumes apiece, Macaulay’s _History of England_ in seventy-two,
the Bible in thirty-eight, and so on. At that time, the supply of
books for the blind had been so far centralized that most libraries
relied upon collections at Manchester, Nottingham, London, or other
places, run chiefly by voluntary organizations. And now, few if any
public libraries provide books for the blind themselves, the National
Library for the Blind, in Tufton Street, Westminster, or its branch
at Manchester, being a depot for all. This admirable institution, at
once a great bookstore and a place for both recreation and educational
work, with its reading rooms, music room, and hall for meetings and
discussions, was provided by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. Public
libraries and other institutions all over the country are entitled to
borrow from it for the benefit of their blind readers, on payment of
a moderate subscription. “It is closely affiliated with the Students’
Library at Oxford, which is gradually being built up to supply the
special needs of University men.”[13]
Stamping machinery is now used for the production of metal plates, from
which any number of copies of books in embossed type may be obtained,
though the process is costly. The Carnegie Trust has provided funds
for the manufacture of metal plates by the National Institute for the
Blind and by the Royal Blind Asylum and School at Edinburgh. All copies
of standard works thus printed--if the word may be used--are presented
to the National Library, and the stereotype plates remain on hand for
further issues.
The work of transcribing books by hand is, however, growing enormously,
and is of vast importance, as is shown by the fact that during 1920,
431 complete new works of literature running into 1,371 volumes of
Braille were produced in this way from ink print by the Library’s
voluntary workers (of whom there are some 500) whilst during the same
period 89 complete new works were published by the stereotyping houses.
It will thus be seen that if the blind of the country depended only on
the stereotyped books produced, their choice of reading matter would be
exceedingly limited.
Blind copyists are employed to duplicate the books at an average cost
of 25s. per volume, whence it is obvious that literary provision for
the blind is very expensive, and is possible on any adequate scale only
if liberal public support is forthcoming. Recently, alas, there has
been a vast increase in the numbers of blind persons. The idea of the
old charitable institutions that such readers would be satisfied with
books of moral edification was abandoned long ago; nowadays it would
be absurd. Books on every subject, serious reading and light reading,
educational literature and literature recording recent scientific
advances and expressing the latest phases of thought, are in demand
among blind readers representing every grade of culture. In short,
there is no more limit, except the cost of producing copies in this
special form, to the contents of a modern library for the blind than to
those of any other general library. At present, the National Library
has nearly 65,000 books on its shelves, besides some 12,000 volumes of
music.
The public library in any subscribing locality is thus relieved of the
serious burden, not merely of purchasing, but also of housing these
bulky volumes. A reader sends in his list of books required, which
is transmitted to the National Library, and the books are then sent
direct to the reader’s home. It is a work of public benefit, yea, of
national obligation, that surely cries loudly for State aid. In the
United States consignments of books for the blind are carried free to
the nearest post office or station. “Of 12,819 books for the blind
circulated by the New York Public Library in 1908, 8,558 were sent
free by mail.”[14] Our Post Office has made concessions not quite so
generous, allowing a book weighing 6¹⁄₂ lbs. to travel for 2d., and
one weighing 5 lbs. to be sent anywhere abroad for 2¹⁄₂d. The cheaper
transmission of books by post will become an urgent question whenever a
national system of interchange between all manner of libraries becomes
an accomplished fact; but, even then, the case of the blind will be one
calling for exceptional liberality.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] A. E. Bostwick. “The American Public Library,” p. 56-7.
[5] R. A. Rye. “The Libraries of London: a guide for students”
(University of London, 1910).
[6] Adult Education Committee: Final Report, par. 5.
[7] _A Question of the Day: Public Libraries_ (Library Association,
1918).
[8] _Third Interim Report_:--C.--Technical and Commercial Libraries.
[9] The following shows the number of readers monthly:--
Oct. 1919 1,316
Nov. 4,361
Dec. 4,405
Jan. 1920 5,608
Feb. 5,259
March 6,166
April 5,585
May 4,416
June 1920 6,029
July 5,772
Aug. 5,936
Sept. 6,365
Oct. 6,871
Nov. 7,428
Dec. 6,617
Jan. 1921 7,043
[10] On the other hand, the complexity and the efficiency organization
required in the technical library and information department of a
modern business undertaking, may be realized from an article on
“The Library at the Ardeer Factory of Nobel’s Explosives Co., Ltd.”
(_Library Association Record_, June, 1921).
[11] American opinion is all in favour of the use of the library as an
information department. “The aim of the business library is rather to
function as a central information, statistical, or research bureau,
or, like other departments, to aid directly or indirectly in profits,
in increasing quantity, quality, or efficiency of production, in
building up an intelligent work force, or in the general improvement
and extension of the business. Only in so far as it does this is
the business library justifiable.” J. H. Friedel, _Training for
Librarianship_, p. 115.
[12] “Within the last three years the number of business libraries has
more than doubled.” J. H. Friedel: _Training for Librarianship_ (1921),
p. 113. See also the chapters on Special Libraries, Agricultural
Libraries, Financial Libraries, Law Libraries, Technical Libraries, etc.
[13] Library Association Record, Aug., 1920, p. 258.
[14] A. E. Bostwick: _The American Public Library_, p. 31.
III
LIBRARY EXTENSION.
Library Extension is closely analogous to the more familiar phrase
University Extension. It stands for various activities that go outside,
often far outside, the province marked out by the Public Libraries
Acts, yet are natural if not inevitable corollaries of the educational
and social doctrines that formulated those Acts. They carry the
services and influence of the library into other spheres--the school,
the home, the voluntary association--and expand its functions from
the mechanical disposal of books as stock-in-trade to their treatment
as atoms packed with vital force, electrons charged with incalculable
energies capable of working great consequences in that susceptible
region, human life. A library may confine itself to a passive attitude,
and so long as it responds more or less freely to external pressure it
may be acceptable and useful to a small proportion of the persons who
pay for its upkeep. But it was long ago borne in upon the far-sighted
librarian and committee-man that a more active, nay, a positively
militant policy was required if the public library was to exercise
all its powers for good in the social economy. More books have
mouldered away or come to a like inglorious and ineffectual end than
were ever worn out by hard use. You can offer your public the finest
collection of books--it has been done again and again by profligate
philanthropists--and never get them read, or the people’s life and
taste improved. It is easy to buy books; it is much more difficult, and
far more important, to create readers.[15]
The librarian’s duty, he has found by harsh experience, is twofold: to
contrive a library service, and to see that the best use is made of it.
Instruction in the art of reading and in the choice of books, it may
be objected, is for the teacher, not the librarian. Theoretically, it
may be so; but the rejoinder is, our teachers have never succeeded in
the task, they have not even addressed themselves to it, and they are
not likely to succeed unless they work hand in hand with the librarian:
they must, indeed, rely on the librarian, the book-expert, more and
more under modern conditions, for guidance in their own reading and
in carrying out their own functions according to the newest lights.
It is largely owing to the lack of any regular correlation between
schools and libraries that the results of the Education Acts have been
so unsatisfactory. The mistakes of 1850 might have been rectified in
1870 by bringing the new system of schooling into the closest contact
with the public libraries. But, though it was enacted that every child
should be taught to read, that children should be taught how to read,
and where and what to read, seems to have scarcely entered the minds
of those responsible for elementary education. In introducing the
Education Estimates for 1917-8, Mr. Fisher said in the House of Commons
(April 19th, 1917):--
“I have been impressed by the fact that boys who have been stirred up
at the age of sixteen or seventeen to attend the technological classes
attached to our new universities in the north of England have so lost
the habit of intellectual activity as to cloy and impede the efficient
working of the college.... The country does not get full value out of
its elementary schools, because so much of the training and instruction
is subsequently lost.”
Why had these boys lost the habit of intellectual activity? Because,
first, though they had received the usual primary schooling, they
had never had instilled into them intellectual habits, interests,
or likings; and, second, because, even where libraries and other
intellectual institutions existed, they had never been brought inside
their doors, or learned that these things were their own and would
satisfy their multifarious needs the more they used them. Library
Extension aims at the repair of these oversights. The activities
which it connotes should be an important part of the library service
when this is reorganized on a national basis. In reality, Library
Extension is a return to the broader idea of the people’s institutes.
The lectures, reading circles, meetings for study and discussion, the
co-operative alliances with energetic bodies such as the Workers’
Educational Association, the local field club, scientific society,
or the like, the closer relations with schools and all intellectual
agencies, are revivals and developments of the social efforts at adult
education which gave life to those institutions in the early nineteenth
century.
As would be expected, the towns which have taken the lead in such
extension efforts as courses of public lectures have been places where
the traditional bond between the library and kindred foundations like
the museum and art gallery have never been severed. Such a combination
is a much more appropriate engine of extension activity than is the
library that is merely a library. It usually contains a lecture hall,
if not smaller rooms for study and discussion. In addition to the
books, which must be available and must be read if lectures are to
have any lasting results, the collections in the museum are there
for use in connexion with scientific and historical lectures, and
the gallery provides the most appropriate illustrations for those on
artistic subjects. In some towns, library, museum, and art gallery
are housed under one roof, governed by the same committee, and even
superintended by the same curator. Sometimes the technical school is
one of the group. Too close a coalition may have detrimental results.
Administration by one chief officer is hardly justifiable unless the
whole establishment is only on a moderate scale. There is always the
risk that one department will flourish at the expense of the others.
One of the most disastrous instances within my experience was when
the committee of a many-sided institute chose a librarian for his
qualifications as a college lecturer. In this case, it was the library
that went to the wall. In others, it has been the museum, the picture
gallery, or the school, when there has been one attached; or the
whole has suffered from the lack of close attention or of the special
knowledge and experience required equally by each department. But
this is no argument against the policy of putting them all under one
committee as branches of one corporate undertaking.
LECTURES IN THE LIBRARY.
At Liverpool, where library, museum, and art gallery are in the same
suite of buildings, and under one general committee, sections of which
are detailed to supervise the several departments, there is an example
of intimate correlation on the largest scale. Here, in the Picton
Theatre under the central library and in the lecture halls attached to
the branches, free courses of lectures have been carried on ever since
1865, averaging now some two hundred yearly, with an aggregate annual
attendance of nearly 200,000. At Bootle, Salford, Warrington, Wigan,
Cardiff, Wallasey, Bristol, Derby, Norwich, Maidstone, Leek, and other
places, mostly in the midlands, and at Islington, Croydon, Woolwich,
Walthamstow, Camberwell, Kingston, Chelsea, Hampstead, Fulham, Hornsey,
Bromley, and other public libraries in the London area, winter series
of public lectures were in full swing in the years before the war, and
in many cases have not been discontinued or have since been revived.
A good proportion of these libraries are of the old composite type,
complete with museum and art gallery; others are tending to become
such. At Nottingham, where the public library is in partnership, as it
were, with the University College next door, among various extension
efforts the half-hour talks on books and reading have for several
decades been a popular mode of stimulating taste and self-education,
both in adults and in children, and have been widely imitated. The
Manchester Public Library was the pioneer in this provision of lectures
bearing directly on the uses of libraries and the best methods of
reading and private study.
A large proportion of the library buildings put up during the last
two or three decades are possessed of lecture halls. “It is also
most desirable,” say the Adult Education Committee, “that all public
libraries should possess a room large enough to be used for classes,
lectures, and discussions.” And yet, only in a few spots, such as
Liverpool, enjoying the privileges of special Acts of Parliament,
is it legal to pay a lecturer’s fee, or indeed to spend a penny on
this invaluable and, one would think, indispensable work. Among
the principal reasons put forward by the Committee of 1849 for the
establishment of people’s libraries was the growing demand for public
lectures. Unfortunately, the point was overlooked or dropped out for
motives of policy when the Act was drafted, and repeated appeals to
have such expenditure legalized have fallen on deaf ears. Thus the work
is carried on under the most discouraging and repressive conditions. If
a public library is so reckless as to embark on illustrated lectures,
it must get hold of a lantern, in forma pauperis from some benevolent
donor, or borrow it from a neighbourly institution that is not hampered
by legislative taboos. Even to print a programme or post up a placard
means surcharge by the Government auditor. In some places, accordingly,
the cost is defrayed out of gifts by public-spirited citizens or by
sending round the hat for subscriptions. One excellent device, which
has obvious advantages over and above the financial expedience, is to
enrol the regular attendants at the lectures into a literary society
with a small subscription. Another and a very objectionable method is
to make advertisements on the programmes pay the printer’s bill. A
public institution ought not to be driven to such shifts. And, even
in the happiest circumstances, very rarely are funds forthcoming for
the engagement of professional lecturers: library committees have had,
almost without exception, to fall back upon the volunteer.
Nevertheless, efficient volunteers have been forthcoming: it is indeed
surprising how many lecturers of a high order can be enlisted by a
librarian who keeps his eyes open for ability and scholarship and
no caprice for hiding the light under a bushel. It was the present
writer’s duty to organize regular weekly lectures at the central
and the two chief district libraries of a large London borough for
several successive winters. By the exercise of some vigilance and
diplomacy, first-class lecturers on a variety of subjects were
secured, without a penny of expense to the borough. The quality of the
lectures was witnessed by the attendance, which averaged well over two
hundred--hundreds turned away on nights when there were bumper houses
not being counted. There is another side to this question of voluntary
lecturers, which may perhaps be urged by the Lecture Agency and the
University Extension boards, that it is robbing the paid lecturer of
his occupation. In the present condition of things the point hardly
arises. There is no money for the professional lecturer, so that the
amateur cannot be charged with blacklegging; but it will assuredly
arise when lecture and other tutorial schemes are properly recognized
and financed. When that time arrives, however, there will be such a
demand for lecturers that the whole question will be seen to have
different bearings. There will be courses of lectures running, or
demanding to be run, at every library, including most of the branch
establishments; there will be tutorial classes, reading circles, and
other groups requiring teachers or at least competent leaders, going
on concurrently. The library proper, that is the working collection
of books, will have become, or be tending to become, the heart, the
functional centre, of a complex organism; it will fall into its place
as the analogue of the library in a big college. Thus there will be
a wide and importunate demand for lecturers, and demand will create
supply only if every possible source is utilized. There will not be a
glut of trained lecturers, or even a sufficient supply. Rather, when
all the lecturers empanelled by official and commercial agencies are in
full employ, there will be keen competition for their spare moments.
When public libraries were first mooted, it was prophesied that the
bookseller would be deprived of a large part of his market, and every
new public library is supposed to be a blow to the trade. The results
are in direct contradiction. A better supply has created a keener
demand. Access to books has stimulated a desire to possess books. The
day of popular libraries was speedily followed by the day of the cheap
edition. There are many more bookshops than ever there were before;
and since there are more booksellers it may be safely concluded that,
in spite of complaints of bad trade, the sale of books has largely
increased. Even the commercial circulating library continues to
flourish. Similarly, it may be anticipated, the public organization of
lectures and teaching for adults, even though every source of supply is
tapped, including the amateur and the volunteer, will lead to a greater
demand for the trained professional, who will find his occupation not
gone but all the more thriving and profitable.
The modern museum and the art gallery in a large town have daily
lectures, or perhaps half-a-dozen lectures a day, provided to teach the
public how to understand and appreciate the value of their contents.
This is one of the main objects of lectures in public libraries, the
contents of which are far more various and extensive. But there are
other reasons for selecting the library building as the most suitable
place for all kinds of lectures for which appropriate illustrations in
the form of works of art, museum exhibits, and other material objects
are not available. Any lecture that aims at permanent results should
provide every member of the audience who wants to pursue the subject
with a reading list; better still, the actual books, arranged by the
librarian and the lecturer in a graduated course of reading, should be
on exhibition, and every facility should be given to the interested
person to take home books and commence his studies there and then.
Such are the considerations kept always in view by the modern librarian
who runs his courses of lectures, not as a side-show, or as a method
of advertizing the library and bringing in new readers, but as an
integral part of the library machine. In the Croydon Public Libraries,
to take one of several good examples, about a hundred lectures are
given annually, some to ordinary mixed audiences, some to bodies of
school children or to the young people in the junior library. The
halls are nearly always crowded with eager listeners. Most of the
lectures are accompanied by lantern illustrations, and the methods of
bringing them directly to bear on the stores of books in the library
are as thorough as in any place I know. The lecturers, who give their
services free, are furnished with lists of the books the library
contains on their particular subjects, and are requested to point out
any serious gaps. The titles of the books are shown on the screen, and
the lecturer makes his personal comments on each. After the lecture,
the actual books are exhibited, and any one in the audience, who
verifies his or her identity from the local directory or otherwise,
is allowed to borrow from these on the spot. Another useful method is
to distribute descriptive lists of the relevant books, arranged if
possible on a continuous plan of reading, such lists being drawn up in
collaboration with the lecturer. It was at Croydon, I believe, that
the library reading was introduced as a form of lecture. The librarian
or some other person well acquainted with a subject and also with the
literature of the subject to be found in the library, reads pieces of
description, notable prose, or fine verse, on such a topic as “The
Englishman in the Alps;” or “Byron, the poet and the man.” It is a
sort of spoken anthology, in short, stimulating interest in the works
illustrated.
UNIVERSITY EXTENSION COURSES, TUTORIAL CLASSES, READING CIRCLES.
Many years’ experience of library lectures from the internal point of
view, that is from the point of view of the librarian and organizer,
and also from that of an occasional lecturer in most of the public
libraries in and near London, as well as careful study of the effects
upon all kinds of hearers, has, however, convinced me that the opinion
of most educators and other critics is right: the only lectures which
are likely to have sound and lasting results are those that have
been carefully arranged to form part of a course. Sporadic lectures
are all very well in their way, but very much inferior in promoting
serious study and developing real knowledge. Reading an occasional
magazine article is not to be compared with reading a book. At the
same time, even if continuous courses can be provided, it would be a
mistake to drop the other sort altogether. The results, if usually
ephemeral, are not to be despised; such lectures are as a rule more
popular than the thorough-going University Extension course, and may
be a stepping-stone to that. And the organizer of such miscellaneous
series may, if he gives thought to the matter, arrange the lectures by
different specialists into groups on allied topics or aspects of the
same subject. He may do still better. The person, whether professional
or volunteer, who is qualified to deliver a first-class lecture would
usually prefer to deliver several, dealing with the same subject more
thoroughly and methodically--it is usually easier, and always far more
satisfactory. In nine cases out of ten, the results would be enormously
more valuable. To dispatch a serious theme in an hour’s discourse is an
effort that usually means a rapid and perhaps brilliant but superficial
handling, and does not always mean that surplusage is avoided. It is
too much like putting the day’s rations into a single meal.
One invaluable concomitant of the best and most remunerative form
of lectures is usually absent at those of the ordinary type, and
that is free discussion. This is not always invited, and, when it
is, discussion often resolves itself into complimentary speechifying
or else passages of arms in which the same orators week after week
display their gifts. To have any real success, lectures must arouse
debate. If there are no questions, no give and take between the mind
of the lecturer and of his hearers, the entertainment is likely to
remain barren. A University Extension lecturer will always invite
questions and the discussion of points that need elucidating; but he
will not always break down the shyness of those who would fain have
more light, even though a course going on from week to week tends to
make his listeners better prepared, and enables them to save up their
difficulties for an opportune moment. Here it is that the tutorial
class, which is run on the lines of a seminar, shows its superiority.
The tutorial class is a small and intimate circle, so small and
friendly that the most diffident are hardly likely to feel that asking
a question is like making a speech; its head is a leader and moderator
rather than a lecturer, and its methods are devised to call out
individual thought and initiative, and ensure that the subject shall be
viewed from every side and all difficulties of comprehension cleared
away. The members of the class do as much work as the teacher: the
better he is the more he gets them to do. Reading circles are usually
conducted on a very similar plan, the preparatory work of course being
done by the members at home. When instead of formal lectures papers
are read or discussions opened by members of a literary society,
fairly satisfactory results are usually obtained; but whatever scheme
be adopted, it is far better to split up into small groups than to be
ambitious of large attendances.
Many public libraries have wisely supplemented their own lecture
schemes by co-operating with University Extension. Even where the
library has not been able to offer a lecture room on the premises,
such co-operation may be very valuable, and a reciprocal advantage
to all concerned. The library can provide books for the students,
issuing reading lists which have been drawn up in consultation with
the lecturers; useful exhibitions, also, can be organized, from the
library’s own stores or from other sources. The tutorial classes
organized by the Workers’ Educational Association have been aided
effectively by such co-operation, which always reacts beneficially, in
more ways than meet the eye, on the libraries themselves. When there
is intimate association between libraries and technical colleges,
polytechnics, and the like, half at least of the real work will be done
in the library or through the books supplied by the library. Nor is it
only the urban libraries that are able to assert their true place in
adult education thus; several of the new rural repositories are working
hand in hand with the Workers’ Educational Association and its tutorial
classes, which have not failed on their part to utilize machinery
so apt to its purposes. Besides the ordinary stock of miscellaneous
books for the general reader, the wise rural librarian lays in a
good selection of the works required by reading circles and tutorial
classes, if necessary duplicating until there are enough copies for all
demands. But for this special call upon his resources, he would rely
upon the Central Library for Students to meet the requirements in works
of this class.
But public libraries as yet do not appear to have instituted tutorial
classes themselves, or indeed to have taken on their own shoulders
the financial responsibility of University Extension courses. Though
they have their own lecture halls and smaller rooms suitable for
the various purposes here enumerated, even the best and most active
library authorities have not done much more than hold such series of
miscellaneous and disconnected lectures as are, admittedly, not the
best.[16] That so much should have been accomplished, even whilst the
public libraries were toiling under the yoke of the penny rate limit,
is to their enduring credit; but it is little to what ought to be done,
under less hampering conditions, and to what the progressive among
them will assuredly do ere long. But the Act of 1919 merely restored
the right of every community to spend as much as it liked on certain
library purposes; it did not restore its natural right to spend money
on what objects it liked, as for example, library lectures or library
classes; still less did it infuse an eagerness to do so where no such
desire had previously existed. The removal of an unreasonable and
effete restriction can hardly be delayed much longer; but even when
there is no legal ban upon expenditure the cost of a paid university
teacher will often be prohibitive. Why then should not the alternative
be taken of appointing a volunteer? This is continually being done by
reading circles all over the country, organized in connection with or
in imitation of the National Home-Reading Union, and the results are
highly encouraging.
The fact is, our resources in private ability and willingness to
serve in such functions as these have never yet been fully explored:
they will have to be explored. Men of high academic attainments are
expensive items in a tutorial scheme providing for the intellectual
avocations of perhaps not more than a dozen zealous students; and, as
was hinted before, there will not be enough of them to go round--there
would not be enough now if a serious attempt were made to ascertain
actual wants and provide for them adequately. Vast numbers of
continuous courses, of multifarious kinds, are required everywhere in
these days of intellectual keenness. Let us try then to run some of
them at least on the lines of mutual help that have served so well in
the past. There has never been in this country any dearth of one kind
of personal ability, that of clear and racy exposition, in the sphere,
for instance, of local politics and lay preaching. It does not exist,
though appearances may be deceptive, in the sphere of intellectual
activity. It should not be more difficult to find leaders for reading
circles and study groups, or lecturers competent to deliver a short
course, than it is to find chairmen for parish councils, political
meetings, or local committees. Nor, if we proceed with common sense
and lay no stress on artificial difficulties, will there be any dearth
of discussion. The part of the leader will rather be to direct the
spontaneous flow, and prevent the study circle from degenerating into a
mere talking-shop. But even loquacity can be controlled and kept to the
point if there is a definite subject, and a course of reading clearly
marked out. A well-informed, tactful, and judicious leader will work
wonders if he observes the golden rule not to overwork himself. The
librarian himself and chosen members of any large staff should be able
to run at least a reading circle, if not to deliver public lectures.
The success of all such undertakings will depend of course on his
personal competence and insight; if he can take his own share in the
work with credit, he will be in the more intimate touch with the mental
attitude and potentialities of his public.
DRAMATIC AND OTHER CIRCLES.
Lectures and classes by no means exhaust the modes in which the
public library may carry on useful extension work; in truth, the ways
are almost unlimited, except that some forms of study, teaching, or
entertainment may cause inconvenience, unless the building is very
large and special accommodation arranged. Thus a small library is not a
suitable place for musical performances, although many public libraries
cater on a lavish scale for students of music. It is not an uncommon
thing, however, for dramatic readings and even full-length plays to
be introduced into the scheme of lectures, or for the library to be
the headquarters of a dramatic society. There is no better method of
imparting a real understanding and appreciation of our best literature
than to induce people to study a classical play dramatically. To begin
with, simple readings should be attempted, each member of the class
or study group taking a distinct part. As soon as the readers have
a grip of the action and plot, they should proceed to act, still
keeping the book before them. A few properties may be introduced, such
as a table and a chair or two and a flagon, in the revelling scene in
_Twelfth Night_, or a screen, in _The School for Scandal_--there is no
need for scenery or costumes. At some libraries, properties--and even
gestures--are entirely suppressed, and the reading is a reading pure
and simple.
Mention of these two plays brings to mind several incidents when this
rudimentary kind of acting brought out as fine and penetrating an
interpretation of the dramatist as any performance by professional
actors, with the usual lavish apparatus, that I have ever witnessed
in a West End theatre. Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Maria
and the Clown, were people I knew very well, attired in their ordinary
dress. The stage was a bare platform, and there was nothing on it but
a table and a few chairs. The performers had the book in their hands;
but, evidently, they were word-perfect in their parts. The scene
went with a verve and a naturalness that could hardly be bettered;
and--best of all--it was Shakespeare, interpreted by intelligent and
well-educated persons, who were the last people in the world to cut or
rewrite or recreate a part as they thought Shakespeare ought to have
written it. Another Sir Andrew Aguecheek is still more memorable. This
gentleman would probably have been a failure or a very indifferent
success in any other character: he was Sir Andrew Aguecheek in the
flesh--the wonder was how we had never noticed it all the years we
had known him. A still more delightful proof of the latent genius
that may be revealed by such modest performances was a certain Lady
Teazle. She was a plain and not a very youthful person; the stage was
as unfurnished and void of decoration as her get-up was plain and
ordinary. Yet, by dint of dramatic instinct that any much-beparagraphed
actress might envy, she easily conveyed the sense of youth and charm
and beauty--she was the finest Lady Teazle I have seen, on or off the
regular stage.
The London County Council and other educational bodies have thoroughly
recognized the untold possibilities of the dramatic study of drama.
It is undoubtedly the right method. Charles Lamb, in a famous essay,
propounded the doctrine that in the theatre we see the actors but
we may entirely fail to see the play. The plays of Shakespeare, he
paradoxically argued, “are less calculated for performance on a stage
than those of almost any other dramatist whatever.” The actor gets
between us and the dramatist; and if that was so in the days of Kemble
and Mrs. Siddons, how much more is it so in these days of sophisticated
stage-display and mannered acting. But put the student of Shakespeare
on the stage, however rudimentary the stage may be, and let him find
his way into the mind of the great playwright by himself, so far as he
may: that is how to study Shakespeare, and that is the mode of approach
sought in such dramatic readings or more elaborate interpretations as
are recommended here. Even the modest group of readers will probably
go on from strength to strength. One group which I first set on this
track were content at first with a series of readings, which were given
in public, after many rehearsals, at the various district libraries
of a London borough. Then they embarked on the complete presentation
of _The Merchant of Venice_, _As You Like It_, and _Twelfth Night_,
with scenery and costumes; and even ventured on a tragedy, all without
discredit. Ultimately, a troupe of experienced players, they gave
a series of Shakespearian plays at the Town Hall and other places,
not only clearing all expenses, but realizing a handsome sum for an
important charity. One of their number later on wrote a comedy, which
they produced with some success. Here, surely, is a piece of library
extension work having high cultural value; it is indicative of what may
easily be done by apt suggestion and cultivation of the group spirit;
and there are innumerable directions in which similar results may be
achieved.
RELATIONS WITH WORK OUTSIDE.
The principle to be kept in view is that the civic library is a most
natural home for all the intellectual activities of a social kind
going on in each community. Even if it is not convenient for all such
bodies to have their headquarters there, the library should entertain
the most friendly and active relations with every one. In the United
States, the public library in most cities performs a large part of
its most remunerative work through the medium of public and private
organizations outside. It may be likened to a nerve-centre, with
a network of efferent and afferent fibres and a series of ganglia
throughout the social organism. Thus the New York Public Library has
a long and miscellaneous list of clubs, leagues, musical societies,
classes of all sorts, business and other associations that hold their
meetings in its various branches. Many American libraries are ready
to plant a delivery station, dispatch a travelling library, or a
collection of special works, anywhere that it is asked for, or even
to provide an industrial firm with books, so long as accommodation
and an acting librarian are supplied. They will prepare select lists
of books on any given subject, get up an exhibition to celebrate any
event or help on any deserving movement: there is no end to the ways in
which they are prepared to put their services at the disposal of the
common weal. British libraries have laboured too much in isolation.
The future depends upon, more than anything else, its coming into the
closest touch with every intellectual and social agency in the body
politic. It should be a matter of course for the local scientific and
literary societies, the field club, the local branch of the Workers’
Educational Association and the National Home-Reading Union--to name
only two out of many--to make their home in the library building. The
antiquarian society should deposit its collections and books and maps
here, the natural history society its specimens and apparatus, thus
laying the foundations of a local museum to be housed in the situation
most favourable for study, both by themselves and by other inhabitants.
Local historical and regional surveys are rapidly developing, whether
as pieces of research aiming at the extension of knowledge or as a
practical form of education: the library, with its local records, maps,
and other historical material, should always be the base.
The Croydon Public Library is the centre from which the Photographic
Survey and Record of Surrey operates. Surrey took the lead in this
important branch of topographical history, and the photographic records
of buildings, scenery, and miscellaneous objects of interest now
collected in the library comprise some 8,000 prints and lantern-slides,
all elaborately classified and indexed for instant reference. Housed
along with these is the Regional Survey of Croydon, consisting of
maps prepared from actual surveys of the district within fifteen
miles’ radius, showing the geology, vegetation, surface utilization,
industries, etc. This also is accompanied by photographs. Further, an
artist has been commissioned to paint faithful records of architectural
or natural features that are likely to perish or be disfigured by
modern changes--a thing that will be of priceless value to future
generations. This logical extension of the work of preserving local
records, minute-books, newspapers, and various fugitive material is
being carried on elsewhere, notably at Coventry, Brighton, Northampton,
and Nottingham. It deserves the attention of the many local societies
that have not yet thrown in their lot with the local library.
LIBRARY EXHIBITIONS.
Libraries may themselves get up exhibitions or grant hospitality to
those organized by kindred bodies. The more the library takes a hand
in the preparation, the more can the series of exhibits be related to
the appropriate books, and the more effective will such efforts be
as aids to popular enlightenment. There is a wide choice of suitable
subjects--book-production and its various branches, engraving and other
arts, local history and geography, the sciences. The library will be
able to supply many of the exhibits from its own stores; usually it
is not difficult to borrow useful material from commercial or private
sources; and loan exhibits from the State museums are available
as nucleus, supplement, or even as forming the whole display. Such
exhibitions are placed under the care of keen and intelligent members
of the staff, and lectures or demonstrations are given illustrated by
the actual objects; the results are enormously ahead of those achieved
by the ordinary static exhibition. Lines of reading are pointed out,
and books brought into juxtaposition with their subject realities, in a
way that even the trained conductor in a museum or picture gallery can
hardly compass. Actual experience in organizing and running a number of
such exhibitions has left me with no doubt of their popularity or their
educational value. When an exhibition illustrating such a subject as
the production of a book goes on for three months in the libraries of a
London borough, and the average attendance during that period exceeds a
thousand a day, we may feel that we are beyond the experimental stage.
Even our rural libraries, when they are located in the village hall or
have a suitable building of their own, need not hesitate to attempt
an exhibition. In many ways, they have exceptional opportunities. To
begin with, there is nothing to compete with them; the novelty would
be absolute. And then there is suitable material of some sort or other
in abundance, botanical, geological, horticultural or agricultural, or
such as illustrates local history, local industries, or any subject
having strong associational interest. Differences of scope being
allowed for, the rural librarian would probably find he had much less
to do with his own hands than if he were getting up a show in the town.
Such places as rejoice in the possession of museums and art galleries
as well as libraries are specially favoured; but it does not inevitably
follow that these departments of public culture do combine forces so
effectually as do the places where the work is on a more frugal scale
but comes at any rate from one and the same fount of activity.
RELATIONS WITH THE SCHOOLS.
The chapter before this concluded with some account of library work
with children. The correlative of the children’s library and reading
room is the school library or the periodical loan of books to the
schools--sometimes it is the alternative. Under the Act of 1919 the
library authority in places newly adopting the Acts will be the local
education committee, and elsewhere the control of existing libraries
may be handed over voluntarily to that body. Long before this Act,
certain education committees had acted jointly with library committees
in establishing school libraries and other modes of bringing school
children into contact with good books. The aims and interests of
library and school in large measure coincide. Recent legislation
virtually admits this sound principle. Into the question whether it
is wise to vest the control of libraries in the education authority, a
question canvassed both for and against in the United States as well
as in this country, there is no need to enter at the moment. Everybody
agrees that children must be taught, or at least encouraged, at a
fairly early age, to read books for themselves and to have some idea of
the uses of a library. Most teachers and librarians would also agree
that every school should have a library of its own, and that at some
stage or other each child should be introduced to the public library.
Perhaps this is as far as we need go in the direction of agreement:
uniformity is surely not advisable, and local circumstances, relative
situation in particular, may have to determine the nature of the
interaction of library and school, and the more important point, how
soon should the school child shift the centre of his reading interests
from the school library to the public one, the one that is there to be
his intellectual mainstay throughout life? From the point of view of a
public librarian, it might be undesirable that a school library should
be so efficient and amply sufficing that elder children were deterred
from finding their way into the wider realm of the public library. The
school library should be but a tributary flowing into that main stream.
There are three modes of dealing with the problem of books for the
school child, and these may be variously combined. (1) There may be
a permanent collection, stationed in the school, consisting of graded
sets of reference works required to illustrate any of the subjects
taught or studied in the school; and further, a collection, large or
small, of such books, mainly of a recreational kind, as it may be
thought fit to provide for home reading. Such a collection may be
built up by the school itself or by the staff of the public library,
who would act, as a rule, in close consultation with the teachers. One
great advantage of having all the books permanently located at the
school is that the children look upon it then as really the school
library, and the teachers are able to familiarize themselves with the
contents, and thus can influence the children’s reading to the maximum.
If there are funds enough, a fairly large and representative collection
can be provided--one that the most voracious boy or girl is not likely
to exhaust till he or she is old enough to join the public library. The
best books become household possessions; children talk about them to
their chums, and not to have read them is a lapse that must be wiped
out. If, on the other hand _Westward Ho!_ or _Little Women_ is merely a
loan and has gone back to the central library, how can the young reader
get even with the luckier ones?
(2) To save the expense of a number of permanent school libraries,
an education authority may arrange with the public library to
organize a series of travelling collections or merely boxes of books
to circulate among the schools. This system may be combined with the
other, the reference collection being regarded, most reasonably, as
always indispensable and therefore permanent, and loans of books for
recreation supplied at fixed intervals. There is one unquestionable
boon attaching to this arrangement--the children enjoy the stimulus, as
the date comes round, of choosing and rejoicing among a fresh lot of
books. Many teachers too, no doubt, are not averse from a change.
(3) The third method implies suppression of the school library, at any
rate so far as it is anything beyond the indispensable collection of
volumes required for use in the school; it is to send the young reader
to the public library. If this is not far away, and especially if it
has a first-class junior department, where suitable reference books
can be used as well as books for entertainment borrowed for reading at
home, there is nothing to deplore; but to children in distant schools
the loss will be serious. The value of this third solution of the
problem, when it is a real solution and not an evasion, is that the
child is introduced early to a large collection of books, and also
comes into a different atmosphere from that of school. Its danger is
that the child may come unchaperoned to a library where there is but
a perfunctory service for the juniors, and will be turned adrift in a
pathless wilderness.
This third method may be seen at work in the schools of Poplar. One of
the poorest among the metropolitan boroughs, Poplar has been a leader
in many library movements, such as the scheme of interchange between
adjoining boroughs whereby all the books in a large group of libraries
are made available for borrowing by dwellers in any part of the area.
The libraries have long co-operated with the schools as actively as the
teachers would permit. Nothing is more essential to the mental life and
the economic efficiency of the future citizen than that the gap between
schooling and maturity should be bridged over. Poplar has realized the
fatal nature of that gap, and has long been doing its utmost to fill
up the chasm. School children come to the public library to do their
preparation and spend their leisure in the enjoyment of books. Classes
are brought by teachers during quiet hours, and sit in the public rooms
doing “silent reading.” For a long while measures have been taken so
that no single boy or girl in the schools shall go out into the world
without being introduced to the public library, and made acquainted
with all that books and libraries can do to help them in life and the
pleasures of life. Twice a week, the upper classes from schools in the
borough, coming in regular rotation, attend at the nearest library
to hear an address by the borough librarian, Mr. H. Rowlatt, or one
of his chief assistants, on the libraries of their own borough and
libraries in general, what they are and what they contain, and how
freedom and ability to utilize the manifold services they afford is
an invaluable part of the individual’s equipment for life.[17] The
librarian and his coadjutors have always thrown themselves heart and
soul into the work of co-operation with the schools; the children
listen eagerly, and the results are seen in the statistics of reading.
The vital importance of this work has now been recognized by the
London Education Committee. Similar schemes are being introduced in
the boroughs of Islington, Greenwich, and Hackney, and it may be hoped
that they will become general. This is by no means all that the Poplar
libraries are doing for the school children. Attempts are made to
help the older children in making up their minds on the occupation
they would choose. Sets of books illustrating various trades are put
before such children, from which they can gather an intelligent idea
of what is the real nature and interest of some craft or trade which
was previously a mere name. This has proved a real help in the critical
moment of many a child’s life. All formalities, such as monetary
guarantees against loss or damage, have been reduced to a minimum or
abolished for the benefit of school children, who are admitted to
full privileges on the bare recommendation of the teachers. Thousands
avail themselves of the opportunity thus held out, and many thousands
of books have been borrowed as a result without the loss of five
shillings’ worth of books per annum. The help given to the children in
general has likewise proved to be indirectly of inestimable value to
the teachers. They admit that the introduction of the library habit
among their young pupils has opened their own eyes to points they had
never realized. One head master volunteered the statement that it had
done away entirely with surreptitious reading of trash among the girls.
Poplar cannot afford a regular system of school libraries; yet, in
spite of poverty, it is signally doing yeoman’s service in moulding the
minds of our future citizens: it is a shining example to boroughs of
far superior resources.
On the whole, my own preference is for the stationary library, when the
school can afford a good one; but one’s preferences may be modified,
or even reversed, in altered circumstances. Whichever plan be adopted,
supervision, or rather sympathetic guidance, is essential. Such
guidance will, of course, be entirely of a positive, not a negative
kind, and will consist of tactful suggestion, suggestion as unobtrusive
as possible, by means of story-telling, illustrated talks, and personal
help. There is not the slightest need for attempting to fit the book
to the child. Let children read books for grown-ups if they have a
mind to, let boys read girls’ books; the girls will read the boys’
books whether you want them or no. It is taken for granted that the
whole library will be well-chosen, and everything in it worth reading.
Alarmist nonsense, emanating from English justices or militant New
England moralists, about boys led into crime by stories of brigands
and pirates, are not likely to upset parents or librarians with all
their faculties about them, including a normal sense of humour. If you
listened to these people, Stevenson and Dumas would have to be put into
a strait jacket, and Michael Scott, Aimard, and Mayne Reid burned by
the hangman. It is the last expiring gasp of the prudery and lust for
chastening the young which made the old-fashioned library for children
a byword. Far more important than any anxiety about moral or immoral
influence is an anxiety about good literature. Edification is thrown
away if the well-meaning author is unpossessed of charm. The first
requisite of a spell is that it shall work. Happily, the charm of fine
literature can hardly be attained but by the fine personality. Good
literature is healthy literature. Among the books a child will read
with delight, it is doubtful indeed whether a single example can be
found of a work of true literary worth that could lead a child astray.
Harrison Ainsworth’s _Jack Sheppard_ and Lytton’s _Paul Clifford_
perished from the catalogues of junior libraries, not because they were
wicked books, but because they were bad literature.
The best books should be duplicated over and over again, especially in
libraries that let their young readers roam along the book-shelves and
choose what they like--as all libraries should; and duplicated as far
as possible in various editions, especially illustrated editions. This
is a far wiser policy than aiming at a very comprehensive selection,
which means that quantities of second and third-rate stuff will be
introduced. After all, if life is short childhood is much shorter, and
if every child had the opportunity of reading all the books that are
fit, there would not be much time left before the date arrived for
migrating to wider spheres.
A bibliography of ideal works for children would not, however, be a
voluminous affair. The children’s librarian should form something of
the sort for use, and the books starred in its pages as superlative
should never be out--there should always be copies enough to ensure
this. The young reader will find it hard to resist the appeal, if he
sees one attractive copy and next week another staring him in the face:
it will assuage disappointment for the absence of something else, or
charming pictures may tempt to a second reading of a classic already
familiar. By such careful management the taste of a healthy child will
remain unspoiled, and in later life sound judgment and appreciation of
the best will show the results of this novitiate.
In America, the question of circulating versus stationary libraries has
been well thrashed out, though not to a unanimous verdict. At Buffalo,
the respective spheres of the library and the education authority
have been carefully defined. School libraries are limited strictly to
the works of reference required in school work, the public library
acting as book-selector. For all further requirements the school and
the school children rely on the public library. In New York City, the
public library deputes this branch of its work to a special department,
under a supervisor of work with schools. The city is divided for the
purpose into districts, in each of which there is a branch library and
a group of schools. A school assistant, usually a woman, is appointed
by the library to look after the work in each district, to make herself
personally acquainted with every teacher, to give advice, and keep
the machinery running smoothly. Formal regulations are kept down to
a minimum. Teachers are allowed to borrow books in large quantities,
and to keep them six months at a time if they need them; they are
expected and assisted to make themselves reliable counsellors and
guides to their pupils in the choice and use of books. Assistants in
the libraries are told off to address groups of teachers and assemblies
of school children on the objects and the resources of the libraries;
children are brought to the library in classes to have its working
and its benefits explained; and, finally, they are encouraged to do
their home lessons in the children’s library, and are provided with a
reference collection adapted to the purpose.
In this country, the relationship between the school and the public
library remains undetermined. Many of our primary schools are destitute
of a library worthy of the name, and if a census were taken it would
probably be found that the secondary schools are even worse off. Many
school libraries have attained a musty and precarious existence through
some passing gust of philanthropy, and maintain it in a more or less
accidental fashion. This is not the fault of the public libraries,
many of which have done more than their share in providing schools with
books, and most of which are ready with the expert services needed to
put school collections on a proper footing. The failure is due more to
lack of a clear realization of the function of school libraries than to
mere neglect or oversight. The work already described as done in the
junior department at Croydon, where as at Coventry and divers other
places, separate collections of books on education and teaching are
provided, from which the teacher may borrow and which the public may
use for reference, may be taken as representing the kind of endeavour
put forth by the more active library authorities. Loan collections for
schools are organized by some authorities, stationary school libraries
by others. But in a vast number of places, though many if not all of
the facilities enumerated above are held out by the library, the saving
propensities of education committees or the indifference of teachers
have left things as they were. The need for a comprehensive treatment
of the problem is still more apparent now than when the Library
Association in 1904 urged that the nation’s libraries were, or ought
to be, an integral part of the national machinery of education. It is
a vital part of the educational problem and of the whole problem of
public libraries; and, whether there are to be two sets of machinery,
working side by side or in reciprocation, or one set controlling both
schools and libraries, the library service for the schools and the
school children must be put on a proper basis, or the future of adult
education and of public libraries also will be in jeopardy. Here,
surely, Ruskin’s saying has a particularly forcible application--“It
is open, I repeat, to serious question, which I leave to the reader’s
pondering, whether among national manufactures, that of souls of good
quality may not at last turn out a quite leadingly lucrative one.”
(_Unto this Last_).
FOOTNOTES:
[15] The modern public library believes that it should find a reader
for every book on its shelves, and provide a book for every reader in
its community, and that it should in all cases bring book and reader
together. (Bostwick, p. 1.)
[16] The Adult Education Committee attribute the most obvious defects
of adult education to-day, to the discontinuity of much of the work
done, the tendency to rely unduly on lectures and to neglect classwork,
and the inadequate supply of books to the students attending lectures
or classes. “It is, in our judgment, essential that whilst regularity
of attendance and seriousness and continuity of study should be
insisted upon, there must be freedom of teaching and freedom of
expression.” (Final Report, par. 146.) The Committee are strongly in
favour of continuous courses of lectures, and of that grouping in
classes of moderate size that makes for “the frank interchange of
thought and experience which is essential to adult education,” and
without which “the work carried on will lose its vitality or change its
character.”
[17] METROPOLITAN BOROUGH OF POPLAR.
Lectures to Boys and Girls attending at the Libraries from Elementary
Schools.
SYNOPSIS.
How knowledge is handed down by books. During school-life advice
and help can be obtained from the teachers: after leaving school
guidance in reading and study can be obtained at the Libraries. Public
Libraries, their ownership and the right to use them. The contents
of the News and Magazine Rooms. Lack of home accommodation, and how
the Reference Rooms can be used for quiet reading and study. Books
in Lending Department on all subjects, elementary, intermediate, and
advanced. Assistance given by staff. How to use the Libraries in
conjunction with Continuation Schools and Evening Classes: also when
learning a trade, business, or domestic arts and occupations. Children
are urged to retain the knowledge gained at school and to supplement
it. Wisdom of acquiring General Knowledge, and how to acquire it:
with special reference to time-tables, directories, atlases, and
dictionaries. The lighter side of Libraries:--Use of holiday guides;
books of travel, manners and customs; music; home interests, such
as gardening, poultry-keeping, pets and hobbies. The care of books.
(Syllabus of one of the lectures described above).
IV
RURAL LIBRARIES.
Before the Act of 1919, more than two-fifths of the population of
these islands, which means practically those living outside the towns
and urban districts, were entirely without a library service. A few
attempts had been made, with various degrees of success, to found small
libraries or contrive methods of circulating collections of books in
the villages. Such were the library of the Lancashire and Cheshire
Union, inaugurated in 1847, the scheme of the Yorkshire Village
Libraries Association, in 1856, and the Coats Libraries supplying
many parts of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Besides these,
there was an odd village library here and there, such as the excellent
miniature institutes given to the inhabitants of East Claydon, Middle
Claydon, and Steeple Claydon, in Buckinghamshire, by the late Sir
Edmund Verney, or the library founded in a Hampshire village by the
unaided efforts of the villagers themselves, which is described by
Miss Sayle in her little memoir _Village Libraries_. Many other rural
libraries have flourished for a time, and then decayed, leaving no
history. Professor Adams found that of the total population of the
United Kingdom in 1911 not more than 57 per cent. resided within
library areas. He contrasted the library provision in different parts
of the country in the following table:--
--------+-------------------+--------------------+---------------------
| Total | Population in | Percentage
| Population, 1911. | Library Districts. | of Total Population.
--------+-------------------+--------------------+---------------------
England | 34,194,205 | 21,103,317 | 62
Wales | 2,025,202 | 938,303 | 46
Scotland| 4,760,904 | 2,403,283 | 50
Ireland | 4,390,219 | 1,245,766 | 28
--------+-------------------+--------------------+---------------------
| 45,370,530 | 25,690,669 | 57
--------+-------------------+--------------------+---------------------
“These figures,” he remarks, “would in themselves suggest what is an
outstanding feature of the present situation, the fact that libraries
are chiefly in the larger town areas, while the smaller towns and
country districts remain to a great extent unprovided for.”
The reason for “this partial and unequal development” was the absence
in the early Public Library Acts of any clause providing for concerted
action among bodies competent theoretically to become library
authorities, but unable practically, because to furnish an adequate
income out of a parish rate would have required an Aladdin’s lamp.[18]
If the county authorities had been permitted long ago to establish
systems of public libraries for the villages, and the product of a
penny rate throughout the county had been spent on the upkeep, there
might by now have been a rural library service not inferior in quality
to that in the towns. But before 1919 the potential library authority
in country districts was the parish council; and, even if parish
councils had been persuaded to combine, the unit of organization would
have been too poor to support anything but a miserable apology for a
library. In his report of 1915, Professor Adams observed that there
was a growing consensus of opinion that the county authorities should
be empowered to adopt the Acts and impose rates, and that the rural
library systems so established should be closely linked up with the
educational system. By this plan the financial difficulties would be
overcome, and, since “common thought and common action” are hard to
attain in a dispersed population, it was only reasonable that a more
widely representative body should be authorized to take the initiative.
“It is part everywhere of the rural problem that there needs to be an
organizing centre for the concentrating and directing of rural thought
and action.”[19] Professor Adams outlined “a public State system” of
rural libraries, “supported by the rates, and, like the educational
system, universal.” It would be closely associated with, if not under
the control of, the county educational authority. “It would radiate
from one or more centres, according as the county is large or small.”
“There would be ample room for voluntary organization and effort
within this framework, and a good village and rural library system
must depend largely on voluntary co-operative work. But the framework
of the system must be strongly knit, and must secure especially at
the centre a library institution, well equipped, and with expert
management and supervision. A new corps of librarians, in the form of
county library superintendents, will be required if the movement is
to be progressively developed.” I have quoted an important passage in
the actual words of Professor Adams, since it must be always borne in
mind that he proposed something far more substantial than the mere
circulation of boxes of books among villages or small country towns
such as asked for the privilege. One of the primary requisites of each
local library, even in the initial scheme which, he suggested, should
be experimented with in a few select areas, was “a permanent collection
of certain important reference books and standard works.” That, indeed,
must be the minimum foundation for the most unambitious kind of library
service, as distinguished from a mere book service. This latter may be
furnished by a circulating system, centering in a repository at some
distance; but the permanent collection must be there, in the village,
or the book service will be bereft of most of its educational value.
The Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, at whose request Professor Adams had
carried out his investigation, adopted for the sake of experiment his
suggestion that the Trust should take over the Coats Libraries in the
Highlands and Islands, which had been initiated by Sir Peter Coats of
Paisley and at that date numbered 186 on the mainland, 59 in Shetland
and Orkney, 33 in Lewis and Harris, and 37 in the other Hebrides. A
repository was established at Dunfermline, from which these local
centres were supplied with periodical batches of books. This was the
beginning of the Carnegie rural library scheme, which during the next
few years offered the public and the Government an object-lesson in the
methods of supplying the neglected two-fifths of the population in the
four kingdoms with a library service.
The first county scheme to be set on foot was in Staffordshire. In
1915 the Trust offered £5,000 to this county council to be expended in
five years on a central repository, a stock of books, travelling boxes
and other equipment, and the costs of administration and carriage,
asking in return for “reasonable assurances that, at the conclusion
of the period and after the expenditure of the grant named, the
scheme would be maintained and supported on funds other than theirs.”
From 54 centres at once established in Staffordshire schools the
scheme gradually spread in four years to 206. The county councils of
Gloucestershire, Cardiganshire, Somerset, and Wilts undertook similar
schemes under like financial conditions, and the Trust made grants to
the public libraries of Perth and Grantham to organize a service in
the neighbouring country parishes. These rural systems were given a
statutory basis in Scotland, under sec. 5 of the Scottish Education Act
of 1918; but it was not till the Public Libraries Act of December, 1919
that the position in England and Wales was legalized. That Act gave an
immense stimulus to the rural library movement. Library schemes have
now been prepared for nearly half the rural area of Great Britain, and
a large number are in actual working order.[20] The Trustees in 1920
set aside a sum of £192,000 for grants to county authorities during the
six years 1920-5, such grants to be employed on the initial expenses
of the stock of books, boxes, shelving, and similar accessories for
the central repository. From that date they ceased to pay for the
erection of buildings or for running expenses. The premises used are
mostly temporary buildings, such as Government huts, or else rooms
in schools. These central repositories look bare and insignificant
to the uninitiated, since they are furnished with little but a few
tables or benches for packing books on and enough shelving to hold a
fraction of the working stock of books, most of which are out in the
villages and when they come home are off on another journey almost at
once. A few stout boxes, with simple fittings countersunk to avoid
damage in transit, lie about, full or empty. These are sent out, each
carrying fifty or a hundred volumes, by rail, carrier, or motor-van,
to the village schools or perchance the village club, to be handed
to the readers by volunteer librarians, who are in most cases the
schoolmasters.
In a typical county, where the population is mainly rural and the
repository is quartered in a borough of moderate size without a library
of its own--where indeed the local inhabitants, hungering for books
which their own borough council will not consent to provide, have to be
kept at arm’s length by warning notices--some three hundred villages
are each at present receiving about two hundred and fifty books a year.
It is not much; it is not much more than an experiment; but anyhow
it is a beginning; and, remember, until the rural scheme arrived the
labouring man never saw a new book, from year end to year end, unless
his child won a Sunday School prize. The circulating stock consists of
books for children and the class of books commonly defined as for the
general reader--that is to say, works for entertainment primarily and
in the second place for knowledge or information. Further, there is in
this particular centre a strong collection of educational works for the
use of teachers, and a numerous and sound selection of sociological
literature for the special benefit of the Workers’ Educational
Association, who have many tutorial classes in the district, most of
them studying economics, social philosophy, or the science of politics.
The teachers are allowed to borrow several books at a time, to further
their work; and in addition, the requirements of modern methods in
teaching reading are met by the allowance of perhaps fifteen or two
dozen copies of certain select books, to enable every child in a class
to have a copy--the reading-circle system applied in the school. If any
studious person should ask for a book not in the printed catalogue,
a book obviously in advance of the general demand and costing rather
more than the average price bargained for, the librarian sends for it
to the Central Library for Students, in Tavistock Square, London. Even
the newest and least-developed rural library aims at an ideal that the
great commercial circulating libraries have given up as unattainable,
to enable any reader to have access to any book, of unquestioned value,
that he applies for--and few failures to achieve this end, by one means
or another, have to be reported.
The librarian superintending another county system, a lady who has
built it up from the foundation stone, has, after three years been able
to announce an average circulation of two thousand books a week. This,
in spite of difficulties of transport, and the absence of facilities
for reaching the adult readers directly. The work here is done entirely
through the schools, and of the eighteen thousand and odd borrowers
recently on the register not much more than eight thousand are above
school age. Nevertheless, she reports, even if the parents have “to
snatch the books from the children or to wait patiently until they are
all in bed” ... “the people will read if they get the chance.”
“In one Cotswold village there are seventy readers, forty of whom are
adults; among them are several farmers, a painter, a butcher, a sadler,
domestic servants, railwaymen, builders, labourers, many mothers, and
the postmistress. Forty books were sent there in January, and by June
these books had 389 readers, an average of 9.5 readers per book. One
teacher reports that his male readers include a carter, a cowman, a
rivetter, farm-labourers, the policeman, a workhouse attendant, the
night watchman, the schoolmaster, and the vicar. Another writes:
“Our readers are chiefly as follows--cloth-workers, carpenters,
clerks, plasterers, house-decorators, tailors, gardeners, printers,
engine-drivers, ironworkers, chauffeurs, railwaymen.” When one looks
at lists like these one realizes that to pack a box to meet all tastes
is no easy matter. In Stroud there is an old lady of seventy-nine who
borrows books regularly from the school, and at Coln St. Aldwyn, in the
Cotswolds, a disabled soldier read, in three months, nineteen out of a
possible twenty-six books. One of our former borrowers who came in by
train every day left her book in charge of a porter in the evenings. It
was some time before she discovered why he was so surly at times, and
then she found she had changed her book before he had finished it!”[21]
Here are samples of the letters received from imaginative
school-children, who had been told about that inexhaustible
treasure-house, the Central Library:--“Please send me a book on
carpentering and oblige.” “Dear Sir, Could you kindly send me on one of
your nature study painting books as you spoke of in our schoolmaster’s
letter from you and oblige, Yours sincerely.” “Dear, Sir, I should be
pleased if you would kindly forward me a book on the study of knitting
a Jumper.” And here is an extract from a teacher’s account of her
library centre:--
“We all feel greatly indebted to the Carnegie Trustees, it is
impossible to over-estimate the boon that the Library is in these
country districts. If the Trustees could see for themselves the
excitement and pleasure when the books arrive, and the rush to see them
and choose, I am sure they would realize afresh how well-spent their
funds are. Our only difficulty is that there are never enough books for
all who want them, but that, without doubt, is a difficulty common to
all Carnegie rural librarians.”
The Carnegie Trustees calculated their grants on the understanding that
purchases by the rural libraries should be restricted to the cheaper
books in general demand (averaging 3s. 6d. new or second-hand), and
that when other or more expensive books were required they should
be obtained on loan from the Central Library for Students. To this
library, which forms a central store of technical, scientific, and
other high-class works, for supplying both the rural systems and those
urban libraries that pay a small subscription, the Trustees are now
making a subsidy of £1,000 a year. It may eventually develop into
an invaluable auxiliary to all the public libraries in the kingdom,
and money spent on increasing its stock is a thoroughly economic
expenditure, since it saves an incredible amount of overlapping among
the different units of the nation’s library service.
Different counties have employed different modes of distribution. Rail
and carrier are the usual medium where the centres are not far from
the railways, and some counties have secured half rates for conveyance
of books by passenger train. Experiments have however been made with
hired motor transport, with a saving on costs and a much more important
saving in time and trouble, since more than a score of boxes can be
delivered and the time-expired boxes collected in a single day’s trip.
The Perthshire authority have acquired a motor-van of their own to
be used for conveying books and also for the librarian’s tours of
inspection. This will no doubt be the plan adopted elsewhere when
the systems reach a further stage of development. More miscellaneous
and more picturesque methods have had to be followed in the North of
Scotland service, which feeds the Islands, including St. Kilda, with
much-needed books. After many abortive attempts to reach St. Kilda,
it was found that a trawler was going there from Fleetwood, and in
this roundabout way the first box of books from Dunfermline arrived
there last year. In the Orkneys, Shetlands, and Hebrides, crofters,
fishermen, and cobblers, we are told, look eagerly for books on
natural history, science, and philosophy, from the Central Library for
Students. How many people passing the drab house in Tavistock Square
have the remotest idea that from this centre, unmarked by anything
more grandiose than a small brass plate, mental and spiritual light
is being steadily radiated to the inhabitants of utmost Thule. In the
island of Foula, where the grown-up people cannot leave their crofts
in the scanty summer, the school-children are enlisted as carriers. A
schoolmaster describes how in the winter he carried the books himself
until he fell in with the sheep-dogs sent out to bring them to the
distant croft. On this island a population of 175 borrows 1,300 books
a year. Guiberwick, with a population of 200, calls for 700 every six
months. Minute records are kept at Dunfermline of the kind of reading
that appeals to various kinds of readers. “For the fiction,” says the
librarian, Miss Thomson, “taken on a whole, they read very good novels.
The general works are of a varied nature, but I have noticed that books
dealing with the literature, fauna, flora, and topography of each
island are much in favour. We also supply books in Gaelic, which are
widely read both by adults and juveniles.” Anyone who has wandered in
the lonelier parts of the Highlands will know what are the difficulties
of a service to the remote glens and the foresters’ stations in the
deer-forests, and what a priceless gift a handful of books always is.
It must be evident from this short account that the rural problem has
been tackled on the cheapest lines. The maximum cost of any county
scheme has in no instance exceeded the yield of a halfpenny rate; and
until there are centres throughout a shire, or until supplementary
means are employed, such as the establishment of stationary libraries
at accessible points in certain areas, it is not likely to increase
appreciably. The following typical examples of county expenditure are
given by the Trustees in their report on the year 1920:--
Total School
pop. pop. Cost
Age of of area of area Total Rate per No. of
County. Scheme. served. served. Cost. equiv. head. Centres.
Staffordshire 4th yr. 246,000 35,000 £525 ¹⁄₁₈d. ¹⁄₂d. 206
Gloucestershire 2nd “ 212,000 30,000 500 ¹⁄₈d. ¹⁄₂d. 303
Cardiganshire 3rd “ 60,000 6,500 440 ¹⁄₄d. 1³⁄₄d. 45
Wiltshire 1st “ 181,000 34,000 435 ¹⁄₁₂d. ¹⁄₂d. 90
Notts 2nd “ 100,000 13,421 580 ¹⁄₆d. 1¹⁄₂d. 164
Somerset 2nd “ 335,000 52,000 450 ¹⁄₁₈d. ¹⁄₃d. 223
It was a wise stroke of policy to make a beginning through the schools
and the children. A reading public is in process of manufacture,
and through the books and the readers thus introduced into rustic
households even the stubborn bucolic mind can hardly fail to receive
some impression. But the risk of beginning in a small way is that
people will be content with small results, or, even worse, that the
service may have such insignificant consequences that nobody will
mind if it declines into something like the old-fashioned school
library or disappears altogether. The country districts are being
supplied with boxes of books; they are not being put into contact
with libraries--they are not yet supplied with what Professor Adams
laid down as the first essential, “a permanent collection of certain
important reference books and standard works.” Such a permanent nucleus
is in truth the essential basis of a library service; a rotation of
book-boxes is, in reality, but auxiliary to this. Unless it be firmly
realized that what has been done is only a very small beginning, and
that enormously more remains to be done before an adequate library
service is provided, a fatal mistake will have been committed, as
paralysing to future progress as the blunder of 1850, which made public
libraries a failure on the whole throughout the first period of their
existence. The warning ought by now to have been taken to heart. In
their manner of dealing with the rural library, the county education
authorities are on their trial. If the wonted errors of bureaucratic
management are committed, if there is a lack of vision and of sympathy
with the villager, especially the villager who will not be hustled
inside the fold of organized adult education, failure to come to
grips with the thorny problems of rural psychology, and, above all, a
one-ideaed zeal for economy and a cheap sort of efficiency, not much
can be hoped for until public opinion, when our new readers have grown
up, imperiously demands more.
So far, little has been attempted, except in one or two counties
blessed with an open-minded and energetic librarian, to secure the
personal contact and the insight into local needs and local avenues
of approach that are the indispensable preliminaries to success. For
the extension work that has proved so lucrative in urban libraries
there is doubly and trebly a need in the country, if libraries are to
play any vital part in the rural economy. During the last few years,
fortunately, many agencies have come into being or have acquired a new
lease of life through which missionary enterprises can be carried on,
granted the necessary intelligence and driving-power at the centre.
Rural conditions have changed profoundly since the war. There is a keen
desire to make life in the country interesting, to open the stagnant
backwater into the general stream. Here there is a village club or a
women’s institute, there a branch of the W.E.A.; the Y.M.C.A. and the
Y.W.C.A. have both identified themselves with these and other local
activities and initiated fresh projects themselves, including small
libraries, reading circles, and educational programmes; one place has
a field club, another a musical society; almost everywhere there are
boy scouts, girl guides, and other elements of social life, to all
of which the library movement should come as an aid and a stimulus.
Some of these may form a natural home for the village library; others
will provide materials for reading circles and similar enterprises on
the part of librarians having some insight into the rustic mind and a
determination to break down initial barriers. But to make such efforts
effective, the policy of the rural library authority must be pushing,
adaptive, and not a parsimonious one, and the staff of librarians must
be something more than machines for distributing books.
The directors of education and the county librarians who are in charge
of rural systems might learn a good deal from the district organizers
employed by the Village Clubs Association. This organization was
founded during the war, with Government assistance, to stimulate social
life in the country, and counteract the tendency of the villagers to
migrate into towns. It works principally by encouraging the formation
of village clubs and institutes, and assisting these with advice and
practical help, especially by getting them to co-operate in schemes
for lectures, classes, entertainments, sports, competitions, and the
like. Several hundred thriving clubs are affiliated to the Association,
and the staff of officials--men chosen for their experience of rural
conditions and insight into rustic mentality--are in touch with
everything that goes on throughout a radius extending over two or three
counties. Many clubs have through local benefactions acquired large and
beautiful village halls, which are obviously the destined home of the
village library--in point of fact, they are not yet the actual home
even where the village has a library centre, bureaucratic authority
much preferring the school, official routine and discipline to mere
human nature.
The Village Clubs Association takes an active interest in the
intellectual side of rural life; it promotes the formation of village
libraries, very sensibly urging every club to make itself the owner
of a small reference collection, to buy some books for lending, and
borrow from the Central Library to satisfy demands beyond the average.
The Association, further, busies itself in promoting study circles,
lectures, and evening classes, official or otherwise. It has its
own library and education committee, whose activities coincide in
large measure with the work that the county education committees and
directors of education are doing, or ought to be doing, in carrying
out the rural library scheme. Yet the Village Clubs Association and
the educational authorities, even in counties where rural libraries
exist and both are ostensibly engaged in furthering the same purposes,
have done nothing yet in concert, have not availed themselves of each
others’ services, and so far as a person who is not a Government
official can make out, do not know of each others’ existence. In
short, this is another notable instance of our national gift for doing
things twice over and at the same time leaving them undone, of paying
twice for the same job and declining to do it properly because of
the expense. This too, in days of anti-waste campaigns and niggardly
economy. The education committee and the director of education in each
county work under the Board of Education; the Village Clubs Association
is foster-mothered by the Board of Agriculture. It is, apparently, not
official etiquette that the Association should recommend the village
clubs to seek the benefits of the education authority’s library
scheme--their pamphlets of information and advice do not mention the
new possibilities opened out by the Act of 1919--or, on the other hand,
for the education authority to utilize the organizing experience and
fit its own schemes into the framework which the Association could put
at its disposal.
If the education authorities ignore official or semi-official work
such as this, it is to be feared that they will be slow to recognize
and co-ordinate the thousand and one activities, the libraries and
institutes founded by private effort, and the numberless bodies
that are trying hard to infuse a new spirit into rural life. Will
they take over or work in any kind of partnership with the library
schemes of the Y.M.C.A., the village library association working
in Worcestershire, or that centred in Barnett House, Oxford? Will
they make the various field clubs and other local societies their
coadjutors? Unless they do, all the elements of a real social and
intellectual resurrection in the villages will be left just outside
their radius. It was a good thing to begin with the schools, but
the work must get beyond the school at the first opportunity. The
village school is only a makeshift base for the great intellectual and
civilizing crusade in which all available forces must be concentrated.
It is very difficult indeed to evoke in a schoolroom the congenial
atmosphere of the library, the reading circle, and the village
institute. The very word education, with its narrow associations, is
unpopular and repressive. Adult education will have to get rid of the
second term before it can become an inspiration. The sooner, therefore,
the rural library can leave the school and schooling behind the better.
To do so everywhere, in most places perhaps, is not yet possible; but
where it is possible, directors of education must not be allowed to
frown upon the suggestion. Freedom and initiative, spontaneous personal
development, are the chief things to aim at, and they will be attained
most easily in regions outside the range of our present educational
machinery.
Salvation will probably come to the rural library movement from such
counties as are enlightened enough to form leagues between villages,
with real not perfunctory libraries in convenient centres, or
combinations of borough or urban district libraries with neighbouring
villages. Only when a growing proportion of the rural public has the
opportunity of direct contact with libraries, and not merely with small
batches of books sent them at stated intervals, will they realize what
a true library service can do. Only then will there be much hope of
co-ordinating all the miscellaneous local efforts into active schemes
of library extension. Incidentally, unless events have meanwhile
hurried on the process of linking up all our public libraries into a
national system, such combinations may furnish a suggestive example to
the towns. But to achieve all this, it is doubtful if we should make
heavy demands upon the county education committees, unless they depute
this side of their work to a strong sub-committee, reinforced with
co-opted members from outside. Representation of other interests than
those of schools and education, representation of the many voluntary
bodies who are striving to reanimate the countryside, representation,
above all, of the people who read or whom we want to read the books,
is a radical necessity. To this point there will be a return in the
next chapter, where the general question of who shall manage our
reconstituted libraries will arise.
In the United States, where the obstacles to a rural library service
are still more formidable, the town population being only 45 per cent.
of the whole, various plans have been tried, and a different method
than that recently adopted in this country has met with most success,
the method of expansion outwards from a library at the centre, freely
open to the public. The State library commissions do not flatter
themselves that they have completely solved the problem, for only 794
of the 2964 counties in the United States have as yet one or more
libraries of not less than 5,000 volumes; but they are apparently on
the highroad to success. At all events, they are fully aware of the
extent and value of their opportunities. All the states in the union
have State libraries, and most have library commissions, which operate
in different ways, some with exemplary thoroughness, and some, it
must be confessed, rather perfunctorily. Many states have systems of
travelling libraries, that in New York being the most extensive and
flourishing. Yet comparing this with the rival county system now to
be described, a well-informed critic says, “The few people reached
compared with the great rural population of the state of New York,
wherein the travelling library under the direction of the State
Library Commission seems to be more widely used than in any other
state of the Union, indicates the futility of trying, by means of a
travelling library system operated from the capital of the state, to
supply farm homes with library privileges.”[22] Municipal libraries
have reached their highest development in Massachusetts, which has on
its public shelves more than six million volumes, about two to each
inhabitant; but in the absence of a county system the rural population
is neglected. Indiana also has an admirable township law, empowering
townships to combine and work in concert; yet only one rural inhabitant
in each eleven enjoys library privileges. A very different tale is told
in those states where the system of the central county library has been
set up, though the system is even now but in its infancy.
The pioneer county library was established in 1901 in Van Wert, Ohio,
in a state where the library movement had hitherto made but indifferent
progress. Funds for a building had been left to the county town by
a self-made banker, J. S. Brumback, and his heirs decided that it
should be a library for the whole county, whereby 30,000 people would
enjoy benefits that would otherwise have been restricted to 8,000.
The county is small and compact, measuring 405 square miles, and is
predominantly a rural area, 16,300 persons at that time living on farms
or in out-of-the-way spots, and the inhabitants of the towns depending
largely for business on the rural population. The county spirit is
strong. There are county parks, a county fair, a county hospital, a
county Chautauqua, agricultural shows, sports, singing contests, and
other county affairs. Hence the tree was planted in the right soil, and
took hold at once. A county tax was sanctioned, a large initial stock
of books was acquired, and has been continually augmented; and when
the stock had increased to 25,000 the whole library service, which is
threefold, dealing with the town of Van Wert, with fifteen branches,
and with the schools in town and country, was run at an aggregate
cost of $7,000 per annum. The staff is divided into three departments
corresponding to the three divisions of the service, besides the
custodians at the branches, who receive an honorarium for their
attendance at certain hours. An equal if not a greater circulation of
books is attained through the schools than even through the branch
stations. Sunday schools are pressed into the work, and the extension
activities are multifarious. Collections of 125 books are sent to each
branch every three months; in addition, supply boxes of a hundred
books go regularly to some branches, and when required to others.
Every inhabitant of the county it must be understood, is entitled to
borrow direct from the central library. This is an important point,
and, observes the librarian, it would be still more important if the
central library were worked on the open access system. In 1920, the
total number of agencies in operation was 142, comprehending, besides
the central library, five city stations, six city schools, fifteen
branches, and 115 school collections. The registered borrowers comprise
nearly sixty per cent. of the whole population, three-quarters of them
using the central library, whether they live in the town or in the
villages. Though weeding-out is a regular practice, obsolete books
being ruthlessly discarded and the library supplied with the latest
books so as to be a real workshop, the total stock is now 30,597,[23]
which is rather more than one volume per head of the population.
Van Wert is a small county, and the compactness of the area served
gives it an immense advantage over areas of the size of most English
counties, which would have to be divided into library districts to be
put on the same footing. But the superiority of the county system, with
its facilities for direct access as well as its service through the
branch stations and the schools, over the mere travelling library, was
so manifest that the system rapidly spread. Among the states that have
adopted county library laws, following Ohio’s example, are Wyoming,
Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, California, Maryland, Washington,
Nebraska, Oregon, Iowa. Canada, also, has welcomed the system.
California has the largest number of county libraries, and is not far
from covering the whole area of the state with a library service. It
has a state board of examiners in librarianship, and only certificated
persons are eligible to county library posts. One laudable social
object is clearly realized as a motive behind rural library policy in
the United States, to encourage the people to live as far as they can
from the heart of the cities, in spots where they can own a little
ground for cultivation, and enjoy pure air and a wholesome environment.
If the practical American looks at it in this way, we may be sure that
there is much force in the contention that a first-rate library service
in the country would be a real attraction and help materially in the
movement back to the land.
Here it is worth while mentioning a different class of library that is
multiplying fast in the United States, greatly to the furtherance of
the same movement--agricultural libraries. There are three varieties of
these, the library of the agricultural college, that attached to the
experimental station, and the agricultural library formed by a private
individual or a farming corporation. Their are sixty-five agricultural
colleges in the States, maintained by state or federal funds.
Primarily, such libraries serve the college students; but the colleges
have adopted a strenuous extension policy, running short winter courses
for farmers, organizing agricultural clubs, sending out instructive
groups of exhibits, batches of books, reading lists and reading
matter, in the form of pamphlets, cuttings, and answers to inquiries.
The University of Wisconsin distributes books by parcel post and issues
bibliographical bulletins; the Massachusetts Agricultural College has
a system of travelling libraries; Purdue University prepares select
libraries of agricultural literature and takes steps to sell these to
farmers. “Through the farmers’ papers, on the special trains, at fairs
and at institutes, the work was carried on.”[24] Agricultural libraries
are an essential auxiliary to the experimental station, where the work
is forwarded materially by the services of an expert librarian skilled
in searching out information. The experimental station and its library
play a part in answering queries from working agriculturalists, similar
to that played by our commercial and technical libraries for the
benefit of manufacturers and men of business.
The advantages of basing a rural library service on a central library
to which the readers can resort if they desire are manifold. Foremost
is the supremely important point that the users can come if and when
they will to see and handle the books and make themselves familiar
with the library’s contents. Open access in town libraries has been,
not merely an educational factor, but an inspiration. The box of books
doled out from a repository that the reader has never seen, and to
which he would not be admitted if he applied, is better than nothing,
but it is a library service only to those who have hitherto had
nothing. A town takes a pride in its library; the villager would have
the same personal interest in the collection of books housed in the
village hall. An inaccessible repository is not likely to excite the
feelings of county patriotism which have been a valuable element in the
success of the Brumback Library, Ohio. Such patriotism is needed, if
the unanimous social effort required of this new experiment, much more
than it was required in the towns, is to become a reality.
The ideal plan would be to divide the large counties into sections,
each centering in a town or regional library. The town libraries
exist, and if proper financial conditions were arranged the towns
would probably not be averse from coming into a well-planned scheme.
They would gain, not lose, by the change, since the available stock
of books would be enlarged indefinitely and there would be a wider
apportionment of overhead charges. At present, Somerset is worked from
the little watering-place of Burnham, which has no library service
for itself, and books are actually sent across the width of the shire
into the suburbs of Bath, a town rejoicing in a large collection of
lending-library books used mainly for desultory reference purposes. How
much better were Somerset mapped out into districts served from the
existing public libraries at Radstock, Weston-super-Mare, Taunton,
and Bridgewater, with new ones established at Glastonbury, Wells, or
other places, unable singly to afford a library. Why should not Sussex
be supplied from the chain of admirable libraries in her south coast
towns, with a new one in the hinterland at Horsham? Kent has public
libraries at Maidstone, Gravesend, Chatham, Bromley, Canterbury, and
Folkestone; Maidstone, with its Bentlif Institute comprising library,
museum, and art gallery, would form a central magazine hardly to
be surpassed, and with subordinate centres at the other places it
would be easy to cater for the whole county. Wiltshire is served
from Trowbridge, where the bookless inhabitants have to be sternly
repulsed from the sacred repository, whilst Calne and Salisbury have
libraries of their own that might co-operate in supplying this large
agricultural area. Similarly, the Gloucestershire repository is in the
county town, and has no dealings with the Gloucester Public Library.
Examples might be multiplied; but the reader need only open the map of
the United Kingdom to see how easy and natural a thing it would be to
adopt the American county library system and centre our rural service
in an accessible library building, with its reference collection, its
reading rooms, and above all, its lending book-shelves thrown open
to all comers. The Librarian of the National Liberal Club, Mr. C. R.
Sanderson, prepared a scheme for Middlesex, one of the latest counties
to accept the Carnegie grant, for organizing a regional service
worked from a central library established within the joint boundary
of Southgate and Friern Barnet, which have between them a population
approaching 60,000. The alternative to this proposal is the usual
travelling library system, and it remains to be seen which will be
ultimately adopted. Middlesex, most of which is mere suburb of London,
is in circumstances very different from those of the average county.
It already has a score of public libraries in its towns and urban
districts, many of which would be anything but worse off if they were
linked into a county scheme. Failing that consummation, towards which,
however, it may be hoped that future events will lead, there seems no
reason but timidity and short-sighted frugality to hesitate in choosing
the American pattern.
[Illustration: LIBRARY OF THE SOUTH-EASTERN AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE, WYE.]
The more rapidly the method of the travelling book-box spreads into
counties in which efficient urban libraries are already working, the
sooner will its radical defects appear; common sense and obvious
convenience will presently call for the abolition of such anomalies,
and insist on a proper utilization of existing resources. The earlier
this happens the better, for such utilization will be far more economic
than an ineffective system, however cheaply run. The outcome will
be something much nearer the goal indicated by the Adult Education
Committee in their Final Report.[25]
“The hope lies in the recognition of the county market town as the
natural centre for the surrounding villages and the gradual development
of transport facilities radiating from the market towns.... The
development of transport and the extended use of electric power will
tend to the decentralization of industry and the movement of firms
from the town to the country. It is improbable, however, that town
workers will be prepared, in any large numbers--even when the housing
shortage is remedied--to exchange urban life for life in the country so
long as the latter is without the counterpart of the many and varied
activities to which they have become accustomed in the towns.... The
rural problem, from whatever point of view it is regarded--economic,
social, or political--is essentially a problem of re-creating the rural
community, of developing new social traditions and a new culture.
The great need is for a living nucleus of communal activity in the
village, which will be a centre from which radiate the influence of
different forms of corporate effort, and to which the people are
attracted to find this satisfaction of their social and intellectual
needs. We conceive this nucleus to be a village institute, under
full public control.... The institute should contain a hall large
enough for dances, cinema shows, concerts, plays, public lectures,
and exhibitions. At the institute there should be a public library
and local museum. If arrangements can be made for games and sports,
so much the better. The institute, in a word, should be a centre of
educational, social, and recreational activity.... As the institutes
will be used more and more for public and quasi-public purposes, it
seems to us that they should be established out of public funds. In
the main, the establishment of village institutes should be a national
charge. The complicated social and economic questions which we call
collectively the rural problem are a matter of the greatest national
importance. They do not admit of any simple solution. They need to be
approached by many roads; one of the most important is through direct
encouragement to the establishment of a new communal organization and
to the development of corporate activities and social institutions in
harmony with modern social ideas. The State cannot create a new social
spirit; it can but provide opportunities for its growth and expression.
One of the chief of these opportunities is the village institute,
and we can think of no more profound or far-reaching piece of rural
reconstruction than the provision of buildings expressly designed as
a focus of the social activities of village communities. Whether such
institutes become active centres of social and educational work will
depend largely upon the degree in which voluntary organizations of
various kinds co-operate in utilizing the opportunities which the
institutes present. It is clear that a village institute can never
become the mainspring of organized life in the village unless the
organized activities of the village centre in the institute. The
success of village institutes in the future rests upon an appeal to
groups of people with common interests, rather than to individuals. It
is because they have, in recent years, begun to flourish that we look
forward hopefully to a vigorous life within the village institutes.”
Only let the library hold the central position in these rural
institutes that it held in the Mechanics’ Institutes before the Public
Libraries Acts, and let the numerous libraries--and institutes--be
knitted together in active fraternal union, and the Committee’s dreams
may easily be accomplished.[26]
FOOTNOTES:
[18] The Adult Education Committee may have been justified in laying
the blame for this state of things on “the want of foresight of the
original promoters of the movement, who assumed that the institutions
would appeal only to the artisan classes of the large centres of
population”; but they were hardly right in going on to ascribe it more
particularly to their mistake in allowing the legislature “to restrict
the expenditure of public money to the product of a penny rate.”
[19] _A Report on Library Provision and Policy_, by Professor W. G. S.
Adams (1915), p. 15.
[20] “Prior to 1920, pioneer rural schemes had been financed or
assisted by the Trust in the counties or areas noted in column ‘A’
below; column ‘B’ shows the counties to which grants have been
sanctioned this year; column ‘C’ shows the counties whose Authorities
are in negotiation (preliminary or advanced) with a view to a grant.”
A
Perthshire
Caithness
Montrose District
Nottinghamshire
Staffordshire
Wiltshire
Gloucestershire
Buckinghamshire
Dorsetshire
Somersetshire
Yorkshire Village Library
Cardigan
Carnarvon
Brecon & Radnor
Denbighshire
Montgomeryshire
Grantham District
Westmorland
Warwickshire
B
Sutherland
Clackmannan
Renfrewshire
Forfar & Kincardine
Midlothian
Berwickshire
Peeblesshire
Dumbartonshire
Kent
Pembrokeshire
Glamorganshire
West Sussex
Cheshire
Inverness
C
Flint
Carmarthen
Anglesey
Middlesex
Hampshire (Isle of Wight)
Hampshire (Southampton)
Worcestershire
Northamptonshire
Cumberland
Durham
Northumberland
Kirkcudbright
Nairn
Fife
Bedfordshire
Surrey
Linlithgow
Shropshire
Cambridge
Isle of Man
(Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, _Seventh Annual Report_, 1921; p. 9.)
[21] _Library Association Record_--“The Gloucestershire Rural Library
Scheme,” by Miss A. S. Cooke (Feb., 1921).
[22] S. B. Antrim and E. I. Antrim, _The County Library_ (1914), p. 238.
[23] Total number of vols. accessioned (Dec. 31, 1920) 37,302; number
in the library 30,597.
[24] J. H. Friedel: _Training for Librarianship_, p. 106.
[25] pp. 141-5.
[26] The character of the best type of village institute may be judged
from the following account of the Nettlebed Working Men’s Club and
Institute:--
“Perhaps the most original feature of the equipment of the hall is
the provision of a cinematograph apparatus. The provision of picture
palaces in all English villages would be a doubtful advantage, if they
showed the baser sort of ‘cowboy’ and other sensational films. Given
some restraint in the choice of subject, however, moving pictures make
winter evenings more changeful. During 1918 the cinema was used very
little, but it is now running every Saturday evening, and draws full
houses. Mr. Fleming’s main idea in installing a cinema at Nettlebed was
to make use of its educational possibilities. The Oxfordshire Education
Committee welcomed the provision, as also did the Inspector of Schools,
the more so because it extended advantages to the school children of
six parishes near Nettlebed. The Education Code permits teachers to
take the whole or part of a school for rambles or visits to places of
educational interest during school hours, and films have been shown
at Nettlebed on certain afternoons to a concourse of children. The
subjects of the pictures were chosen to illustrate geography, history,
English, and nature study. A village club can conduct its ‘cinema
department’ by joining a lending library of films, so that the subjects
can be duly varied.
“The higher aspects of village life have not, however, been neglected
at Nettlebed. Concerts, lectures, and dances are held in the men’s
hall, which is laid with a special dancing floor of oak, famous
throughout the district, and this is protected in the ordinary way by
a cloth covering. Dancing classes are held weekly for children in the
afternoon and for adults in the evening, and are conducted by a lady
resident in the village. An instructress, under whose care the young
girls in the village and district are taught cookery, laundry work, and
housekeeping, lives in a house near the hall. Across the road is the
school garden, divided into some fourteen plots, each cared for by one
boy. At the back of the playground is an old building converted into
a carpenter’s shop, in which another section of the boys work under
the supervision of the village schoolmaster. All of these branches
are under the control of the County Education Authority. Altogether,
it will be seen that in these various ways instruction as well as
amusement is provided.” Sir Lawrence Weaver, _Village Clubs and Halls_
(1920), pp. 82-3.
V
A NATIONAL LIBRARY SERVICE.
Centralization proved to be the only way of extending a library service
to the rural districts. No village, unless through the largess of
a plutocrat, could build up and maintain anything worth calling a
library for itself. Given a centralized system, some sort of service
can be run cheaply, and a first-class service can be run economically.
Does it not follow that some measure of centralization would be good
for urban libraries, enabling them to save in certain directions,
and making their resources go a great deal further than they go at
present in the direction of widest utility? The largest libraries
have managed to be self-sufficing, not merely because they have more
money to spend, but rather because their service is organized on the
principle of a centralized group. There is a point beyond which it
does not pay a library to provide from its own resources all that its
users may possibly require. Each library must determine this point
for itself. The everyday wants of its readers ought to be satisfied
on the spot and at the moment; but to go far beyond that point even
should a local Crœsus provide the wherewithal, would be extravagant,
entailing surplusage, overlapping, and waste. Spending money on books
only in occasional request is to spend too little on books in continual
demand. The library of moderate means cannot pretend to satisfy both
daily and exceptional wants, unless it is able to call upon outside
resources, such as a Central Library for Students developed to such a
capacity that it forms a sufficient reservoir for supplementing all the
moderate-sized stocks in the country. If most of the urban libraries
were brought into a co-operative network of libraries, with mechanism
for interchange by which the book lacking here would be supplied there,
or else from a larger regional library or a clearing-house at the
centre, obviously a service equal to the pooled resources of the whole
system would be provided without the present waste on overlapping.
Central organization exists in the big provincial cities; that is the
reason for their superiority, and they are superior in a degree far
beyond that of mere size. It does not exist in London; that is why
serious readers must have recourse to the British Museum or the big
special libraries, to satisfy their requirements; or if, like the great
majority, they can rarely do this, they must go without. London is the
most glaring illustration of the vices due to mere parochial methods;
it suffers, not so much because its library resources are limited, as
because they are not mobilized. For certain purposes, it has already
been noted, both London and provincial libraries acknowledge the
economic value of some centralization. Thus every municipal library has
given up buying books in Braille type for the blind, and relies for
this branch of its service upon the National Library at Westminster.
A great many subscribe to the Central Library for Students, and draw
upon that for books required by specialist readers. A large number
help to provide the funds for the great Subject-Index to Periodicals,
which makes the contents of reviews, magazines, technical and
scientific journals, filed in their reference departments, available
for instant use. This may not seem much compared with the results
of joint effort or of State supervision in America, where they have
co-operative cataloguing, co-operative publication of bibliographies
and aids for readers, and elaborate facilities for professional
training; but it is a beginning. The Adult Education Committee can
think of no way to endow the industries of the country with an adequate
series of technical libraries except by centralization. Although many
librarians, represented by the Library Association, do not approve of
the particular scheme put forward, they are at one with the Committee
in admitting that co-ordination of the separate libraries and the
establishment of a central supply is the only way to solve this
problem.
Although, however, the partial and unequal development of public
libraries which the Adult Education Committee by a slip in their
logic put down to the rate limit, is due, as the report conclusively
shows, to their having had to struggle along in isolation, it would be
disastrous to take the control of the local libraries entirely out of
the hands of the local authorities. This would stultify all efforts
to inspire public opinion and evoke local pride. No institution in a
civilized society is more sure to be an expression of corporate life
and local individuality than a communal library, in the building up of
which the actual users have had a hand. A system, however complete and
efficient, bestowed by a Government department, however benevolent,
would be sure eventually to stifle all such aspirations. The local
communities in both town and country must have a decisive voice in the
management of their libraries. They must have a larger voice, not a
smaller, than they have had hitherto. Local initiative has never had
free play. Why is it that public libraries rarely excite that interest
and enthusiasm in which the promoters hopefully confided? The answer
is obvious. Libraries have suffered from official repression, and have
not had even the doubtful advantage of official tutelage. If a town
wished to spend liberally on its library, it was pulled up by the rate
limit. If it wanted lectures, the Government auditor put in his veto:
he does so still. And so with any of the excursions from the programme
prescribed from above that would have helped to realize a higher
ideal. Library authorities have been confined to the unimaginative
duty of exercising circumscribed and inadequate powers, and the
library committee has enjoyed the least prestige of all the council’s
departments. More local control, more powers of initiative, and more
representation of the actual users of the library are needed, if a
vigorous and useful life is to be maintained.
But this is fully compatible with healthy co-operation between the
different authorities under the guiding supervision of a central
department. Some authorities may require a stimulus; they should not
be allowed to victimize those among their constituents who crave the
very necessities of civilized life. Cases are not unknown where borough
councils have failed to carry out, or have deliberately emasculated, a
library scheme approved by a majority of the ratepayers. Education is
compulsory: it is a question whether one of the chief instruments of
education should be at the mercy of a local body to grant or withhold.
For, so inconsiderable a place does the library take at present in
local politics, the average borough council, elected to manage the
trams, the streets, water, electricity, and other mundane affairs,
seldom represents the views of the citizen on such a different matter
as libraries; and the committee appointed by such a council hardly
ever represents or is fully cognizant of the views of the people who
actually use the library.
Fortunately, the times when a policy of rate-saving at all costs,
or the selfishness of a leisured class enjoying their subscription
libraries and not in favour of too much education for the lower orders,
or the interested opposition of the liquor trade and the music hall
proprietor, were able to keep out or keep down public libraries, are
gradually passing away. They have not gone altogether; but it would
be invidious to name the two or three distinguished boroughs where
these influences are still rampant. The problem now is to bring the
great crowd of under-developed and under-nourished libraries into
line one with other, to assist the halt, help the blind to see, and
by schemes for concerted action enable all to reach the same level of
efficiency as the big towns have attained without undue exertion. A
simple licence to spend more than a penny rate will not secure this by
itself. Reorganization on a co-operative ground-plan will do as much as
the mere expenditure of money, and money will not be spent lavishly in
these frugal days. The merit of such a reorganization is that so many
and so great values will be secured at a minimum cost. The material is
in existence for an enormous improvement of the services.
Had not the sweeping proposals of the Adult Education Committee for
making the local education authority the library authority been
negatived before the late Bill came into Parliament, the heterogeneous
units that constitute the library service of London would after the Act
of 1919 have come under the unifying influence of the London Education
Committee. It was such a near thing that we may pause to consider
the probable results. As already noticed, library development in the
metropolis has been unequal in the extreme. Certain boroughs are still
destitute of a public library system. The total number of books in
the remainder is about a million and a half. All these metropolitan
libraries are established under the same Acts; till recently they drew
their income from a uniform rate (except in certain boroughs where a
high rateable value allowed the penny to be reduced to a halfpenny);
the governing bodies are in each district a committee of the borough
council. Yet each group of libraries is a distinct entity. Each
authority is a law unto itself. A ratepayer in one borough is not
permitted to borrow from the library in the next though interchange of
privileges would have been, not merely a logical but a great economic
advantage. There has been no consultation between the authorities
to avoid overlapping in neighbouring reference libraries, though
correlative specialization would have been easy and remunerative.[27]
Every reference library develops on individual lines, perhaps as a
British Museum in miniature, with the result that, out of a number much
larger than the total number of boroughs, not one is above the standard
of a second-rate library in the provinces. Some committees offer a
cordial welcome to students at school or college in their boroughs.
Others repulse such students unless they are ratepayers or at least
residents in the borough.[28]
The immediate advantage of combining all the local libraries of London
and Greater London into one system, all available to any one living or
working in any quarter, and supplementing each other by a simple method
of interchange, is manifest. The majority of the reference libraries
should be shut up at once, and the space used for library purposes
that have hitherto been neglected. Provided that every branch has a
good collection of quick-reference books, there is no need for most of
these--many of them are legacies of the still more parochial government
of London before the present boroughs were formed. A proportion of the
contents should be used to augment the stock of the Central Library for
Students, which is now, in a small way, a central depot for the lending
libraries of both London and the country. The remainder, after all
useless and obsolete material had been sent to the destructor, would be
brought together to form the initial stock of some six or eight really
excellent reference libraries, so placed that every potential reader
would be within the radius of a tram-ride. Six or eight large central
libraries might be selected for the purpose, and would require little
alteration beyond the removal of the lending department, for which room
would have been found elsewhere.
Whenever the present haphazard library service of London is superseded
by a unified system, there will be a possibility of incorporating into
it, or associating as auxiliaries, various public or semi-public
libraries not belonging to the municipalities. London is not poor in
its bibliothecal possessions, though badly served. In 1910, Mr. R. A.
Rye calculated that in the public and administrative libraries and
those belonging to various institutions, Greater London had a total
of eight and a half million volumes, of which one and a half million
are inaccessible to the general public.[29] This gave a supply of one
volume per head, which may be compared with Berlin’s two volumes,
Dresden’s three, and the four per head in Paris. Such comparisons, it
should be observed, are not a matter of simple arithmetic. A larger
community may find its account in a smaller relative stock, be that
organized for use. A family of five with ten books would be badly off.
A town of 50,000 with 100,000 volumes would be opulent. London, with
a system of centralization and distribution comprehending all these
varied resources, would probably be as well off as any city in the
world. It is largely a question of realizing the intellectual capital
that is now paying such poor dividends. Special libraries, such as
that of the Patent Office, the National Science and the National Art
Libraries at South Kensington, the Public Record Office, and others,
like the various economic and sociological, historical, medical,
legal, and other libraries attached to technical or scientific
institutions, would continue to stand apart, but would stand in a
definite relation to the general service.
[Illustration: READING ROOM OF THE GENERAL LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF
LONDON.]
The proper balance between local control and the superintending
departments--and sub-departments, if the nation’s libraries are
reorganized as several great territorial systems--would not be
difficult to contrive, so as to preserve and foster the rights of
each community to self-expression. It is not proposed to work these
out in detail here. Briefly, the functions of the central board
would be:--(1) to install and operate the machinery for interchange
and central supply, the latter ultimately superseding the former
altogether; (2) to see that the local libraries and more especially the
selection of books are maintained at a proper level; (3) to undertake
such wholesale services as cataloguing and the compilation of aids
to readers, work which is now done over and over again by individual
library staffs at great expense, or else is neglected; (4) to organize
and finance the training of librarians, and see that they are properly
paid. Ultimately, librarianship might be organized as a sort of civil
service; at any rate, librarians ought to be as carefully looked after
by the State as are the teachers.
Many other enterprises of vast public benefit could be, most
appropriately, engineered by the central office; for example, the
publication of large editions of non-copyright books in a form
suitable for lending library use. Bookbinding is another item of
local expenditure that calls urgently for mass treatment. It is not
proposed, however, that the central library authority should set up a
binding factory in opposition to the trade. This would be unnecessary,
for it would be in such a commanding position, as by far the largest
purchaser in the market, that it could dictate its own terms to
publishers, printers, binders, and even to paper-makers. The fact is,
the rebinding of books in public libraries might, for the most part, be
done away with, if paper, covers, and binding were originally designed
to stand the wear. As a leading authority on the subject, Mr. Douglas
Cockerell recently said, “Publishers still design books to meet the
fancy of the casual buyer, and very largely ignore the requirements of
the libraries, which are for many books their largest customers.”[30]
Light, fluffy paper is selected by publishers solely to bulk out books;
the thicker the book the higher the price. “Now the public may like
to pay for fluff and wind, but the librarian’s interests are directly
opposed to this. Increased bulk means more shelf-room, and the use of
this paper means that the books will fall to pieces after a very short
time.” But our central authority would surely see to it that a book
produced for library use should be printed on paper of good quality
and cased in split boards, which “should last in ordinary library
circulation until the librarian is forced to discard it on account of
the dirt it has picked up.”
Another need of paramount importance to all engaged in the pursuit of
knowledge is that the contents of the numerous periodicals produced
throughout the world, registering advances in all branches of
science and research, should be abstracted and indexed, so that the
material should be rendered accessible or at any rate its existence
fully known.[31] Mention has already been made of the Subject-Index
to Periodicals, in which some hundred and fifty periodicals are
systematically indexed. This important undertaking was initiated some
years ago by Mr. E. Wyndham Hulme, late librarian to H.M. Patent
Office; it has been carried on successively under the auspices of the
“Athenæum” and of the Library Association. It is at present a heavy
burden upon a few devoted shoulders, although a very large part of
the labour is performed by volunteers; yet its scheme is susceptible
of indefinite expansion, if all the requirements of scientific and
technical workers are to be, even approximately, met. It is eminently
a task pertaining to the library, the university and college library,
the special library, and the research department of all types. Were
there a central library department in existence, it would undertake
this as part of its ordinary routine. It would also undertake the
collateral task of preparing and publishing a union catalogue of the
long sets of periodicals of all kinds to which the Subject-Index gives
the references, and it would indicate where these sets are to be found.
Besides the indexing, it would perhaps carry out the further but
hardly less valuable work of drawing up and issuing systematic digests
of important new knowledge contained in the learned periodicals. It
has been recently proposed that the British Museum should carry out
this necessary piece of national work, the cost of which, sales being
allowed for, would not be excessive.[32]
Such results, however, invaluable as they would be to the whole nation,
through the services rendered to several classes of workers, would be
only a by-product of the centralizing and systematizing process, the
immediate object of which would be the betterment of our libraries.
Let us return then from this digression. In the middle of last
century and towards its end, Edward Edwards and then his biographer,
Thomas Greenwood, both stated their conviction that central control
was necessary, and that one of its most useful instruments would be
systematic inspection. Greenwood quotes the following from Edwards:--
“If every Library in this country on which the public has any fair
claim, could be brought distinctly under public view, by a precise and
periodical statement, comprising at least three particulars: (1) what
it _is_; (2) what it _has_; and (3) what it _does_; a long train of
improvements would inevitably follow. But the systematic inspection of
Public Libraries to be effective must be national.”[33]
He goes on:
“The present writer is convinced that there will never be a full
measure of health and vitality in libraries generally until some
central control of this nature is established. The largest and best of
the public libraries do not need it, but would welcome it to secure
the welfare of the library body politic. But there is a class of
libraries, and it is to be feared that it is not a small one, which
seriously need to have light from the outside brought to bear upon
their administration. Such libraries are managed in a narrow, illiberal
manner, with rules which hamper rather than help the public. The staff
is selected without regard to conditions of suitability, training, or
merit, and every method adopted is of the tamest and least efficient
kind. Only national and systematic inspection can alter this state
of affairs. His Majesty’s inspectors of public schools perform an
efficient and salutary work without curbing local aspirations, and
similar inspectors of public libraries would be able to carry out an
equally useful task in connection with the municipal libraries. But
it is plain that no form of public Government inspection would be
agreeable to existing library authorities, unless accompanied by some
kind of substantial State aid.”[34]
Government inspection of libraries is not unknown in other countries,
on both sides of the Atlantic, and appears to cause no friction but a
spirit of good feeling and mutual help. It is carried on, for instance,
in Canada, and it is one of the functions of the State library
commissions in the United States. The libraries accept it in the spirit
which Edwards saw would animate the efficient library authority, and,
further, welcome it as a potent means for extending their benefits
into regions hitherto unreached. In Ontario the Minister of Education
is responsible for the administration of the Public Libraries Act,
and assigns this part of his duties to the Public Libraries Branch,
of which the Inspector of Public Libraries is superintendent. But in
Ontario the local authorities are so whole-hearted in their zeal
that the energies of the Branch are mainly confined to general work
in the interest of libraries, to routine inspections, the collection
of statistics, and the payment of grants. Yet, it is admitted, the
majority of librarians and library trustees would welcome a demand for
a minimum standard of efficiency.
The American State commissions usually include the State librarian,
other professional librarians, prominent educators, literary men,
library trustees, and business men interested in the work. “Instead
of regarding with jealousy the assumption by the State of powers like
these, librarians generally welcome the increase of systematic work
fostered by State aid and control. They are active everywhere in
efforts to establish State commissions, where such do not exist, and
the opponents of their efforts are usually persons unfamiliar with
the modern library movement, or politicians who see in such action no
benefit to themselves. In some cases, where legislatures have refused
to enact a proper State library law, State library associations,
voluntary bodies of librarians, have agreed to initiate and carry on,
at their own expense, some of the activities usually supervised and
financed by the State.”[35]
“A former agent of the Massachusetts Free Library Commission won for
himself the title of ‘the travelling bishop,’ descriptive both of the
estimation and affection with which he was regarded.” “State library
commissions exist at present in thirty-seven states. In a few states
such as in California, New York, and Utah, the State library or the
State board of education, in lieu of a library commission, exerts the
functions that such a commission would have.”[36]
The question of State grants to local authorities is perhaps important,
but certainly not so important as some critics would make out.
Equalization of burdens would of course have to be arranged. Yet, on
the other hand, there should be nothing to prevent a very enterprising
authority from spending a great deal more if it chose on further
developments of its library service. Progress would ultimately come to
a standstill if there were not this liberty; uniformity, at any level,
is ultimately stagnation. The Adult Education Committee speak of State
grants to local exchequers; but, apparently, these were to have been
calculated on the measure of a local authority’s zeal in co-operating
with educational work in the narrow sense, and not made a handle for
beneficent central control. It might or it might not be advisable to
assist local effort or reward enterprise by a policy of grants in aid.
Anyhow, it should be borne in mind that the material benefits of
such a scheme of centralization as has been roughly outlined would be
tantamount to a large financial contribution by the State, though it
should cost the State nothing. Apart from equalization of burdens[37]
and, perhaps, rewards for noteworthy efficiency--or the converse, fines
or refusal of grants for failures in efficiency--there seems to be
little use in discussing what proportion of the cost of our systems
of libraries should be defrayed by local rates and contributions
from local authorities and what by the State. Both rates and taxes
come ultimately from the same source, and, so far as that source, the
rated and taxed individual, is concerned, he might as well spend his
time debating which pocket he should keep his purse in. Inspections
and grants from the local exchequer would, obviously, go hand in hand;
but the allotment of grants would certainly not be the sole or the
principal end of the system of inspection.
If all the libraries in the kingdom were linked together in a national
system, the division into urban libraries and rural systems would to
a large extent disappear. A large number of the urban libraries would
be absorbed into groups of town and country libraries, analogous to
the American county groups; and large rural areas, with small village
libraries and a service of boxes, would have their focus in new central
institutes easily accessible to readers in the vicinity and available
for occasional visits by students at a greater distance. Many populous
areas would remain much as they are at present, with some increase of
facilities. But, instead of one Central Library for Students, there
would have to be, sooner or later, several large supplemental libraries
in convenient spots, forming magazines supplying, not individual
readers, but the scattered libraries; and, probably the British Isles
would have to be divided for library purposes into several provinces,
each centering in one of these. Supervision of library activities in
such provinces would devolve upon regional committees, elected by the
county and borough authorities in each province, the central board
exercising co-ordinating functions and carrying out such work as is for
the general welfare.
These central supplemental libraries would be built up largely by
a careful redistribution of existing resources. There is hardly a
library of any size that does not contain many books which are very
seldom used, books, however, which no librarian would dare to jettison,
because he knows that some fine day a reader is sure to come along
to whom one volume or another will be of priceless importance. There
are many other books so infrequently called for that it would be an
immense convenience to store them elsewhere, and utilize the valuable
shelf-space for books in continual request. Books of this sort should
be kept at the supplemental library, duly catalogued, and ready to be
sent to any library throughout the area served, when readers require
them. The supplemental libraries would, of course, be always buying
more books; they would have to keep abreast of the latest advances in
all subjects; but the works just described would form an important
part of their original contents, and would be transferred to them free
of cost. Local libraries are constantly put to the expense of buying
books for one or two users; such users are, no doubt, among the most
deserving of all their clients, and it is but just that their urgent
wants should be satisfied. But it is a tax upon the capacities of small
libraries that should be met somehow else; they would be spared it
by the new system, and the cost of the supplemental library would be
saved over and over again, the local library then having more funds to
maintain the stock of books in regular demand.
The present Central Library for Students is a step in the right
direction, but it is only a step; the work will have to be done on
a very large scale. This library was an outgrowth of the efforts to
supply students attending university tutorial and W.E.A. classes
with books to carry on systematic reading. At the end of 1915, the
Carnegie United Kingdom Trust undertook to provide £600 to assist in
the establishment of the library, £2,000 for additions to the stock,
and £400 yearly for five years, if £320 were raised by subscription.
The subvention was afterwards raised to £1,000 a year, and in 1920 the
issues of books numbered 15,500. The Adult Education Committee were
deeply impressed by the exceptional value of the work performed by this
library, and proposed that it should be made the nucleus of a central
circulating library to supplement the local library service all over
the country. With an assured income of £2,000 a year for ten years,
they calculated that an annual circulation of at least 40,000 volumes
would be attained; their estimate being based on an estimated cost
of 1s. per volume issued. The actual cost of each issue, under our
present benevolent postal regime, is considerably more. The figure is
now probably not less than 1s. 6d. Add return postage to this, and you
will see that, after borrowing a book two or three times, you might as
well have bought it outright. The method of sending out books singly is
too expensive. And a circulation of 40,000 a year would be a mere drop
in the ocean; any small provincial library has an annual circulation
of at least 40,000; a large borough library system in London expects
an annual circulation of about a million. The thing must be done on a
vast scale to be worth doing at all, and then it can be done cheaply,
even if, as might reasonably be expected, the Post Office declines
to grant a large rebate on the transmission of books issued from the
national libraries. The proper method is to make our central library or
libraries an integral part of the whole machine, supplying to all other
libraries all, or nearly all, of the books that are not imperatively
necessary on the spot for everyday purposes. Then the issues from the
central library will not be in twos and threes, but in large batches,
and the average cost will be reduced to an economic amount.
Mr. John McKillop produced a workmanlike scheme in 1907 for such a
supplemental library in London as would have provided all the students
and other hard working readers throughout the twenty-eight municipal
boroughs with all the books required in the most exacting course of
study. He proposed that it should be established by the Education
Committee of the London County Council, since its greatest immediate
effect would be to supply students with expensive works not now within
their reach.
“With eighty-five municipal libraries already established in London, it
would be useless duplication for the Education Committee to undertake
all the work of registering borrowers and issuing volumes to them
and safeguarding their return. It is suggested that the contents of
the Council’s collection should be lent on application to the public
libraries and the libraries of educational institutions which could
then lend them to their clients. This method would avoid the necessity
for a very large staff. The central collection would have as borrowers
merely the eighty-five libraries and branches already established,
and those which may be added from time to time by the boroughs in the
future, together with the fifty or so polytechnics, and such other of
the institutions for higher education as may care to avail themselves
of the facilities offered. In any case its borrowers could not exceed a
couple of hundred, and though each of these might daily draw and return
large numbers of books, the clerical labour required would be but a
fraction of that necessary in a smaller library, where a large number
of borrowers withdraw and return one or at most two volumes each.”[38]
Mr. McKillop based his estimate of cost on the number of volumes
contained in the Patent Office Library, viz., 105,000 volumes, which
comprehend a very large proportion of modern scientific works. “If we
take 35,000 as the number of volumes required for a modern working
science library of reference (_i.e._, excluding the smaller text-books
and class-books), and if we allow four times this number for the needs
of departments other than science, we get a total of 165,000 volumes as
the size of the collection. As a basis to calculate the capital cost of
the collection probably 5s. is too little and 10s. too much per volume.
Taking 7s. 6d. as a working figure the total cost would be about
£62,000 (one penny rate in London produces £171,000). But it would be
impossible to spend for this purpose wisely and economically such a
sum as £62,000 within less than ten years, and the collection could be
got together with reasonable rapidity by the expenditure of not more
than £10,000 in any one year. The average expenditure would probably be
nearer £5,000. In regard to administration the cost would be probably
easily covered by £5,000 a year when in full working order, but would
be four or five years in getting up to that figure.”[39]
If the cost of Mr. McKillop’s scheme was to be £5,000 a year in pre-war
money, we can hardly expect much from £2,000 a year now, especially
when the whole of the United Kingdom, and not London alone, is to be
supplied. Further, it is hardly too optimistic to conjecture that the
number of students and other serious readers in the population is a
great deal higher now than it was in 1907, and, accordingly, that the
demands upon our supplemental libraries would be proportionately more
exacting. No, the Adult Education Committee have not looked far enough:
a much bigger scheme is required, and the expenditure of much larger
sums than they contemplate. But there is no need to be frightened by
the cost; one may safely affirm that the general economic saving will
be in direct proportion to the outlay on the establishment and upkeep
of the experimental libraries. Whatever is spent at the centre, will be
far more than made up by savings at the circumference.
Mr. McKillop put the case of the student of science and technology, for
whose difficulties he felt most concern, although there are numerous
others whose state of destitution is no less pitiful, with a cogency
that cannot be bettered.
“These students may be either those whose means enable them to pursue
courses of study in the splendid laboratories of University College,
the Royal College of Science, the City and Guilds Institution, and
other schools of equal rank, or they may be young men and women whose
circumstances compel them to earn their living by daily work, and have
only access to the culture and improvement offered by evening study.
While the former presumably have access to the best literature of their
subject in the libraries of the institutions in which they work, the
latter, although, it is suggested, showing probably greater devotion
and sacrifice in the pursuit of knowledge, are debarred by the hours of
opening and closing from the use of the magnificent collections in the
British Museum, Patent Office, and other public libraries of reference.
The polytechnics, it is admitted, do make great efforts to supply the
books required by their students; but it cannot be contended that at
present they can compete in this respect with the other institutions
named, which provide for the student who has all his day for study.
It is precisely for this latter class that the public rate-supported
libraries of London ought to provide, and it is a well-established
fact to those who know something of the inner working of the public
libraries in London, that it is one of the great sources of discontent
among London’s public librarians that insufficient funds, and sometimes
also unsympathetic borough council committees, prevent their doing
more than is done for this class. But there are inherent difficulties
which have to be taken into consideration. London is not a unit; it is
twenty-eight independent units without even a semblance of federation,
and it would impose an insupportable financial burden on the ratepayers
if every one of the twenty-eight boroughs were to attempt to supply,
through the public libraries, the books required by advanced students
in science, technology, history, literature, art, and other domains of
study which can be pursued in London.”
... But why should London provide twenty-eight sets of all these works?
There is no probability that one student in, say, Bermondsey, and one
in, say, Finsbury, will require the same volume of the Philosophical
Transactions at the same time, and, therefore, it is not necessary
that both Bermondsey and Finsbury, and every other library in London,
should possess a set. But there is a probability that more than one
student in the same borough might require the same volume at the same
time; for instance, a teacher at the Battersea Polytechnic might
recommend the half-dozen or so students in his advanced class in
chemistry to read some classical memoir; and Battersea Public Library,
to meet this demand efficiently, would require two or three sets of
the Philosophical Transactions, which would be an obviously absurd
arrangement. The absence of any system of co-operation between the
metropolitan libraries renders it impossible for them at present to
co-operate in any way in meeting this difficulty.[40] Mr. McKillop
went on to show that it might be possible for the local libraries,
trusting to the central collection for an adequate supply of what may
be called students’ works, relatively seldom used, to work with a
standard collection of popular works which would be the same in all
boroughs. “When this point is reached, it might be possible to have a
common catalogue for all the libraries.... The way is, in consequence,
easy for a local authority which decides to establish a collection. It
can procure for a very small sum the catalogue of all its collection
ready made on the best lines, and all it has to do is to purchase the
books, etc.”[41] Without endorsing this idea of stereotyped libraries,
an idea which is obviously contrary to the vital principle that a local
library, if it is truly alive, will by the predominant character of its
contents show itself to be the expression of local individuality, we
must admit that it opens up suggestive possibilities.
Another proposal of the Adult Education Committee lies open to more
severe criticism. This was a project for assisting industries and
technical students and research workers by setting up a great chain
of industrial libraries forming “a technical library system for each
industry,” independently of the municipal library system. Side by
side with the latter, not yet, and perhaps not even then, organized
as a reciprocating system, there would be erected a complex and
highly expensive series of special collections, open, apparently, to
members of the particular industries alone. “In the case of general
libraries the unit of organization and administration is the local
authority, in the case of the technical library system it should be
the industry.”[42] The amount of costly and unnecessary duplication,
both of contents and of machinery, in such a cumbrous scheme dumbfounds
the experienced librarian, especially when he reflects that all the
libraries in the kingdom could be put on a scientific basis, and
all the wants of both the general public and the special industries
amply satisfied, at much less the price. Such a scheme must obviously
have been framed by persons having but a rudimentary idea of the
library arts, or they would have thought out a much more practical
and economical plan. The extravagant cost and the impracticability of
the proposal have been exposed in a special Memorandum by the Library
Association, representing the trained librarians of the country, who,
strange to say, were not consulted before the scheme was evolved. The
gist of their criticism is contained in the following paragraphs:--
“The Library Association is not prepared to admit that this policy is
sound or economical. Clearly, extensive overlapping cannot be avoided,
because a large number of industries require general technical
libraries and not special technical libraries. For example, the motor
industry is special, but a library for that industry must contain
books special to many other industries, on metallurgy, chemistry,
physics, and other subjects. An industrial library should comprise
information, not only on the industry itself, but on subjects and
industries in contact with the industry for which the library is
intended. As a rule the industrial and technical student, unless he
is a beginner, needs information just off the line of his special
work. Hence, libraries formed round an industry will tend to become
general technical libraries. Few industries are confined to one area.
Birmingham is usually regarded as the centre of the hardware trade,
which, however, is spread widely over the country. A technical library
for an industry must have a centre and branches with all the machinery
of inter-communication and exchange. Even so, the books could not be so
readily accessible as by an extension of the present library service,
which has developed naturally in response to the people’s demand for
information. A better plan, therefore, would be the proper organization
of the existing libraries of technical societies, and an extension of
the present service of public libraries, the technical collections of
which (so far as funds have allowed) have been selected to aid the
industries of the locality. The public library service is already
extensive; improvement on it is essential; but to organize another
parallel service would be a regrettable waste of money in view of the
great need at this time of obtaining the best technical library service
at the least cost.
“The Library Association is strongly of opinion that scientific and
technical information should be freely available to people who are
not yet enrolled in or who are outside an industry; otherwise that
industry would tend to be impervious to new ideas, except from within.
They earnestly press for the efficient equipment and expansion of
the existing public technical collections, and for the foundation of
technical libraries, in large provincial cities, on the lines of the
Patent Office Library in London.”
The all-important question remains to be discussed: If a centralizing
authority is required to enable the libraries of this country to take
their proper share in reconstruction and in carrying on civilized life
in an intelligent and orderly way, who is to be this centralizing
authority? What Government department is fit for such a charge? Unless
a new one is to be created, the Board of Education obviously has sole
claim. This was the unhesitating conclusion of the Adult Education
Committee. The Library Association, the membership of which is made
up principally of salaried officers or elected representatives of
the present municipal authorities, took alarm at this proposal, and
especially at the corollary that the library authority should be the
local education committee. The objections are, briefly and summarily,
two: That the interests of the libraries might tend to be subordinated
to those of the schools, and that bureaucratic control would stifle
local interest and local initiative. But, as was urged in the chapter
dealing with the interaction of libraries and schools, if the Board of
Education undertook this wider responsibility, it should, and doubtless
would, become a board of something more than scholastic education.
Libraries must not be allowed to take a second place to the schools,
the work of which at an early period of life they are destined to
transcend. Let the local education committee attend, as now, to the
schools, which will be, and should be, its first consideration. But
let another body, appointed definitely for the purpose, partly no
doubt from the same personnel, but well seasoned with co-opted members
representing the wider intellectual interests of each locality, be
responsible for managing the public library.[43]
[Illustration: THE ORATORY LIBRARY.]
American librarians, who have had experience of administration of both
libraries and schools by boards of education, are not in favour of
vesting the control of libraries in the education authorities. “Too
close an administrative connection ... has not been beneficial to
the library ... it has generally been found that when the control of
a public library is vested in a body created originally for another
purpose it is regarded as of secondary importance and its development
is retarded. It is better that the library should have its own board of
trustees, and that the two institutions should co-operate in the freest
manner. Such mutual aid is, of course, founded on the fact that the
educational work of both school and library is carried on largely by
means of books. That of the school is formal, compulsory, and limited
in time; that of the library is informal, voluntary, and practically
unlimited. It is greatly to the advantage of the scholar, and of those
informal processes of training that are going on constantly during life
whether he wills it or not, that he should form the habit of consulting
and using books outside of the school. When books are thought of merely
as school implements their use is naturally abandoned when school days
are over.”[44]
Similar views were submitted by the Library Association to the Adult
Education Committee. Part of their resolution ran as follows:--
“The aim of the library as an education institution is best expressed
in the formula ‘self-development in an atmosphere of freedom,’ as
contrasted with the aim of the school, which is ‘training in an
atmosphere of restraint or discipline’; in the school the teacher
is dominant, but the pupil strikes out his own line in the library,
which supplies the written material upon which the powers awakened
and trained in the school can be exercised; furthermore, the contacts
of the library with organized education cease where the educational
machinery terminates; but the library continues as an educational
force of national importance in its contacts with the whole social,
political, and intellectual life of the community....”
“In speaking to the resolution, Mr. L. Stanley Jast, formerly Secretary
of the Library Association, developed the argument--“The work of the
librarian is sharply contrasted with that of the teacher. The teacher
deals with human material, the librarian with the written record, and
only incidentally with the people who come to consult and use it. But
not only is there this wide difference in the nature of the material
upon which the teacher and the librarian respectively work; there is
a difference of immediate aim of so basic a character that one is
almost the negative of the other, and therefore are they perfectly
complementary to one another.... The library and the school supplement
and complement each other. And the virtue of each is that it is not the
other.... The material of each is different, the aims are different,
and the administrative machinery of the one has no real relation to
that of the other.... The resolution has a second thesis, which is
that it is after all only a portion of the library field which touches
education.... We outgrow the school; we cannot outgrow the library.”[45]
“We have examined these arguments with the care to which the policy
of the Library Association is entitled. The first argument, however,
rests upon a sharp distinction between the library and the school which
should not, in our opinion, exist. A school is a more complex and
many sided institution than the argument would appear to assume, and
its functions are too narrowly confined by the phrase ‘training in an
atmosphere of restraint or discipline.’ The class-room is but part of
a school. Other institutions--the workshop, the gymnasium, the playing
field, and the library--are essential features, each of them making its
peculiar contribution to that self-development which is claimed to be
an end of the library. The school in fact, is a community which fulfils
its end through a variety of agencies of which the class-room is one
and the library another. The ideal school is one which seeks to aid
self-development through the medium of ‘discipline’ on the one hand,
and by providing opportunities for the pupil ‘to strike out on his own
line’ on the other.
“The antithesis between the teacher and the librarian is also, in our
judgment, too sharply defined. Powers are trained by their exercise,
and the printed book is an integral part of the equipment of the
school. If the librarian deals with the written record, it is but as a
means to self-development in the scholar. In other words, the library
is part of the educational fabric, just as much as the art room or
the school clinic. The school and the teacher will perform their true
function only in so far as they enter into the closest co-operation
with the library and the librarian. The latter will fill their real
place only through co-operation with the former. Both school and
library will be immeasurably strengthened when the artificial line of
demarcation is obliterated.
“It is sometimes argued that the libraries would lose by the process
and become subject to an over-rigid systematization, to which
librarians are rightly opposed. This attitude of mind appears to us to
be based on a want of knowledge of the strong trend towards greater
freedom and initiative within the publicly provided schools of the
country. This movement, we believe, would receive a valuable stimulus
from closer association with the libraries, without necessarily
imposing a mechanical organization upon the libraries.
“The provision of children’s rooms in libraries, the assembling of
books bearing upon the work and interests of students, library lessons
and other developments and proposals will forge strong and necessary
links between the school and the library; but it is difficult to see
how this intimate relationship can be generally established unless
there is an organic connection arising from a single policy based
upon the complex needs of the pupil. Under certain circumstances the
frank interchange of experience and inter-relation of interests may be
possible with dual control. But it is at least open to doubt whether
they will be generally and permanently attained without a common
administration.
“The second argument in support of independent administration for
libraries is, in the words of the resolution referred to above, that
‘the contacts of the library with organised education cease where
the educational machinery terminates.’ The Education Act, 1918,
provides for compulsory continuation education up to the age of 16,
and ultimately 18. Further education of this character must lead to a
growth of both technical and general education beyond these ages. There
is certain to be an extension of technical education after the war, and
there will be a growing demand for non-vocational education to be met.
With the latter question we shall deal at greater length in our Final
Report. A greater call than in the past will undoubtedly be made upon
our educational resources, and the necessity will arise for that close
co-operation between educational institutions and libraries which is
admittedly desirable in the case of school pupils if the school and the
library are to fulfil their functions.
“It is true that we cannot outgrow the library: but it is equally true
that we cannot outgrow the school, in other words, that we cannot
outgrow the need for systematic education. The whole purpose of our
inquiries into adult education has been directed towards formulating
recommendations based upon this truth. Our inquiries, further, justify
the view that there is a growing recognition of the need for education
and an increasing desire for it on the part of men and women.
“But though the public library has an important function to perform
in relation to educational institutions, its activities travel beyond
assistance to formal education. It exists to serve the needs of a
public with varied interests. It must satisfy the requirements of the
serious student; but it must also cater for that large class of people
who are ‘general readers,’ and those who go to books for recreation.
The unsystematic and recreative reading which the libraries have
stimulated do not, however, it seems to us, provide any argument
for maintaining the public libraries as an independent municipal
service.”[46]
In the present writer’s opinion, the distinction drawn by Mr. Jast
is a sound one, and is corroborated by the reluctance of American
librarians to placing libraries under an authority primarily appointed
to administer schools. But, since there remains so much in common in
the aims of the two sets of institutions, if the supreme authority
were entrusted with a scheme of education in the larger sense--call it
culture, humanism, or personal development, since the term education
smacks too much of the school and college--then it would be logical
and salutary to put our public libraries under a department of that
authority, making this responsible, side by side with the education
department in the narrower sense, to the supreme Board--which may
or may not continue to be called the Board of Education. Dread of
bureaucratic control has become almost instinctive with thoughtful
people. The habit of working in watertight compartments, and repressing
every spontaneous activity that cannot be forced into the strait-jacket
of official routine, inspires observant critics with distrust even
of rural library schemes conducted on strictly official lines under
education committees. To put the control of both urban and rural
libraries in the preoccupied hands of those whose attention is centred
in schools, discipline, and organized education, would be a blow at
the freedom and elasticity of the library. After all, the problem
of the young person is much the same everywhere, and education may
for the most part be reduced to a system. People who have grown up
and developed personality, however, will not submit to have their
intellectual nutriment doled out on a system. They must have a say in
managing and developing their own libraries, and in choosing the books
they are to read.
The notion of a Libraries Board side by side with and independent of
the Board of Education would find no support in this country. Nor are
we likely to see State library commissions on the American model,
though we may as well digest the lesson from the United States, where
they certainly know how to manage libraries so that they bulk large in
the social consciousness. Co-operation, but not subordination, must
be the watchword. The department of the general Board of Education
charged with supervision of the national system of libraries would
contain, besides those who are educators in the widest sense of the
term, representatives of those versed in the government and the actual
administration of public libraries, from the British Museum and the
university libraries downwards. Such a combination would be less likely
than the mere education committees of to-day to negative the proposals
of those who understand the needs of libraries and of the people who
use them. The local committees would likewise be well-seasoned with
co-opted members representing all the varied intellectual interests of
each locality, and, above all, representing the actual readers, the
people most concerned in each library’s well-being. Local initiative
must be welcomed, not merely tolerated: it is the vital element of
progress. In between would come the regional committees, charged with
the maintenance of the central supplemental libraries, and with all the
general activities carried on throughout each great library province.
Thus, surely, the proper equilibrium between the central co-ordinating
body and local volition would be safely established.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] cp. America:--“In towns where there is more than one library
accessible to the public, these should reach as soon as possible some
_modus vivendi_ that will prevent the useless duplication of any class
of literature. This may usually be done by agreeing to specialize.
For example, in Chicago such an agreement has been made by the Public
Library, the John Crerar Library, and the Newberry Library. The Public
Library specializes in general literature, the John Crerar in science,
and the Newberry in history, economics, and so on. In pursuance of
this policy, the Newberry Library has even transferred to the John
Crerar its medical collection, which had reached a considerable size.
Such action is evidently a long step toward the complete understanding
between civic institutions that is so much to be desired; and it
deserves the highest commendation.” Bostwick: _The American Public
Library_, pp. 73-4. Similar specialization has been effected in the
Astor, Lenox, Bar Association, Academy of Medicine, and Columbia
University Libraries in New York.
[28] There are great irregularities in the distribution of these
libraries; for instance, the ratepayer in Holborn has to walk on the
average 540 yards to get to a library; in Camberwell he would have
to go 1,030 yards; in Wandsworth 1,400; while in the huge borough of
Woolwich, if it were all built up, he would have to travel about 2,400
yards. The majority of the boroughs, however, only expect their readers
to walk between 500 and 1,000 yards.
If we consider the provision of libraries in proportion to the
population, we find that the extreme variations are that Hampstead
supplies a library for every 14,000 inhabitants, while 75,000
inhabitants in Stepney share one between them.
But the demand for library facilities is not the same in all the
boroughs, for we find that while in Hampstead 125 out of every 1,000
of its inhabitants are registered as using the library, in Shoreditch
only 29 per 1,000 avail themselves of the facilities which exist in
that borough. The effect of this is that the number of _readers_ per
library varies considerably, for while Poplar and Hammersmith share a
library or branch between 1,200 readers, Stoke Newington and Chelsea
are satisfied with one establishment for 4,600 readers.
(John McKillop: “The Present Position of London Municipal Libraries
with suggestions for Increasing their Efficiency,” in _Library
Association Record_, Dec. 1906.)
[29] Rye, R. A., _The Libraries of London_ (1910)--“Preliminary Survey.”
[30] In a lecture at the School of Librarianship, University College,
London, on May 23rd, 1921.
[31] “Sometimes a discovery of vital moment lies concealed for
many years in a little known periodical; the most striking recent
case is that of Mendel’s experiments, now the inspiration of the
most productive school of modern biology, described in 1865 in the
periodical of a natural history society in Brünn but buried until 1900,
when a happy chance revealed them.” _Times_, June 29, 1921--“Indexing
of Technical Literature.”
[32] “A union catalogue of the current periodicals preserved in
the German libraries, published in 1914, comprised some 17,000
entries. A similar list for the periodicals filed in the libraries
of the United Kingdom, prepared in 1914-15 by some English State and
copyright librarians, was submitted for publication to the Department
of Scientific and Industrial Research, but the proposal met with no
encouragement. Yet the compilation of such a list is an essential
preliminary to the proper national organization of knowledge. For a
union list indicates the relative strength and weakness of our national
libraries in respect of their periodical collections: it enables
the librarian to correct the latter without unduly increasing the
expenditure of the library in that department of literature.” _Nature_,
June 9, 1921--“Co-operative Indexing of Periodical Literature.”
[33] _Edward Edwards_, by Thomas Greenwood, p. 137.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Bostwick: _The American Public Library_, p. 28.
[36] Friedel: _Training for Librarianship_, p. 176.
[37] “The amount produced by the penny rate varies from borough to
borough within very wide limits. The wealthy City of Westminster
receives nearly £23,000 for every penny of its imposed rate; Kensington
comes next with £9,500, and the others fall gradually till we find that
Stoke Newington receives only £1,400. But to estimate the burden it is
necessary to consider the produce of the penny rate in relation to the
number of inhabitants, and in doing this we find that while every 1,000
inhabitants in Westminster can raise for library purposes £128, in
the over-burdened east and south-east, Poplar and Camberwell can only
raise £20, while Stepney comes lowest on the list with £19 per 1,000
inhabitants. But this does not express the whole of the burden, for
while 1,000 inhabitants of wealthy Westminster have the power to spend
£128, they find that their five libraries, well stocked with books and
liberally staffed, cost them only £65, while Poplar, which finds six
[actually four] establishments too little for its needs, must perforce
expend the whole of the £19 per 1,000 citizens that it is enabled
to raise.” J. McKillop: _The Present Position of London Municipal
Libraries_. These figures were put down in 1907; the present situation
may be understood from later statistics. The areas and populations are
similar.
FROM L.C.C. LONDON STATISTICS, 1913-4.
Charge falling
on Rates. Amount
Poplar 4 Libraries .99 £3,080
Kensington 3 ” .61 £5,905
Westminster 4 ” .43 £11,784
FROM L.C.C. STATISTICAL ABSTRACT, 1920.
Assessable Value. 1d. produces
Poplar £835,583 £3,482
Kensington £2,451,335 £10,214
Westminster £7,011,845 £29,216
Current estimate at Poplar, £8,318 to 2.17d. in £.
Poplar, it should be noted, has one of the most efficient library
systems in London, though the buildings are not pretentious and the
furniture is for use and not ornament. To provide and work this
admirable system something like an economic miracle had to be worked,
for so narrow was the financial margin that as the borough librarian
picturesquely put it, if a few slates fell off the roof the cost of
replacing them had to come out of the book fund.
[38] J. McKillop: _Present Position of London Municipal Libraries_.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Adult Education Committee: _Third Interim Report_, 20.
[43] “The public libraries and museums should be remitted to special
committees of the education authority. On each of these committees it
would be desirable to co-opt representatives of voluntary organizations
and societies specially interested in the work of the committees, such
as local educational bodies, scientific societies, and art clubs.
Librarians and curators should, of course, have direct access to their
respective committees and the fullest possible scope for their powers
and special knowledge.” Adult Education Committee: _Third Interim
Report_, 56.
[44] Bostwick: _The American Public Library_, p. 95.
[45] Adult Education Committee: _Third Interim Report_, 19.
[46] Adult Education Committee: _Third Interim Report_, par. 9-12.
VI
TRAINING IN LIBRARIANSHIP
The pioneers of our municipal libraries were mostly men who had had
no experience of library administration, and learned their craft
and coached their assistants after studying the best type of older
libraries, improvising new methods to suit new circumstances. In
1876 the American Library Association was founded, and in 1877 the
Library Association of the United Kingdom. Their objects were first,
educational, through the medium of personal intercourse and the
exchange of information; and secondly propagandist, the furtherance
of the library movement. In some of the larger towns classes were
carried on for the instruction of the staff; and in 1884 the Library
Association drew up an examination syllabus, which was a first step
in defining the proper qualifications of a librarian. Classes open
to any assistant were held at various centres, and in 1893 an annual
summer school was started. The Association next appointed an Education
Committee, which before long co-operated with the London School of
Economics in holding courses of lectures, conducted correspondence
classes, elicited similar efforts from provincial branches, and
held yearly examinations. Certificates were granted in the separate
subjects, Literary History, Bibliography, Classification, Cataloguing,
Library Organization, and Library Routine; and when an assistant
had taken these seriatim he might obtain a full diploma, after he
had shown some knowledge of Latin and of a modern foreign language,
and written an original thesis on an appropriate subject. The weak
point of this admirable programme was that it did not provide for
systematic training or even for continuous study. Perhaps it was an
initial mistake to award certificates in single subjects, for the
majority of those gaining such certificates never approached the final
stage, and in a dozen years less than a dozen candidates won the
diploma. But the standard of the qualifications had to be adapted to
the educational level of the ordinary library assistant, and to the
extreme disadvantages under which he laboured. His hours were long, his
pay was low, and, penny rate libraries being uniformly understaffed,
he could not be spared to attend many classes, even if any were held
in his neighbourhood. The diploma scheme of the Library Association
is still in being, and provides an alternative method of qualifying
for professional certificates to working assistants who are unable to
benefit by the training system next to be described.
During the war, whilst the Adult Education Committee were trying to
find a place for libraries in a comprehensive plan of reconstruction,
the Carnegie United Kingdom Trustees were in consultation with the
Library Association on the question of a more thorough system of
training. The University of London School of Librarianship came into
existence as the outcome of these conferences in 1919, a few months
before the new Act. This was a momentous event in the history of the
profession. The School is a department of University College, the
largest school of the University; its curriculum fits into the scheme
of the Faculty of Arts; the students participate in the social and
intellectual life of the college. Thus it is not a separate vocational
institution, like the majority of the American library schools, but
part of a great foundation dedicated to the liberal arts and sciences.
The normal course of training occupies two years, and students must
devote their whole time to lectures, private study, and practical work;
but for the benefit of assistants who cannot throw up their occupation,
and also of booksellers, publishers’ assistants, and others desirous
of knowing something of library economy and useful subjects like
classification and indexing, part-time attendance is allowed, by which
the training is spread over a period varying from three to five years.
But it must be continuous. This and the thoroughness of a college
training, coupled with the initial requirement of a general education
of matriculation standard, make the advent of the school a great
stride forward. In time, the training may develop into a postgraduate
course, and instruction may be given in a series of advanced subjects,
such as Historical Bibliography and the Bibliography and History of
Scholarship, Latin, Greek, Biblical, Celtic, Romance, Teutonic and
Scandinavian, courses which the present writer was able to introduce as
possible subjects for study and research into the Library Association’s
syllabus, when he was Hon. Secretary of their Education Committee.
The growing complexity and diversity of library work and the
multiplication of technical and other special libraries call for
new types of librarian. The administrator of a large urban or rural
system must be a highly educated and many-sided person. Knowledge
of the relative values of books on an immense range of subjects is
hardly more necessary than ability to help other persons, not only to
select the right kind of books, but also to read, not at a venture,
but methodically. The able librarian must have a wide comparative
acquaintance with the contents and the technique of many libraries. He,
or perhaps she--for women are at least as well-fitted as men for almost
any kind of library work--must be a competent organizer, a good judge
and controller of others, and one who can infuse keenness and interest.
It is a tradition that he should be a master of the superficial, a
compendium of second-hand learning, knowing something about everything;
but that it would detract from his qualifications as a kind of walking
index to universal knowledge, if he knew too much about anything in
particular. This is an inhuman and impossible ideal. The oft-quoted
dictum of Mark Pattison that the librarian who reads is lost, unless
it be wantonly interpreted that we have lost the well-read librarian,
is a mistaken warning. One must have a hobby for mere vitality’s sake;
and, unless we specialize in something, we shall not even know what
knowledge is about anything.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Langley & Sons_
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, GENERAL LIBRARY.]
The corner-stone of the edifice is the science and art of book
selection. The librarian must be a first-class judge of books, and
of books for definite use. He is to be the guide and counsellor
of innumerable readers; the inspirer of untold thousands more. He
should be ready at a moment’s notice to deliver a lecture on the
art of reading, and, with reasonable time for preparing his notes,
to conduct a tutorial class or at any rate lead a reading circle.
Some specialization will give him a good start on either run. A mere
smattering is not of much use in this branch of library extension work.
Thus the desideratum is an appropriate blend of general and special
accomplishments, and there is no question as to which should be
acquired first. Entrants to the School of Librarianship are expected
to have matriculated beforehand: if they aim at academic honours,
they should take their degree before they specialize in professional
subjects. Many of the present students are pursuing librarianship as a
postgraduate course: this may become a general rule as the programme
of studies is enlarged. The University has recently allowed the course
to be taken as the final stage in a degree course, under certain
regulations. Some American library schools have highly specialized
curricula; the Carnegie Library School of Pittsburg, for instance, has
courses in Library Work with Children and School Library Work; and
at Washington, in association with the School for Secretaries, there
is a Training School for Business Librarians. High school or college
graduation is usually required for admission, and in the library
schools at Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin there
are courses leading to a degree. Too much specialization in the library
school itself is not desirable. The best librarian for a technical,
scientific, historical, or other special library is one who has taken
the B.Sc., B.Eng., or honours Schools, and then followed a course in
Librarianship. Librarianship is not a science, notwithstanding the fact
that a number of the American library schools call themselves schools
of library science, and that a baccalaureate is granted in this, but
an art. It is the application of knowledge, knowledge which must
be attained first; education must have preceded training. That is a
rough-and-ready way of putting it; but such is the main principle that
should guide us in drawing up a course in librarianship.
Both in England and in America, two orders of librarians and library
assistants are tending to become clearly differentiated, on the
analogy of the two orders in the Civil Service. On the one hand are
those who enjoyed a liberal education and have supplemented this with
a first-class technical training; on the other, those who had a poor
start educationally. The latter may by intelligence and perseverance
catch the former up; there will be no watertight partitions between
the classes. But the difference between them will become more and
more accentuated as library activities become more complex and more
specialized. In one way, a school of librarianship forms a medium
between the two grades; it may enable an energetic man or woman to
overcome the disadvantages of a poor start in life; in another way,
it helps to differentiate the classes, those persons who proceed
successfully through the courses and win diplomas going automatically
into the higher class, and those who fail to attain more than a few
odd certificates, into the lower grade. The main determining factor
is to have enjoyed or to have missed a good preliminary education,
comprising a knowledge of languages and fair general culture.
The present curriculum of the School of Librarianship is as follows:--
(i.) English Composition.
(ii.) *Latin _or_ Greek _or_ Sanskrit _or_ Classical Arabic.
(iii.) *A Modern Language other than English.
(iv.) Bibliography.
(v.) Library Organization (including Public Library Law).
(vi.) Library Routine.
(vii.) Cataloguing and Indexing.
(viii.) Literary History and Book Selection.
(ix.) Classification.
(x.) Palæography and Archives.
In the purely technical subjects, the instruction is partly theoretic
and partly practical. The students are set to work, under expert
supervision, cataloguing sections of a library; they classify masses
of books, and perform upon them various routine processes; they are
given mediæval English, Latin, and Norman-French documents to decipher
and translate, mediæval manuscripts to catalogue and calendar. They
watch bookbinding demonstrations, and are shown, not only how a book is
bound well, but also how the job is done in a shoddy way by dishonest
binders. Skins of the finest quality and other bookbinding materials
are hanging up in the school, and all sorts of library apparatus and
equipment are on exhibition. During the long vacation the students
are expected to work as voluntary assistants in libraries of the most
modern type, and no opportunity for practical experience or for seeing
things actually being done is neglected. Lectures on such phases of the
prescribed subjects as library architecture, rural library systems,
library work with children, technical and commercial libraries, and
library extension, are continually being given by special authorities
not on the regular staff. The student who is not a graduate must
pass examinations in all the ten subjects set out above, before he
can receive the diploma; the graduate may be exempted from the first
three. Those candidates who have not held salaried offices in approved
libraries do not receive the Diploma until they have done at least one
year’s work in such capacity. It is apparent, then, that the course
is partly general and partly technical; and, whether the entrant is a
graduate or not, there is no escaping the basic requirement, a good
general education, or the other essential, practical experience.
America had library schools thirty years before Great Britain; there
are now eighteen library schools in the United States, several
requiring a college degree before admission, some qualifying their
alumni for a degree in library science. Other agencies for training
librarians are apprentice classes and summer schools; and the training
these last provide is more continuous and thorough than is afforded
by the same kind of institution in this country. Certain general
colleges, also, hold courses in bibliography, palæography, and kindred
subjects, useful not only to the librarian but also to the research
student. Germany, Italy, and Sweden preceded us in the establishment
of library schools, the first-named in 1861. France exacted
technical qualifications from candidates for university libraries
in 1879. Holland has a library school, and 1920 saw one started in
Czechoslovakia. All these are Government or university foundations. If
our libraries become a national concern, training in librarianship will
necessarily be an affair for the community to regulate and finance.
Old-fashioned library committees and librarians still exist who
are well content with the library assistant that, as they put it,
“has gone through the mill,” in other words, a person without any
education worth mentioning and without training in any real sense,
who has learned his work by having had to do it and never studied the
why or the wherefore of library practice. There are still librarians
who regard librarianship as simply a job like any other job, which
has got to be carried on and incidentally find some one a berth; and
who feel aggrieved if called upon to furnish anything beyond the
most rudimentary service--lending and reference library and reading
room--and regard any sort of library extension as incipient bolshevism.
Committees and librarians of this stamp actually prefer the uneducated
junior, the youth, that is, who has enjoyed nothing more liberal than
primary schooling; whereas the intelligent and progressive committee or
librarian would rather appoint, even to a senior post, a well-educated
person who has to learn his duties, than one poorly educated yet having
had a great deal of practical experience. The former would have to
spend some time in picking up the ways of a new post, but, given equal
abilities, he would show himself the better man in a brief space of
time.
Perhaps a more insidious danger than this survival of the obsolete
is the view, to which all administrators of systems are apt to fall
a prey, that high mechanical efficiency is the be-all and end-all of
library economy. Perfect and smooth-running machinery is an admirable
thing; it will certainly be one of the characteristics of every
library system that achieves complete success. But there are elements
still more essential, which cannot be secured by the pursuit of mere
mechanical perfection. To put mechanism and mechanical organization
first, knowledge and ideas second, is as bad a mistake as crass content
with the old, inadequate service. The danger of being dominated by
mechanism is, in truth, as real a danger in the world of libraries
as ever it was in Erewhon. “True, from a low materialistic point
of view, it would seem that those thrive best who use machinery
wherever its use is possible with profit; but this is the art of the
machines--they serve that they may rule.”[47] This very danger is
already apparent, it has been noted, in some of the rural systems
superintended by bureaucratic directors of education. Their criterion
of efficiency is uniformity, in method and results. But uniformity is
of no value except as a mark of excellence or fitness. When uniformity
is sought for its own sake, it is bound to stultify aspiration and
suppress spontaneity. In the earlier days of the public library,
there were librarians who thought that they had achieved immortal
fame by inventing that surprising piece of mechanism, the indicator.
Library progress for decades was checked by the indicator and the
repressive form of organization of which it was the symbol, the closed
library. To infuse a new spirit into the reading and the non-reading
public will do infinitely more for the future of libraries than any
amount of mechanical efficiency. That is the reason why the School of
Librarianship has erected its course of professional training on the
broad base of a liberal education. This is no slight to the technique
of librarianship; but means that technique must be the servant, not the
master, and that machinery will be used best if those who control it
have intelligence and vision.
And why should training in librarianship be confined entirely to
librarians? It has often been urged that bibliography should be taught
in schools. Book selection, indexing, classification, in short, most
of the professional subjects, are elements of a general training in
organization and in methods of study and research. When there comes
about a thorough correlation between libraries and schools, young
people will, as a matter of course, acquire the rudiments of the
library arts. Since the child, as soon as he leaves school, will have
to pursue his intellectual activities chiefly through the medium of
books, he should be taught something about bibliography, at any rate
the maxims and methods of book selection. Self-education to-day is
rendered more difficult and uncertain by the very multiplicity of
books that solicit attention. Even advanced university students are
surprisingly ignorant of the means for ascertaining the nature and
relative value of the literature of the subjects they are working
on. A thorough grounding in book-selection and certain other of the
library arts might work a reformation in the newspaper world: it
is a point for the attention of schools of journalism. Imagine the
results if there were a reference library of high quality in every
office and every reporter and sub-editor had been trained in using it
accurately. No one is competent to be a guide in intellectual matters
or a dispenser of knowledge who is not engaged in a continual process
of self-education. The value of a knowledge of librarianship to the
layman is recognized in the United States: in 1914 ninety-one American
colleges gave courses in what is there called library science.[48]
One result of the library extension work described in an earlier
chapter is a wider diffusion of the library arts. When the Education
Act of 1918 comes into force throughout the land, and the school-child
becomes a “young person”; when intellectual training is carried on
right through the plastic period of mental development, the opportunity
for cultivating the library arts will be laden with profound
consequences. If elementary schools and continuation schools then work
in due co-ordination with libraries, the new curricula will in large
measure comprehend what we desire: instruction in the art of reading
and the enjoyment of literature, guidance in the use of scientific and
technical books and in the methods of research. Every young person
should be shown how to make himself master of the multifarious contents
of a library, to acquaint himself with other library resources that are
within reach, to become his own bibliographer, map out his reading to
the best advantage, and be able to choose books wisely, whether he is
buying for his own shelves or making use of the public library.
The vital importance of the library arts to the researcher and to
all whose work is among books, pamphlets, or records, needs no
expatiation. Mr. Sidney Webb, in lecturing to young librarians some
years ago, depicted the infinite pains with which he constructed his
own bibliographies of social science. He had to acquire the library
arts in the hard school of experience, when manuals of bibliography and
guide-books to books were fewer than they are now; and, no doubt, the
fine library at the London School of Economics may be regarded as in no
small part the result. Modern specialization has extended the field of
knowledge so enormously that the finest education is, in a large sense,
only elementary--only a preparation of the individual to use human
knowledge and exert himself in extending it.
Exact classification is making its way in all directions. The art of
classification is not only an invaluable mental discipline, it may
be applied with advantage in every province of work and business.
It stands for order and method in all sorts of affairs. Though a
classification of books is not the same thing as a classification of
things, and may depart in many respects from the exactness of logical
theory, there is no better way of inculcating the usefulness of system
than by illustrating it in a well-classified library, where the
reader can find his way from shelf to shelf, and follow the tracks
pointed out for him to other book-cases the contents of which are more
distantly connected with his subject. Commercial firms have learned the
value of systematic filing. Representatives of business corporations
and parties of students from schools and colleges visit the Commercial
Library at Manchester in order to examine the vertical file and have
its principles explained. It is in the research departments of the
technical firms that classification, filing, and indexing are pursued
to their furthest reaches. It is to be wished that the librarian’s
near relations, the publisher and the bookseller, would make more use
of system. When the bookshops are arranged on an intelligible plan,
there may be less romance in the Charing Cross Road, but it will be
better for business. And, though some might think there was more
lost than gained in the second-hand shop if “Americana” were shelved
according to Dewey and “Book Rarities” placed in their proper decimal
order, there is at any rate no sentimental objection to the scientific
arrangement of new books. But, with the notable exceptions of two or
three large firms of publishers and the university presses, no one
seems to think it worth while to issue classified catalogues of new
publications. Booksellers and publishers prefer to arrange their wares
and compile their catalogues by the sizes of books, by binding, or
by prices--by anything except the subject. Both are sadly in need
of a course in librarianship. Publishers have declined to take the
expert advice of the Library Association, or to learn anything on
the materials, printing, format, or even the kinds of books that are
wanted. The fact is, their books, their catalogues, and their methods
of marketing are adapted to the momentary satisfaction of a public
having no acquaintance with the library arts. When we are each our own
bibliographer, these perfunctory ways will have to be dropped, or the
reader and book-buyer will want to know why.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Langley & Sons_
READING ROOM OF THE GOLDSMITH’S LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON.]
Classification is the natural basis of indexing, or rather classifying
and indexing are complementary to each other, the object being to
have everything in its place and to show how it can be found. Every
author, every one who uses or dispenses information, every one who
keeps so much as a commonplace book, ought to be an efficient indexer;
yet ignorance of what constitutes a good index is almost universal.
There has been a slight improvement of late in the proportion of
books indexed; but the general standard of precision and scientific
arrangement is still very low. Apart from inaccuracy, which is a common
defect, our methods, in regard to thoroughness and ease of reference,
are painfully inferior to American methods; [49]the fact is patent
even in some of our big co-operative treatises, which have no excuse
for their slovenliness on the score of economy. Yet the public seem
to be content. They are used to taking what is offered them, and have
never considered what minimum of efficiency in book-production they are
entitled to expect. A review here and there makes its protest against
a bad or omitted index, or against inadequate or forgotten maps, or
illustrations that do not illustrate, and to this may be attributed the
slight improvement noticed. Yet the importance of indexing, in all the
affairs of life, is so obvious that, apart altogether from its function
in books and libraries, it ought to find a place in any well-planned
scheme of education.
But the most important and fundamental of the library arts is that
of book selection, which is best defined, not as choosing the best
books, but as choosing the right, the appropriate books. The student
of librarianship is taught literary history so that he may be a safe
and discriminating selector of books, and be qualified to see that the
library contains the right sort of material. The object of library
lectures and reading circles is to direct readers to the right books to
read. In her account of a very interesting experiment,[50] Miss Sayle
describes how the Hampshire villagers were allowed the casting vote
on every book purchased by the simple expedient of eliminating those
books that failed to attract readers. The results sound lamentable.
Whole sections went under the hammer. Autobiography, Gardening, Lives,
Travels, Poetry, are one and all reported “Abolished, owing to lack
of readers.” _Waverley_, _Kidnapped_, _Barnaby Rudge_, and Pierre
Loti’s _Iceland Fisherman_, were among the classics discarded in one
year in order to make room for the works of Mrs. Henry Wood, Miss
Worboise, Baroness Orczy, and Gene Stratton Porter. Lamb’s _Tales from
Shakespeare_ seldom left the children’s cupboard. Now Miss Sayle is
undoubtedly right in extolling the principle of giving her village
readers the initiative in the choice of books for their own library,
the library they founded and maintain out of their own pockets. But her
story is not creditable to those who might, had they gone the right way
to work, have guided the tastes of these village readers, so that they
would have chosen and enjoyed the very books that had to be discarded.
One can hardly imagine a reading circle finding much to discuss in
books by the luminaries mentioned as chief favourites; but it is quite
as difficult to imagine that a paper or a reading or an intimate talk
about Stevenson, Scott, Dickens, and a few of the poets, would have
failed in opening many eyes to the charms of the writers abolished.
To prescribe what people shall read is impossible; it is foolish to
present any public, in town or country, with a well-chosen library, and
tell them to take it or leave it. Coercion would be as fruitless as it
is impossible. But to leave the choice to the untrained and unguided
initiative of the villagers, without some attempt at training and
assisting their powers of choice, is hardly less absurd than it would
be to let the children in a school decide what lessons they should be
taught.
This is the real inwardness of the great fiction question, on which so
much wordy argument has been expended. There is no need to deplore the
high percentage of fiction that is read; if this is of any literary
value, the percentage is so much to the good. The innuendo underlying
the Adult Education Committee’s sneer at “unsystematic and recreative
reading” betrays an illiberal conception of the cultural value of
belles-lettres, of which Meredith said:--
“Light literature is the garden and the orchard, the fountain, the
rainbow, the far view; the view within us as well as without. The
Philistine detests it, because he has no view, out or in. The dry
confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled and sapless, when
they condemn it. The vulgar demand to have their pleasures in their
own likeness--and let them swamp their troughs! They shall not degrade
the name of noble fiction.... Shun those who cry out against fiction,
and have no taste for elegant writing. Not to have a sympathy with the
playful mind is not to have a mind.”
The question is not whether public libraries ought to provide novels,
nor simply whether they should provide only the best novels and reject
the bad. The important problem is, how the general reader is to be
led to choose and enjoy the best. To spend public funds on the public
provision of feeble and enfeebling reading-matter is indefensible.
True, there are librarians who defend it: one head of a large system
has recently pleaded for fiction of the Charles Garvice and Ethel
Dell type, because the charwoman and the overworked housewife find
it restful and soothing, and cannot afford to subscribe for it to
the circulating library. But public libraries are not a sort of poor
relief: their mission is not to provide, even these unhappy folk,
with opportunities for mental dissipation; but, the very reverse, to
introduce them to higher pleasures. Would apologists for bad novels
recommend our public art galleries to adopt similar standards of taste?
Or our museums? No doubt, if we turned them into a kind of Madame
Tussaud’s or sensation-mongering picture-house, these would be much
more popular with a very large and a very important class.
This kind of argument hardly needs confuting: but many committees
and librarians have been led astray by the specious doctrine that by
giving people the inferior stuff they like they will eventually be led
to prefer something better. The present writer, who has devoted years
of hard work to shepherding the general reader into the right way of
appreciating good fiction, would be the last to deny the humanizing
value of the novel and its right to an honourable place in the public
library; but he would be the first to deny that to get people to
read any kind of novel, or to bring them at any cost into the public
library, is a sure way of inducing them to read something better.
Than much of the reading done at the expense of the library rate it
would be better if no reading were done at all. A kind of mental
dram-drinking, it is stupefying to the brain and soul, and thoroughly
anti-educational. Homœopathic application of continual doses of the
hair of the dog that bit you is a futile mode of treatment. The time
has come for saner methods, and the only sane method is to refuse
to recognize the stuff as having anything to do with the literature
which a public library has to supply. Earlier pages have dealt with
the various methods by which the standard of fiction reading can be
raised--duplication of the best on shelves to which the reader has free
access, descriptive catalogues and readers’ guides, lectures, talks,
and reading circles. Our crusading efforts at raising the level of
popular taste must be as strenuous as those of a revivalist mission.
Future progress depends on a wide diffusion of the library arts; it
depends on the attitude of that much-abused person the general reader.
When the general reader uses public libraries wisely and well, and
finds them indispensable to a full life, their position will be
assured. The largest body of readers will always be composed of this
class: the object of education is to turn out intelligent general
readers.[51] The Adult Education Committee expressed too narrow a view
of the library’s function in the social organism when they insisted on
the paramount claims of vocational and non-vocational education, and
spoke slightingly of the general reader, the vast multitude who are
guilty of “unsystematic and recreative reading.” It is only fair to
notice, however, two passages in which the Adult Education Committee
did not overlook the claims of the general reader and of imaginative
literature:--
“The Lending Department is the main feature in the smaller libraries;
it provides such books as are suitable for continuous reading or study
and in convenient form. The books cover the whole range of knowledge,
physical and metaphysical, ancient and modern, philosophy, religion,
sociology, language and literature, science, fine and useful arts,
history and travel. The recreative element in reading bulks largely
in the statistics of this department. Very much of what is best and
most elevating in English literature takes the form of fiction, and
selecting this with care and discretion the library gives valuable
impulse in the direction of broadening the mental outlook, enlarging
the sympathies, and elevating the tastes and feeling of readers. Any
estimate of the cultural work of the library which omits the effects,
more or less unconscious, of the reading of the best poetical and
imaginative literature is gravely incomplete and inadequate.”
“It is clear, however, that local education authorities may neglect
the ‘general reader’ in their desire to obtain from the public
libraries the maximum of assistance for more serious students. This
is a danger which must be guarded against. It is part of the problem
of how to retain the freedom and elasticity of the library with the
more organized administration of the system of public education. It
is with no desire to subordinate the libraries or belittle their
importance that we recommend the union of educational and library
administration.”[52]
It will not do merely to tolerate this large section of those who use
libraries, on condition that its interests are made secondary to the
“serious students and trained readers.” This would be fatal to the true
purpose of the public library, which should minister to intellectual
life in all its fulness. The general reader must be put first, not
second. A clear conception of what is best for the general reader will
ensure that the interests of education shall not be neglected. It
is on the growth of a new consciousness, a new attitude towards the
institutions subserving humanism, that we must pin our faith in the
great library system of the future.
A FURTHER COURSE OF READING.
PUBLIC LIBRARIES, PAST AND PRESENT.
BOSTWICK, Arthur E. The American Public Library. Appleton. 1910. 8vo.
illus.
BROWN, James Duff. A British Library Itinerary, Grafton. 1913. 8vo.
BROWN, James Duff. Manual of Library Economy, ed. by W. C. Berwick
Sayers. Grafton. 1920. 8vo. Illus.
GREENWOOD, Thomas. Edward Edwards, the chief pioneer of municipal
public libraries. Scott Greenwood. 1902. 8vo.
GREENWOOD, Thomas. Public Libraries: A history of the movement,
and a manual for the organisation and management of rate-supported
libraries. Cassell. 1894. 8vo. illus.
OGLE, John J. The Free Library: its history and present condition,
edited by R. Garnett. Allen. 1897. 8vo. [The Library Series.]
THE LIBRARY QUESTION OF TO-DAY.
ADAMS, Professor W. G. S. A Report on Library Provision and Policy,
to the Carnegie United Kingdom Trustees. Edinburgh. Neill. 1915.
BOSTWICK, Arthur E. Library Essays: papers related to the work of
public libraries. New York. H. W. Wilson. 1920. 8vo.
BOSTWICK, Arthur E. A Librarian’s Open Shelf: essays on various
subjects. New York. H. W. Wilson. 1920. 8vo.
HARDY, E. A. The Public Library: its place in our educational system.
Toronto. William Briggs. 1912. Illus.
LIBRARY ASSOCIATION. The Library Association Record. 8vo. 1899 in
progress.
LIBRARY ASSOCIATION. Public Libraries: their present position and
future development in national reconstruction. Library Association.
1918. 8vo. Illus.
LIBRARY ASSOCIATION. Year Book for 1921; edited E. C. Kyte. Library
Association. 1921. 8vo.
Contains statistics of existing libraries and their work.
MCKILLOP, John. The present position of London Municipal Libraries
with suggestions for increasing their efficiency. Reprint from
Library Association Record. 1906.
MINISTRY OF RECONSTRUCTION. Adult Education Committee. Third Interim
Report. Libraries and Museums. H.M.S. Office. 1919.
MINISTRY OF RECONSTRUCTION. Adult Education Committee. Final Report.
H.M. Stationery Office. 1919.
MOREL, Eugene. La Librairie Publique. Paris. A. Colin. 1912.
PUBLIC LIBRARIES ACT, 1919. H.M.S. Office. 1919.
RURAL LIBRARIES.
ANTRIM, Saida B. and Ernest I. The County Library. Ohio, Pioneer
Press. 1914. 8vo. Illus.
CARNEGIE UNITED KINGDOM TRUST. Annual Reports. Dec. 1914--Dec. 1920.
Edinburgh. Constable. 1921.
SAYLE, A. Village Libraries: a guide to their formation and upkeep.
Grant Richards. 1919. 8vo.
WEAVER, Sir Lawrence. Village Clubs and Halls. Newnes. 1920. 8vo.
Illus.
TRAINING IN LIBRARIANSHIP.
FRIEDEL, J. H. Training for Librarianship: library work as a career.
Lippincott. 1921. 8vo. Illus.
ROSS, James. Technical Training in Librarianship in England and
abroad. Reprint from Library Association Record. 1910.
FOOTNOTES:
[47] Samuel Butler: _Erewhon_, XXXV. “The Book of the Machines.”
[48] J. H. Friedel: _Training in Librarianship_, p. 92.
[49] See, _e.g._, the _Cambridge History of English Literature_, and
compare it with the _Cambridge History of American Literature_, a model
of arrangement, indexing, bibliography, and general editorial work.
[50] A. Sayle, _Village Libraries_.
[51] “Education should be preparation for life. Its purpose is to
prepare the immature human being for the life he is to lead when he
becomes mature. It is to fit the child for the life he is to live when
he shall be no longer a child. That is, to my mind, the purpose of
education.” Dr. C. A. Mercier (_The Principles of National Education_,
1917.)
[52] Adult Education Committee: _Third Interim Report_, par. 12.
INDEX
Adams, Prof. W. G. S., on library provision, 136-139
_Administration_, 14, 183-184, 200-210, 221
_Administration of Centralized Library System_, 179
_Adult Education_, 4-6, 98-99, 111, 149, 154, 202-204, 208-209
Adult Education Committee and Board of Education, 200-201
Adult Education Committee and Central Library for Students, 190-191
Adult Education Committee, centralization, 73, 171-2, 175, 194, 197, 198,
202
Adult Education Committee, fiction question, 230-235
Adult Education Committee, _Final Report_, 165-167
Adult Education Committee, on grants, 186-187
Adult Education Committee, on intelligence bureaux, 89-90
Adult Education Committee, on lectures, 111
Adult Education Committee, on reading Rooms, 62
Adult Education Committee, on reconstruction, Preface, 30, 31, 73,
171-172, 175, 194, 197, 198, 202
Adult Education Committee, Technical and Commercial Libraries, 78-80
_Advertising_, 48-49, 103
_Agricultural Libraries_, America, 160-161
Airdrie, adoption of Library Act, 22
America, books for the blind, 94
_America_, children’s libraries, 64, 68, 74, 131
America, Education Authorities a. Library Authorities, 201-202
America, indexing, 227-228
America, inspection of Libraries, 184-186
America, librarianship, 224
America, libraries, 25, 41, 118
America, library schools, 213, 216, 219-220
America, rural libraries, 156-162
America, school and library, 131
America, State Library Commissions, 156, 184-186, 209
America, travelling libraries, 156
American Library Association, 211
_Ancient Libraries_, 11
Andersonian Institute, Glasgow, 8
Antwerp, Institute of Commerce, 77
_Apparatus_, Library, 219
_Apprentice Classes_, America, 220
Archbishop Tenison’s Library, 12
Architecture, library, 219
_Assistants_, 212, 217-219
“Athenæum”, The, 181
Baillie’s Institution, Glasgow, 23
Bath, adoption of Library Act, 22
_Bibliography_, 131, 171, 220, 223, 225
Birkbeck, George, 8
Birkbeck College, 8
Birkenhead Public Library, 22, 64
Birmingham Commercial Library, 80
Birmingham, library rate, 27
Birmingham Public Libraries, reference library, 45, 48, 50
Bishopsgate Institute, reference library, 51
Blackburn, adoption of Library Act, 22
_Blind_, libraries for the, 91-95, 171
Board of Education, 208-209
Board of Education as central authority, 200-201
Bolton Public Library, 21, 80
Book issues, 25, 40, 41
_Book selection_, 34-36, 54, 97, 129-130, 179, 215, 223, 224, 228-235
_Book selection_ for children, 68, 70-72
_Book selection_, periodicals, 57, 59
_Book supply_, 41-43, 70, 105, 142
_Bookbinding_, 42, 180-181
_Bookbinding demonstrations_, 218-219
_Book-box system_, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 146, 149, 164, 165
_Books_, requirements of good, 72, 180-181, 227
Bootle Public Library, lectures, 101
_Borough councils_, 173
_Borrowers’ restrictions_, 40-41
Bradford Commercial Library, 80
_Braille system_, 93
_Branch libraries_, 37
Bright, John, 18, 21
Brighton, Local Act, 1850, 21
Brighton Public Library, 120
Bristol Commercial Library, 80, 81, 86, 85-87
Bristol Public Library, 11, 45, 50, 101
British Museum, 12, 13, 14, 170, 182
British Museum Library, 34, 54, 55, 195
Bromley Public Library, lectures, 101
Brotherton, Joseph, 13-19
Brougham, Lord, 1, 4, 9
Brown, James Duff, 54, 55
Buckinghamshire, village libraries, 135
_Bureaucracy_, dangers of, 7, 208, 222
Burslem, adoption of Library Act, 22
Bury, William, 11
_Business librarians_, courses for, 216
Camberwell Public Library, 22, 101
Cambridge, adoption of Library Act, 22
Canterbury, 16
Canterbury, adoption of Library Act, 22
Cardiff Public Libraries, 22, 45, 50, 89, 101
Cardiganshire Rural Library, 140
Carnegie, Andrew, 23, 25, 77
Carnegie Rural Library Scheme, 31, 139
Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, annual report, 140-141, 145-146
Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and Central Library for Students, 145-146,
190
Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and National Library for the Blind, 92-93
Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and rural libraries, 31, 139
Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, Scotland, 139-142
Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and training in librarianship, 213
_Catalogues_, 39, 40, 171, 182, 226, 232
_Cataloguing_, 179, 218
_Central clearing house_, 170
Central Library for Students, 111, 170, 177, 188, 190
Central Library for Students, relations with rural libraries, 143, 145,
147
_Central repository_, 139, 141, 142
_Centralization in library system_, 29-30
Rural, 137-138, 161
Urban, 169-210
_Chambers of Commerce_, 85
Chelsea Public Libraries, 51, 101
Cheltenham, adoption of Library Act, 22
Chetham Library, Manchester, 11, 17
_Children_, books for, 129-130
_Children_, library work with, 216, 219
_Children’s Libraries_, 63-74, 205-6
_Children’s Reading room_, 63, 64
_Choice of books_, _See_ Book Selection
Christian Socialists, 10
City and Guilds Institution, 194-195
_Classification_, 53, 83, 213, 223, 225-226, 227
_Closed system_, _See_ Open access
Coats Libraries, 135, 139
Cobden, Richard, 13
Cockerell, Mr. Douglas, on bookbinding, 180
_Commercial Libraries_, 74-91, 219
_Co-operation_, 174-176, 177, 196-197
_Co-operation_, rural 150-155
_Co-operation with industries_, 97
_Co-operation with outside organizations_, 117, 150-155
_Co-operation with schools_, _See_ Schools
Cork, adoption of Library Act, 22
_Correspondence classes_, 212
County Education Authority and rural libraries, 149
_County library schemes_, 137-139, 156-160
Coventry, 22
Coventry Public Library, 22, 41, 120, 133
Croydon Public Libraries, 80, 101, 106-107, 119
Croydon Public Libraries, junior library, 65, 66, 106-107, 133
_Curriculum_ of School of Librarianship, 218
Czechoslovakia, library school, 220
_Degrees in library science_, America, 219
Derby Public Library, lectures, 101
Dickens, Charles, on libraries, 21
_Digests_, from periodicals, 182
_Discipline in children’s libraries_, 66-67
_Discussion_, value of, 109-110
Dr. Williams’s Library, 12
Doncaster, adoption of Library Act, 22
Dover, 16
_Dramatic Circles_, 114-117
Dublin Public Library, reference library, 45
Dundee, adoption of Library Act, 22
Dunfermline, central repository, 139, 147
Dunfermline Public Library, 61
Edinburgh Public Library, 23, 45
_Education_, 1-6, 72-74, 98, 122, 173, 184, 210-211.
_See also_ Libraries and education
Education Act, 1870, 2, 24
Education Act, 1918, 224
Education Act for Scotland, 1918, 140
_Education authority as library authority_, 175, 200-210
Education Bill, 1807, 1
Education Bill, 1820, 2
Education Department, 2
Edwards, Edward, 13-17, 21, 29, 183, 184
Edwards, Passmore, 25
Elementary Education Act, 1870, 22
_Engravings_, 50
“Erewhon,” 221-222
Ewart, William, 6, 13-19
Ewart Act, _See_ Public Libraries Act, 1850
_Examinations_ in Librarianship, 212, 214, 219
Exeter, adoption of Library Act, 21, 22
_Exhibitions_, 120-122
_Fiction_ question, 34-35, 230-235
_Filing_, 58-59, 226
_Finance_, 25, 26, 31, 41, 42, 102, 148, 193
Fisher, Mr. H. A. L., 98
Formby, Thomas, 25
Forster’s Act. _See_ Education Act, 1870
France, librarianship in, 220
Fulham Public Libraries, lectures, 101
_Furniture, fittings, etc._, 82
Germany, library schools, 220
Glasgow, 8, 23
Glasgow Commercial Library, 80
Glasgow Mechanics’ Institution, 8
Glasgow Public Libraries, 38
Gloucester Public Library, 163
Gloucestershire Rural Libraries, 140, 163
_Government department as library authority_, 172-3
_Government grants_, 184-188
_Government inspection of libraries_, 183-188
Grantham Rural Libraries, 140
_Grants_, 29, 184-188
Greenwich Public Libraries, co-operation with schools, 127
Greenwood, Thomas, 29, 183
_Guide-books to books_, 179, 225, 232
Guildhall Library, 51
Hackney Public Library, 22, 127
Hampstead Public Library, 51, 101
Hebrides, rural library scheme, 147
Hereford, adoption of Library Act, 22
_History of library movement_, 1-31
Holland, library school, 220
Hornsey Public Library, lectures, 101
Huddersfield, 8
Hull, adoption of Library Act, 22
_Illustrations_, 43, 52, 53, 64, 65
_Indexing_, 47, 53, 61, 181, 213, 223, 226, 227, 228
_Indicators_, 38-39, 222
_Industrial libraries_, _See_ Technical libraries
_Industries_, co-operation with, 79
_Industry as local authority in technical library system_, 198
_Information Bureau_, 54, 76, 82-83, 88-90
_Information desks_, 89
_Inspection of libraries_, 183-188
Ipswich, adoption of Library Act, 22
Ireland, Public Library Act, 20, 22
Ireland, reference libraries, 45
Islington Public Libraries, 22, 43, 55, 69-70, 101, 127
_Issues as index of reading_, 25
Italy, library schools, 220
Jast, Mr. L. S., on Schools and libraries, 203-204
_Journalism_, schools of, 223
Kidderminster, adoption of Library Act, 22
Kilmarnock Public Libraries, reference library, 50
Kingston Public Libraries, lectures, 101
Kirkwood, James, 11
Lamb, Charles, 116
Lambeth Palace Library, 12
Lancashire and Cheshire Union library, 135
Lancashire and Cheshire Union of Mechanics’ Institutions, 8
_Lantern slides_, 52, 106, 119
Leamington, adoption of Library Act, 22
_Lecture rooms_, 62, 99-107
_Lectures_, 64, 65, 99-107, 211, 212, 215, 228, 232
Leeds Commercial Library, 80, 88
Leeds Public Libraries, 8, 22, 45
Leeds Technical Library, 88
Leek Public Library, lectures, 101
Leicester, adoption of Library Act, 16, 22
_Lending libraries_, 33-43, 233, 234
_Librarian_, 66, 67, 69, 106, 107, 127, 205, 214, 216
_Librarianship_, definition of, 216-217
_Librarianship_, training in, _See_ Training
_Libraries and education_, 29, 175, 200-210
Libraries Board, suggestions for a, 209-210
Library Association of the United Kingdom, on bibliography, 227
Library Association on centralization, 171-2
Library Association, commercial and technical libraries, 78, 80
Library Association, libraries and education, 29, 202-203, 204
Library Association on rural libraries, 153
Library Association and school libraries, 13
Library Association, Subject-Index to Periodicals, 181
Library Association on technical libraries, 198-201
Library Association Education Committee, 211
_Library authorities_, 173, 174, 175
_Library authority_, parish council as, 137
_Library committees_, 28, 173, 175
_Library economy_, 213
_Library extension_, 96-134, 219, 224
_Library provision_, 136, 139
_Library rate_, 15, 18, 19, 26, 136, 137
_Library schools_, 211-220
_Library service_, 14, 32-95, 138
_Liberal education_, 217, 222
Lichfield, adoption of Library Act, 22
_Light literature_, _See_ Fiction
Literary and Scientific Institutions, 33
Literary and Scientific Institutions Libraries, 12
_Literary history_, 228
Liverpool Commercial Library, 80
Liverpool Public Libraries, 16, 37, 45, 48, 50, 91, 100, 102
Liverpool, Special Act, 1852, 21
_Loan Collections to schools_, 122, 124-125, 133
_Local collections_, 51-52
Local Education Committee, 31
Local Education Committee as library authority, 201
Local Government Act, 1894, 27
_Local records_, 52
London, City of, 20, 22
London Education Committee, 127, 175, 192
_London libraries_, 22, 47-48
_London libraries_, lectures, 101
_London libraries_, reading rooms, 60
_London libraries_, reference libraries, 45, 49, 50
_London libraries_, special collections, 50-51
_London libraries_, statistics, 178
_London libraries_, and students, 195-196
London library, 34
London, Library Act, 1877, 24
London Mechanics’ Institution, 8
London School of Economics, 211-212, 225
London, University of, School of Librarianship, 213, 216, 218-219, 222
London, University of, University College, 191, 213
McKillop, John, supplemental library scheme, 191-197
_Magazine rooms_, 55
_Magazines_, _See_ periodicals
Maidstone Public Library, 22, 101, 163
Manchester, 13, 15
Manchester College of Arts and Sciences, 8
Manchester Commercial Library, 80, 81
Manchester Commercial library, contents, 83-85
Manchester Commercial library, vertical file, 225
Manchester, library rate, 27
Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 8, 61
Manchester Public Libraries, 21, 38, 45, 48, 49, 101
_Maps_, 43, 52, 58, 82, 119
Marylebone, adoption of Library Act, 22
Massachusetts Agricultural College, 161
Massachusetts Free Library Commission, 185-6
_Mechanics’ Institutes_, 5-10, 26
_Mechanics’ Institute Libraries_, 5-10
Meredith, George, on fiction, 230
Metropolitan Association of Mechanics’ Institutions, 8
Middlesex, rural library scheme, 163-164
Ministry of Reconstruction, 30
Mitchell Library, Glasgow, 23
_Monastic libraries_, 11
_Motor service_, 38, 141, 146
_Museums_, 15-16
Museums Act, 1845, 15, 18
Museums and Gymnasiums Act, 1891, 27
_Music_, 43
National Art Library, South Kensington, 178
National Home-Reading Union, 112, 119
National Institute for the Blind, 93
National Library for the Blind, 92-95, 171
_National library service_, preface, 155, 169-210, 220
National Science Library, South Kensington, 60-61, 178
New York Public Library, 94, 118, 132-133
Newcastle-upon-Tyne Public Libraries, 27, 45, 50
_Newspapers_, 43, 55-59
_Newsrooms_, 47, 55-59
_Non-municipal libraries_, incorporation of, 177-178
Northampton Public Library, 50, 80, 120
Norwich Public Library, 11, 21, 80, 101
Nottingham Public Libraries, 22, 45, 50, 64, 91-92, 101, 120
_Obsolete methods_, 220-221
Ogle, J. J., 29
Oldham, adoption of Library Act, 22
Oldham, library rate, 27
_Open access_, 37, 38-40, 161, 232
Orkneys, rural library scheme, 147
Overseas Trade Department, 85
Oxford, adoption of Library Act, 21
Paddington, adoption of Library Act, 22
Paisley, adoption of Library Act, 22
_Palæography_, 52, 218, 220
_Parish council_, as library authority, 137
_Parochial libraries_, 11-12
Parochial Libraries Act, 12
Patent Office Library, 178, 193, 195, 200
Peacock, Thomas L., 9
_Periodicals_, 47, 56-61, 181-182
_Periodicals_, indexing of, _See_ Subject-Index to Periodicals
_Permanent collections_ of books in country districts, 138, 149
Perthshire Rural Library, 140, 146
Philadelphia, Commercial Museum, 77
_Philosophical Radicalism_, 4
Polytechnics, 195
Poplar, school and library, 126-127
Post Office, transmission of books by, 95, 191
_Practical instruction in librarianship_, 218-219
_Press clippings_, 53, 65, 82
Preston, library rate, 27
Prints, 43, 52, 119
Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 78-79
Public Library Acts, 6, 96, 136
Public Library Act, 1850, 12-20, 30
Public Library Act, 1853, 12-20, 26, 30
Public Library Act, Ireland, 1853, 20
Public Library Act, Scotland, 1853, 20
Public Libraries Act, 1892, 24, 27
Public Libraries Amendment Acts, 1894, 28
Public Libraries Act, 1919, preface, 112, 122, 135, 140
Public Libraries Act, 1921, 30
Public Library Acts, adoption of, 21, 22, 23, 24
Public Library Bill, 1854, 20
Public Record Office Library, 178
_Publications_, library, 179-180
Purdue University agricultural library, 161
Putney, adoption of Library Act, 22
_Rate_, library, 27, 30, 172, 174, 175, 187-188, 193
_Readers_, issues, 40, 41
_Reading circles_, 62, 64, 65, 104, 110-111, 112-114, 143, 215, 228-229,
232
_Reading courses_, 64
_Reading_, standard of, 40, 42, 60, 229-235
_Reading rooms_, 55, 61-63
_Ready-reference library_, 48
_Reconstruction_, preface, 29-30
Reconstruction Committee, 30
_Reference books_, 44, 46, 47, 52, 58, 70, 138, 149
_Reference libraries_, 34, 36, 44-55, 176-177, 223
_Regional committees_, 189, 210
Rochdale Public Library, business section, 80
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 1
Royal Blind Asylum and School, Edinburgh, 93
Royal College of Science, 194
_Rural libraries_, 31, 110-111, 112, 135-168, 188, 219
_Rural libraries, co-operation with outside organizations_, 150-155
_Rural libraries_, co-operation with schools, 141-144, 148-149, 150-155
Ruskin, John, 134
Rye, Mr. R. A., libraries of London, 178
St. Bride Foundation Library, reference library, 51
St. Helen’s, library rate, 27
St. Kilda, transport of books to, 146-147
St. Pancras, adoption of Library Act, 22
St. Paul’s Cathedral Library, reference library, 51
_Salaries_, 179, 212
Salford Public Library, 13, 16, 27, 101
Sayle, Miss, village libraries, 135
_School libraries_, 70, 72, 73, 122-125, 216
School of Librarianship, University of London, _See_ London, University
of
_Schools_, 2-5, 98, 154, 200-210, 224
_Schools_, co-operation with, 23, 29, 51-52, 64, 65-74, 97, 106, 122-134,
137-138, 141-144, 148-149, 150-155, 200-206, 223-224
Scientific associations’ libraries, 178-179
Scotland, adoption of Library Act, 22, 23
Scotland, Education Act, 1918, 140
Scotland, Public Library Acts, 20, 26, 28
Scotland, reference libraries, 45
Scotland, rural libraries, 135, 140
Selborne, Roundell Palmer, Earl of, 19
Sheffield, adoption of Library Act, 21, 22
Sheffield, library rate, 27
_Shelf-room_, 180
Shetlands, rural library scheme, 147
Sion College Library, 12
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 9
Somerset Rural Library, 140, 162-163
_Special collections_, 43, 49-51, 52, 53, 119-120, 198, 225
_Staff_, 76, 77, 90, 183, 184, 211
Staffordshire Rural Library, 139-140
_State aid_, _See_ Grants
_State control_, 29, 137-8, 179
State Library Commissions, America, 156, 184-186, 209
_Statistics_, Bristol Commercial Library, 86
_Statistics_, Islington Public Libraries, 43
_Statistics_, library provision, 136
_Statistics_, London libraries, 178
_Statistics_, public libraries, 16, 17, 23, 35, 43, 81, 86
_Statistics_ of reading, 35
_Statistics_, rural libraries, 140-141, 144, 148
_Statistics_, supplemental library, 193, 194
“Steam Intellect Society,” 9
Stirling’s Library, Glasgow, 23
_Story-telling for children_, 64, 65
Stratford-on-Avon Public Library, reference library, 50
_Students_, 41, 46, 54, 62, 195-7
Students’ Library, Oxford, 92
_Students’ reading rooms_, 62
Subject-Index to Periodicals, 61, 171, 181, 182
_Summer Schools_, 211, 220
Sunderland, library rate, 16, 27
_Supplemental libraries_, cost of, 193-194
_Supplemental libraries in national scheme_, 188-193
Swansea, library rate, 27
Sweden, library schools, 220
Syracuse University, library school, 216
_Teachers_, 72-73, 132, 133, 142, 205
Technical associations’ libraries, 178-179
_Technical libraries_, 74-91, 197-200, 219
Thackeray, W. M., on libraries, 21
_Training in librarianship_, 171, 179, 211-235
_Transport_, 38, 141-142, 146-148, 191
_Travelling collections for schools_, 124-125
_Travelling libraries_, 135, 139, 156
_Tutorial Classes_, 104, 109-111, 142, 215
Union Catalogue, 182
_Union of educational and library administration_, 72, 73, 122, 133-134,
200-210, 234
_Universities_, 1
University Extension Courses, 107-114
_University libraries_, 45
_Utilitarian function of the library_, 74-77
Van Wert County Library, Ohio, 157-159
Verney, Sir Edmund, village libraries, 135
_Village clubs_, 141
Village Clubs Association, 151-153
_Village Institutes_, 8, 165-167, 168
_Village libraries_, 135
_Voluntary workers in libraries_, 103, 138, 141-142
Wales, National Library of, reference library, 50
Wallasey Public Library, lectures, 101
Walsall Public Library, 22, 27
Walthamstow Public Libraries, lectures, 101
Warrington Public Library, 16, 17, 27, 101
Warwick, adoption of Library Act, 22
Washington Training School for Business Librarians, 216
“_Weeding-out_,” 36, 159, 177, 225
West Riding Union of Mechanics’ Institutions, 8
Westminster, adoption of Library Act, 22
Whitbread, Samuel, 1, 4
Whitechapel, adoption of Library Act, 22
Whittington, Sir Richard, 11
Wigan Public Library, 27, 101
Wilts Rural Library, 140, 163
Winchester, adoption of Library Act, 21
Wisconsin, University of, 161, 216
Wolverhampton Public Library, 22, 27
Woolwich Public Libraries, lectures, 101
Workers’ Educational Association, 99, 110-111, 119, 142
Working Men’s College, 10
“_Workshop theory_,” 36
Yorkshire Village Libraries Association, 135
Young Mens’ Christian Association, 150, 153, 154
Young Women’s Christian Association, 150
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Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation
has been standardized.
For this version in the table on page 148, some of the headers have been
abbreviated to allow the table to fit within the margins.
In the Index “Selborne, Roundell Palmer, Earl of, 19” was out of
alpha order and was moved. Page number references in the index are as
published in the original publication and have not been checked for
accuracy in this eBook.
Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following
changes:
List of Illustrations:
“Library of The South-Western” “Library of The South-Eastern”
Page 5: “rom a railway company” “from a railway company”
Page 8: “working mens’ institution” “working men’s institution”
Page 27: “to find Wolverhamption” “to find Wolverhampton”
Page 38: “could not even seen” “could not even see”
Page 70: “provided in the childrens’” “provided in the children’s”
Page 71: “greater volume to more” “greater volume of more”
Page 87: “Stockton to Middlesborough” “Stockton to Middlesbrough”
Page 101: “free course of lectures” “free courses of lectures”
Page 177: “of interchange, are manifest” “of interchange, is manifest”
Page 202: “ran as follow:--” “ran as follows:--”
Page 216: “University of Winconsin” “University of Wisconsin”
Page 219: “ten subject set” “ten subjects set”
Page 224: “his own bibliogapher” “his own bibliographer”
Page 227: “take the expect advice” “take the expert advice”
Page 232: “appeciating good fiction” “appreciating good fiction”
Page 241: “Gloucester Public Libary” “Gloucester Public Library”
Page 242: “of Library Act, 161, 22” “of Library Act, 16, 22”
Page 247: “Sir JOSEPH BBOODBANK” “Sir JOSEPH BROODBANK”
Footnote 43:
“voluntary organizattions” “voluntary organizations”
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