books. And at the outset let us remember that although these things are
apparently material, as much so as butter or hats, they are much more
than this. They are the vehicles for conveying ideas, so that a library
is a concern for the dissemination of ideas. This brings it in line with
another great intellectual and moral distributing agency--the school. In
the school the distributor is more often a producer than in the library,
especially in the universities, where the discoverer of new facts or
laws himself imparts them to his students. Yet the school is essentially
a distributing rather than a producing agency. In the school, however
the means of distribution are not limited, while in the library they are
pretty strictly confined to the printed book. I know that there are some
people who believe that the library is growing out of such restrictions,
and that its mission is to be the distribution of ideas through any and
all mediums--the spoken word, in lectures; the pictures, in exhibitions
of art; the museum specimen; and so on. We should welcome all these as
adjuncts to our own business, and when we have mastered that business
thoroughly perhaps we may take them up each on its own account. Those
who love books, however, will want to see the distribution of books
always at the head of the library’s activities.
And it may be kept there, provided we make everything else in the
library serve as guide-posts to the printed records on the shelves. A
picture bulletin, for instance, may be both beautiful and useful, but it
should never be an end in itself. It is the bait, if we may so speak,
for the list of books that accompanies it. The pictures excite the
interest of a child who sees them and he wants to know more about them.
The list tells him where he can find out, and the result is increased
use of the library. In like manner if you have a lecture course, or a
loan exhibition in your library, see that it is made a means of
stimulating interest in your books.
I have said that in distribution we bring to the individual what he
wants or what he needs. That sounds a little tautological, but it is
not. A man often wants whiskey when he doesn’t need it at all, and
conversely a boy sometimes needs a whipping--but he doesn’t want it. So
with the reading public. They often want fiction of a class that they do
not need, and have no longing for books that would really benefit them.
Here we may mote a difference between the free library and all merely
commercial systems of distribution. As the purpose of the latter is to
make money, wants are regarded rather than needs. But even with a store
there are limitations. If any one wants an injurious article--for
instance, a poison or an explosive--the law steps in to prohibit or
regulate. And even outside the limits of such regulation, the personal
sense of responsibility to the community that governs the actions of an
honest merchant will prevent his attempting to satisfy certain wants
that he believes would better remain unsatisfied. So, too, certain books
are without the pale of the law--they would be confiscated and the
librarian would be punished if they were circulated. Beyond these there
are many books that we do not circulate simply from our sense of general
responsibility to the community.
The difference between our work and that of the merchant in this regard
lies chiefly in the more extended scope left for our own judgment. No
librarian thinks of circulating illegal literature; his only care is to
exclude such of the allowable books as he believes should not, for any
reason, be placed on his shelves. Here, sometimes, popularity and
usefulness part company. The librarian may yield entirely too much to
the wants--the demands--of the community and neglect its needs. His aim
should be to bring the wants and the needs into harmony so far as
possible, to make his people want what will do them good. This might be
dubbed “the whole duty of a librarian.” Few, I am afraid, attain to the
full measure of it, and too many fail even to realize its desirability.
Of course if you can bring the full force of a reader’s conscience to
bear on his reading--if you can make him feel that it is his duty to
read some good book that strikes him as stupid, you may make him stick
to it to the bitter end, but such perfunctory reading does little good.
The pleasure one gets in reading is a sign of benefits received. Even
the smile of the boy who reads George Ade is a sign that the book is
furnishing him with needed recreation. The pleasure experienced, we will
say, in reading Shakespeare is of course of a far higher type; yet I
venture to say that if that pleasure is absent, the benefit is absent
too. Nine-tenths of the distaste felt for good standard books by the
average reader is the result of the mistaken efforts of some one to
force him to read one of these books by something in the nature of an
appeal to duty. There is no moral obligation to read Shakespeare if you
do not like it, and if a friend persuades you of such an obligation you
are apt to end by rightly concluding that he is wrong. But with this
conclusion comes an unfortunate distaste for good literature; a
conviction that standard works are all dull, and that the only kind of
pleasure to be had from reading is the most superficial kind. The moral
for librarians is: cultivate in your readers a taste for good
literature; get them into the frame of mind and the grade of culture
where they like Shakespeare and then turn them loose. No injunctions
will be necessary; they will not cease to read until they have devoured
the utmost sentence.
But how shall this taste be cultivated? I wish I knew. I wish I could
give you a formula for causing the flower of literary appreciation to
unfold. The rule is different in every case. First and foremost there
must be something to cultivate. You cannot go out into the desert with
watering-pot and raise strawberries or asparagus. But you can take a
poor little spindling plant and dig about it and fertilize it until it
waxes into a robust tree whose branches are laden with big, juicy ideas.
If you are skilful enough to find out what intellectual germs there are
in your reader’s mind you can cultivate them little by little, but if
you throw Shakespeare and Milton at the heads of all alike they will be
likely to fall on barren ground. The golden rule for making your library
both attractive and useful (the two things go hand in hand) is to adapt
your books to those aptitudes of your readers that need and will bear
cultivation.
This means that in selecting books for your library you must not
disregard the demands and requests of your readers. It also means that
you must have the acuteness to detect what they ought to request. It
may be, for instance, that near your library is the home of some great
industry employing large numbers of intelligent mechanics who would gain
both enjoyment and benefit by reading some of the technical literature
bearing on their work. Only it has never occurred to them to think that
this literature, much of it perhaps expensive or inaccessible, can be
obtained at the public library. It is your business to get it, if you
can, and to let them know that you have it and that they are welcome to
read it.
Remember, too, that he gives twice who gives quickly. Much of the
ephemeral literature of the day, which is purchased for recreative
purposes, is rightly and properly read for curiosity. People like to
read the latest book and talk to each other about it. We are all embryo
critics. This desire to read the last thing out, just because it is the
last, has had anathemas piled on it until it ought to be crushed, but it
is still lively. I confess I have it myself and I cannot blame my
neighbor if he has it too. Unless we are wholly to reject the recreative
use of the library or to accept it with a mental reservation that the
public shall enjoy itself according to a prescribed formula or not at
all--we shall have to buy some of these books. I am afraid that
otherwise some future historian of literature may say of us in parody of
Macaulay’s celebrated epigram on the Puritans and bearbaiting, that the
twentieth-century librarian condemned the twentieth-century novel, not
because it did harm to the library, but because it gave pleasure to the
reader. Now, if we are going to buy this ephemeral literature, we must
get it quickly or not at all. The latest novel must go on your shelves
hot from the presses, or stay off. And this is true of much other
literature that is not ephemeral but that depends for its effect on its
timeliness. It will certainly lose readers if it is not on your shelves
promptly, and if it deserves readers, as much of it does, the net result
is a loss to the community.
So we come next to the question of readers. How shall we get them? What
kind do we want, and how shall we reach that kind? In commercial systems
of distribution the merchant gets customers in two ways: by giving good
quality and good measure and by advertising. Some kind of advertising is
generally essential. Even if your community is a very small one it is
right that you should occasionally remind it of your existence and of
what you have to offer. Legitimate advertising is simply informing
people where they can obtain something that they are likely to want. The
address of your library should be in your railway station; in the
schools; in the drug store. Your latest accessions should be announced
in the local papers and bulletined in the same places. When you have an
item about your library that would interest the reader send it yourself
to the paper. There is nothing undignified about this. Do not forget
that you are in charge of certain articles that the public needs and
desires and that it is your business to let the public know it. The
new-comer to your town cannot know intuitively that your library is at
such and such an address; the old resident who likes to read Howells
cannot ascertain by telepathy that you have just received the last
volume by his favorite author. You may even send a special card of
information to a reader who you know will be glad to get it.
One would think that if there was anything distinctive about our systems
of distribution, commercial or otherwise, it was the great degree to
which we advertise and the money that we spend in so doing. But with it
all, this feature in its misdirected energy and lack of method is the
weak point of the whole system. Much of the money spent in advertising
is devoted to attempts to get people to buy what they do not want. Any
one knows that when he desires a very special or definite thing it is
often impossible to find it, though it may be next door. In our library
work, so far as readers are concerned, our weak points are two: first,
failure to make known our presence and our work to all who might use the
library; second, failure to hold our readers. These things are both
serious. We ourselves see so much of libraries that we find it difficult
to understand how large a proportion of any community is ignorant of
them and their work. In large cities, of course, this is more likely to
be the case than in small towns. Yet if you will compare the number of
names on your registration list with the population you serve, even
making allowance for the fact that each book withdrawn may be read by
several persons, and deducting young children who cannot read, you will
be surprised at the discrepancy. There are many people who do not know
of your library’s existence or who do not realize what it means. Your
first duty is to find some way of giving them the information and of
seeing that they shall not forget it.
Regarding the second failure, you may get some idea of that if you will
compare the growth of your registration list with that of your
circulation. The circulation never grows as fast as the membership. It
may even be stationary or decreasing while new users are coming in
daily. The fact is, of course, that former users are all the time
dropping off. Why do they drop off? It is your business to find out and
to keep them if you can. The librarian in a small community has a great
advantage in this respect, for she can know her constituency personally
and keep track of them individually.
But the personal relations of the librarian and her assistants with the
public belong as much in the third section of our subject as in the
second. The importance of them cannot be exaggerated. I am not sure that
I should not prefer a sunny-faced, pleasant-voiced, intelligent,
good-tempered assistant in a tumble-down building with a lot of
second-hand, badly arranged books, rather than the latest Carnegie
library stocked with literary treasures if these had to be dispensed by
a haughty young lady with monosyllabic answers and a fatigued
expression. I know of no more exasperating duty than that of continually
meeting a library public--and I know of no pleasanter one. For the
public is just you and me and some other people, and like you and me it
is various in its moods. The mood of the public in a library is often a
reflection of that of the librarian. The golden rule here is direct
personal contact; and don’t forget the last syllable--tact. Don’t force
your services or your advice on people that neither wish nor require
them, but don’t forget that you may have pleasant, intellectual
intercourse without offering either aid or advice. When an aged man who
knows more of literature than you dreamed of in your wildest visions
wants “The Dolly dialogues,” don’t try to get him to take “Marius the
Epicurean” instead. But if you get into the habit of talking with him it
may make the library seem pleasant and homelike to him, and, besides, he
may tell you something that you do not know--that is a not remote and
certainly fascinating possibility.
I need not say that no library can be useful or attractive unless it is
properly arranged and cataloged, and unless it has a simple and
effective charging system; and unless the public is admitted directly
to the shelves and allowed to handle and select the books. But I do need
to say--because some of us are apt to forget it--that these things are
not ends in themselves, but means to an end, namely, the bringing
together of the man and the book, the distribution of ideas. Do not
assume that for some occult reason you must classify and catalog your
library precisely like some large public library with which you are
familiar. Do not assume, if you are a trained cataloger, that there is
any virtue, for instance, in subject cards. One subject heading that
brings the book in touch with your public outweighs a dozen that do not
affect it. To bring together man and book break all rules and strike out
in all kinds of new directions. Your particular locality and your
particular public may have special requirements that are present nowhere
else. Rules were made for the aid and comfort of the public, not for
their confusion and hindrance. Methods are the librarian’s tools, not
his handcuffs and shackles. To do anything well we must do it with
method and system; but these, like a growing boy’s clothes, need
frequent renewal. If your library has stopped growing and has reached
senility, then the same suit will fit it year after year, but premature
old age is not a good goal to strive for.
LAY CONTROL IN LIBRARIES AND ELSEWHERE[3]
The system by which the control of a concern is vested in a person or a
body having no expert technical knowledge of its workings has become so
common that it may be regarded as characteristic of modern civilization.
If this seems to any one an extreme statement, a little reflection will
convince him to the contrary. To cite only a few examples, the boards of
directors of commercial or financial institutions like our manufacturing
corporations, our railways and our banks, of charitable foundations like
our hospitals and our asylums, of educational establishments like our
schools and colleges, are now not expected to understand the detail of
the institutions under their charge. Their first duty is to put at the
head of their work an expert with a staff of competent assistants to see
to that part of it. Even in most of our churches the minister or
pastor--the expert head--is employed and practically controlled by a lay
body of some kind--a vestry, a session or the like. Government itself is
similarly conducted. Neither the legislative nor the executive branch is
expected to be made up of experts who understand the technical detail of
departmental work; all this is left to subordinates. Even the heads of
departments often know nothing at all of the particular work over which
they have been set until they have held their position for some time.
It is hardly necessary to say that this system of lay control is of
interest to us here and now, because it obtains in most libraries, where
the governing body is a board of trustees or directors who are generally
not experts, but who employ a librarian to superintend their work.
To multiply examples would be superflous. Lay control, as above
illustrated, is not universal, but I postpone for the present a
consideration of its antitheses and its exceptions. It looks illogical,
and when the ordinary citizen’s attention is brought to the matter in
any way he generally so considers it. In certain cases it is even a
familiar object of satire. The general public is apt, I think, to regard
lay control as improper or absurd.
With the expert and his staff, who are concerned directly with the
management of the institution in question, the feeling is a little
different. It is more like that of President Cleveland when he “had
Congress on his hands”--a sort of anxious tolerance. They bear with the
board that employs them because it has the power of the purse, but they
are glad when it adjourns without interfering unduly with them.
Are either of these points of view justified? Should lay boards of
directors be abolished? Or, if retained, should those without expert
knowledge be barred?
Now at first sight it certainly seems as if the ultimate control of
every business or operation should be in the hands of those who
thoroughly understand it, and this would certainly bar out lay control.
I believe that this view is superficial and will not bear close
analysis.
The idea that those who control an institution should be familiar with
its details appears to originate in an analogy with a man’s control of
his own private affairs, when his occupation and income make it
necessary that he should attend to all those affairs personally. The
citizen who digs and plants his own garden must understand some of the
details of gardening. The man who does his own “odd jobs” about the
house must be able to drive a nail and handle a paint brush. This
necessity vanishes, however, as the man’s interests become more varied
and his financial ability to care for them becomes greater. At a certain
point personal attention to detail becomes not only unnecessary but
impossible. To expect the master of a great estate to understand the
details of his garden, his stable, his kennels, as well as the experts
to whom he entrusts them, is absurd. He may, of course, as a matter of
amusement, busy himself in some one department, but if he tries to
superintend everything personally, still more to understand and regulate
matters of detail, he is wasting his time.
We must seek our analogy, then, both for lay control and for the
attitude of the ordinary citizen toward it in that citizen’s management
of his private affairs. He knows his own business--or thinks he
does--and he finds it hard to realize that the details of that business
could ever grow beyond his personal control.
But, after all, this progress is one towards the normal. Attention to
details in the case of the poor man is forced upon him. Except in rare
cases, he does not really care to shovel his own snow; he would prefer
to hire a man to do it, and as soon as he can he does do so. So long as
his sidewalk is properly cleared he is willing to leave the details to
the man who clears it. He does not care whether that man begins at the
north or the south end, or whether his shovelfuls are small or large.
Here, if we examine, we shall find a common characteristic of those
kinds of work where laymen are in control--the persons for whom the work
is done care very much about results; they are careless of methods so
long as those results are attained. And in a very large number of cases
the persons for whom the work is done will be found to be the public, or
so large a section of it that it is practically a group of laymen so far
as the particular work in question may be concerned.
A lay board of directors or a lay departmental head, then, is simply and
properly a representative of a greater lay body that is particularly
anxious for results and not particularly anxious about methods. Lay
control is thus not illogical, but is the outcome of a regular and very
proper development. But, as has been said, it is not the only method of
controlling a great institution. An institution may be managed by a
graded body of experts. So were the old guilds of craftsmen managed. So
are many ecclesiastical bodies, notably the Roman Catholic Church. We
may call this method of control hierarchical. It has some advantages
over lay control and some disadvantages. We may imagine such a system
applied to libraries. All the libraries in a state, we will say, would
then be managed by the state librarian, and all these officers would be
subject to the orders of the librarian of the national library, who
would be supreme and accountable to no one. Without going into detailed
discussion of this extremely supposititious case, we may say that the
objection to it would be that the persons who are especially interested
in the results of the work done are not represented in the controlling
hierarchy. Where the persons interested are all experts, as in a guild
of craftsmen, there can perhaps be no objection to control by experts;
though even in this case we are leaving out of consideration the
persons, generally laymen, for whom the craftsmen do their work.
In fact, any trouble that may arise from the lay control of a body of
expert workers lies just here--in the failure either of the controlling
authority or the trained subordinates to recognize and keep within their
limitations. It should be the function of the supreme lay authority to
decide what results it wants and then to see that it gets them--to call
attention to any deviation from them and to replace those who cannot
achieve them by others who can. It should be the part of the expert
staff of subordinates to discover by what methods these results can best
be reached and then to follow out these methods.
When the lay head attempts to direct the details of method, or when the
trained subordinate thinks it his duty to influence the policy of the
institution, then there is apt to be trouble.
Such results are apt to follow, on the one hand, the inclusion in a
board of trustees of a man with a passion for detail and a great
personal interest in the work under him, but without a keen realization
of the necessity for strict organization and discipline in his expert
staff; or, on the other hand, from the presence in that staff of a
masterful man who cannot rest until he is in virtual control of whatever
he concerns himself about.
I say trouble is _apt_ to follow in such cases. It does not always
follow, for the organization may adapt itself to circumstances. The
interested trustee may play with ease his two roles, fitting into his
board as a lay member and becoming practically also a part of the expert
staff. The masterful subordinate may dominate his board so as to become
its dictator, and thus do away for a time with his lay control. We have
all seen both these things happen, not only in libraries, but in banks,
in hospitals, in charitable institutions. In some cases it has been well
that they have happened. But although an occasional stick is flexible
enough to be tied into a knot, it would be hazardous to try the
experiment with all sticks. Some may bend but more will break.
Is it not better to accept frankly the division of labor that seems to
have been pointed out by the development of our institutions for the
guidance of their management?
Boards of trustees in this case would find it necessary to decide first
on the desirable results to be reached in their work. This is a phase of
library discussion that has been somewhat neglected. What is the public
library trying to get at? Not stated in vague terms, but in concrete
form, so that the trustees can call the librarian to account if he fails
to accomplish it? It is only fair to the librarian that he should be
informed at the outset precisely what he is expected to do, and then it
is only fair that he should be left to do it in his own way.