activity we have by no means exhausted its field. Its recreative
function is hardly less important. A very large proportion of the
library’s users go to it for recreation or relaxation. They obtain this,
of course, in the same way that they obtain education from books,
namely, by the acquisition of new ideas or mental images. The recreation
comes in from the fact that these ideas temporarily distract the
attention from other ideas connected with daily work and worry, and that
they ease the brain in the same way that a strained muscle may be eased
by gentle exercise. Evidently it is impossible to draw a line between
these two classes of a library’s activity. A zoological or a botanical
garden is an educational institution, so is an art museum. Yet the large
majority of those who go to them do so for amusement, and the
educational benefits obtained are incidental. Those benefits, however,
are none the less real, and it would evidently be impossible to give
separate statistics of those who have made educational and recreative
use of the institution. Yet we find people trying to do this very thing
in the case of the public library, which case is quite comparable with
those stated above. It is assumed, in the first place, that the use of
fiction is purely recreative, while that of non-fiction is educational;
and, in the second place, that the recreative use of the library is to
be condemned or at least discouraged, in comparison with the other. That
either of these can be sustained is very doubtful. The attempted
subordination of the recreative work of the library to the educational
is at best invidious. Each has its place in the scheme of things and
comparison in this case is worse than odious, it is misleading. Further,
it is positively impossible to draw a line between educational and
recreative books. So far as motives go, one may read Gibbon for
entertainment and Madame de Stael’s “Corinne” as an Italian guide book.
So far as results are concerned, the intelligent reader always acquires
new ideas as he reads; and in most cases the very same idea may and does
have both an educational and a recreative function. But although we can
draw no line, it is quite possible to pick out books on the one side and
on the other, and to assert that these are read chiefly for educational
purposes and those for recreation. On which side shall the library throw
its influence? There are many good librarians who feel that the popular
tendency is too strong towards recreation and that the library should
restore the balance by throwing its weight on the other side. Others see
in the popular desire for recreative reading only a hopeful reaction
from the mental tension and overwork with which, as a nation, we are
doubtless chargeable. Between these two points of view I believe that
the equilibrium of the public library is safe, and that it is in no
danger of developing unduly either on the recreative or on the
educational side.
Personally I have never felt that the user of libraries or any other
type of the average American was in danger from too much recreation. If
there is any use of a library that may have a vicious tendency it is its
use for pure pastime in the etymological sense--the reading of books
with absolutely no aim at all save to make the time pass. Now to make
time pass pleasantly or profitably may be a most legitimate object. Not
that, and not any lawful aim is objectionable. But aimlessness--the lack
of an aim--the taking out of books to skim or to glance at, or to look
at the pictures, with no desire for amusement, or profit, or anything
else--that is certainly worthy of condemnation. There is more of it than
we know, and it constitutes a menace to our intellectual future.
Newspaper reading fosters it, but not necessarily. Newspaper reading
with an aim is far better than aimless skimming and skipping of a
literary classic, and I should rather see a boy of mine reading the most
sensational dime novel he could lay hands on, with the definite desire
and intention of finding out how Bloody Bill got his revenge, than
lazily turning over the pages of Scott with no idea of what the story
was about. The first would be the case of a good reader and a bad book;
the second that of a good book and a bad reader. The library can easily
deal with the book; it cannot so easily manage the reader, though it may
try to do so. In the case of the bad reader the storage battery of ideas
has lost its connection. It would be well for some of us if we should
forget for the moment the difference between fiction and non-fiction and
should try to mend this broken link.
And now a word about ourselves. What are we, who are engaged in this
work, laboring for? Why are we working, and what do we expect to
accomplish? In answering this question it will be better for us to free
ourselves entirely from the bondage of words that mean nothing. Some of
us--I hope very many of us--are in the library work solely because we
love it and cannot keep out of it. Others are trying with more or less
success to persuade themselves that this is their reason. Still others
cannot truthfully say that they have had a “call to library work,” and
some of these are conscientious enough to fear that they are in the
wrong place and that the work is suffering thereby. To these I desire to
address a word of consolation and encouragement. The impression is very
general that the greatest work of the greatest minds had no motive but
the productive impulse. The poet, according to this view, sings because
he cannot help singing; the artist paints solely to satisfy the creative
longing within him; the musician composes for the same reason. Now the
fact is that a man who is capable of great work, or of ordinarily good
work, may produce it under a variety of impulses. Some act more strongly
on one man; others on another; or the same man may be more susceptible
to a given impulse at one time or place than at another. Without a
doubt, many of our immortal works were the result of simple inability
to keep from producing them. But just as certainly, others were the work
of men who had to school themselves by long practice and then to hold
themselves to the work with iron determination. “Genius” says Carlyle,
“is nothing but an infinite capacity for taking pains.” To which a
modern critic replies, “On the contrary, genius is an infinite capacity
for doing things without taking any pains at all.” Both are right. There
are both these kinds of genius--and many others. The writer who attempts
to bind down genius to rules and formulae will have a hard task. And
what is true of genius is also true of ordinarily good work--the work
that you and I are trying to do in our libraries. Some of us do it
easily because we cannot help it; others do it with more or less
difficulty under the pressure of one or another need. One, though the
work itself comes hard to him, loves the result to be accomplished;
another, perhaps, is toiling primarily to support himself and those
dependent on him. What of that? We have been placed where we are, to
secure certain results. We want the help of every one who can contribute
a share of honest, intelligent work toward the attainment of these
results, and we shall not ask for motives or inquire into the exact
amount of effort that was necessary, provided the work has been done and
done well.
I have the greatest sympathy for the conscientious library assistant who
feels that she ought to love her work in the same way perhaps that she
loves music or skating, or a walk through the autumn woods, and who,
because she does not sit down to paste labels or stand up to wait on the
desk with the feeling of exhilaration that accompanies these other acts,
is afraid that library work is not her métier.
Such workers should possess their souls in peace. It is very common for
routine work to pall upon him who does it, and we are all apt to think
that no work but ours has any routine. Our weary eyes see only the
glorious moments of success in the lives of other toilers; we are blind
to the years of drudgery that led to them. The remedy is to look
forward. You may not enjoy climbing the mountain step by step, but the
view from the summit is glorious. And if to sustain yourself on the
climb you think of the bread and cheese that you have in your lunch
basket, I cannot see that there is aught to complain of.
All over the world there are workers who feel that they are not worthy
of their work. It is dull; it palls on them. But if their lot had only
been different! If their work had been that of the musician or the
artist! Then toil would become pleasure, and the hours that now drag
heavily would flit on wings. Very little of this feeling is justifiable,
and these dissatisfied workers will do better work if they are made to
realize that it is only the favored few who can bring enthusiasm to the
daily routine. The most that we can ask of the average worker is a
conviction of the usefulness of his work and a determination to make it
as useful as possible. More: such a determination honestly lived up to
is sure to beget interest--that concrete interest in one’s work that is
worth much more, practically, than an ideal love for it. The woman who
goes into slum work impelled only by a vague love for humanity is apt to
give up after a little when she discerns that humanity in the concrete
is offensive in so many ways. But if she forces herself to keep on, and
to make herself as useful as possible, there comes the personal interest
that will bind her to her task and that will increase its usefulness. So
it is with library work; you need not love it ideally to succeed in it;
you need only buckle down to it until you feel the personal interest
that will carry you through triumphantly.
And what is it all about? In the broadest sense, as I have already said,
we librarians are the purveyors of ideas stored up in books. These ideas
are more to man than mere education--they are life itself. Life is
growth, not stagnation--it involves change and acquisition. “Life is
change,” says Cardinal Newman, “and to be perfect, one must have changed
many times.” To contribute the opportunity and the stimulus for such
change is our business. The child cries out to his environment--“Give me
ideas and experiences; good and pleasurable if you can, bad or painful,
if you must, but give me ideas and experiences.” Part of this craving it
is the duty of the public library to satisfy. The craving may grow less
keen as we grow older, but it never really ceases to exist. To satisfy
that craving in legitimate ways and to guide and control it if we can is
our business, stated in the broadest possible terms. That is what we are
aiming at. The librarian should be the broadest minded of mortals. He
should be a man in the widest sense--to him nothing human should be
alien.
This is decidedly broad and correspondingly vague. Being so, it may be
interpreted by every worker in the way that appeals to him most. To one,
the educational work of the library will make the strongest appeal; to
another its recreational function. One may prefer to lay stress on the
guidance of children’s reading; another on reference work with adults.
These are all phases of one and the same general class of acts--the
imparting of ideas by means of books--and there is no reason why each
worker should not gain interest in that work by and through the
particular phase that appeals to him.
“I wish,” says one of James Lane Allen’s characters, “that some
virtue--say the virtue of truthfulness--could be known throughout the
world as the unfailing mark of the American. Suppose the rest of
mankind would agree that this virtue constituted the characteristic of
the American! That would be fame for ages.” We librarians, in like
manner, not only wish but strive to make some one virtue characteristic
of our work--say the virtue of usefulness. “As useful as a librarian,”
“As indispensable as the public library”--these are not yet, I am
afraid, household phrases. But why should we not make them so?
LIBRARY STATISTICS
It is a valuable exercise to examine into the origin and uses of the
things that we have been accustomed to take for granted and to regard
almost as part of the accepted order of nature. The result will often be
startling and it will always be salutary, if the examiner be sane and
conservative. Therefore a very good way to begin a discussion of
statistics is to query whether they are of present value at all, or
whether they are old fashioned rubbish and had better be discarded.
Statistics are the numerical statements of results or facts. Now
thousands of individuals and thousands of bodies--families, clans,
associations, that accomplish much in this world, go on very well
without keeping any record at all of what they do. This is indisputable.
On the other hand we shall see that as work is done well and carefully
there is an increasing disposition to make and keep a record of results;
and as the work extends in scope and complexity, the record, too,
becomes more complex. Take, for instance, the record of so apparently
simple a transaction as the payment and receipt of money. The individual
who has little of it to receive and disburse may go all his life without
keeping so much as a cash account, much less a set of books. He may even
spend a considerable income in the same way, including the maintenance
of a household and the support of a family, and he may, on the whole, do
it wisely and well. Yet of two men of the same means, one of whom should
conduct his affairs thus, while the other kept a rational system of
household and personal accounts, the latter would universally be
regarded as pursuing the better course. And as we pass from this to the
conduct of a business we recognize that the man who engages in commerce
without keeping proper accounts is a fool and courts failure, and that
the larger the business and the more widespread the interests, the more
complicated and extensive must be the bookkeeping. A large commercial
concern may thus employ a special department with a large staff of men
simply to keep record of its financial transactions. This is probably
the most ancient kind of statistical record and the one whose usefulness
is most generally recognized.
In like manner another common and useful statistical record--the
inventory, or list of articles on hand--although not commonly and
regularly taken by the individual, becomes absolutely necessary in the
smallest kind of business, and without it the merchant can have
absolutely no idea, of whether he is conducting his business at a profit
or a loss. When we go on further and examine, the conduct of great
commercial or manufacturing concerns we find that the statistical
department becomes of increasing importance, the details collected by it
multiply and the staff of persons whose sole duty it is to collect and
to discuss them may be very considerable. That a great manufacturing
company would waste time and money on a task of no value is
inconceivable, and there is thus a very strong presumption that
statistics are worth something. Even where bodies of men have so little
power or corporate action that they cannot collect statistics for
themselves, it is generally deemed a proper expenditure of the public
money to do so at the common cost, hence governments maintain great
census bureaus, whose duty it is not only to count heads every few
years but to tell the farmer how much he raises, the merchant how much
merchandise he exports, and so on.
Is the free public library an institution that will be benefited by the
collection, tabulation and discussion of the results of its work, so far
as they can be numerically expressed? What are the objects of such
collection in the instances above enumerated? In the first place, they
are to satisfy mere curiosity. If such curiosity is trivial, the
collection of statistics is evidently useless, and I am afraid that more
than a little of it, public and private, falls under this head. But
curiosity, even when it goes no further, may be perfectly legitimate.
Especially is this so about one’s own affairs. When a man is attempting
anything he is naturally curious to know whether he has succeeded or
not; and to find out, if possible, precisely how far he has gone in the
desired direction. He may have property enough to support him beyond all
doubt, but it is quite right that he should want to keep a list of his
stocks and bonds and to know whether they have risen or fallen in value
during the year. Still further, curiosity about other people’s affairs
may be legitimate, as, for instance, when one is responsible for their
proper conduct in greater or less degree. In the same way the trustees
of a free public library, representing the public at large, by whom the
library is supported and carried on, have a right to know all possible
particulars regarding the way in which their librarian has carried on
his work and the results he has reached in it, and the municipality in
turn should require of the trustees a strict account of the funds that
they have administered. All this information, as far as it can be stated
numerically, constitutes a mass of statistics, and this one reason amply
justifies its collection and would justify a much larger number of
tables than is usually given in a library report, provided only that the
information is to the point and is or should be in public demand.
But we cannot stop here. A free library, it is true, is not a
money-making concern, but it certainly should be run on business
principles. The public puts into it a large sum of money and has a right
to expect certain returns, which are none the less definite that they
cannot themselves be represented in dollars and cents. The library
statistic books are therefore, in a way, the records of the business;
they show whether it is being conducted conservatively or wastefully, at
a profit or at a loss. And as all these record books are open, they
enable us, or should enable us to make instructive comparisons between
the methods and results of one institution and those of another.
But even this is not all. It is a maxim of this strenuous age that all
things are good or bad according to the results to which they lead, not
in the narrow sense that “the end justifies the means,” but in the
broader sense that we must know things by their fruits. The man who said
“I go, sir,” and went not, was judged by his acts, not by his words; and
no matter how much knowledge we store up and how many tables of data we
collect we shall be derelict in our duty if we regard this as an end in
itself. The state of mind in which the Mahatma spends his life in
impassivity, contemplating inward things and making no outward motion,
may have certain advantages, but it is not consonant with the spirit of
this age and this land. By which I mean that when we have found out
something from our statistics we must do something with it. More; we
must so direct our statistical investigations that they bear directly on
a possible course of action. This is done by the great manufacturing
concerns that maintain statistical departments; but we all use
statistics in this way. If a boy wants to go to the circus he first
looks through his pockets to see whether he has enough cash. Here is the
germ of a statistical investigation conducted for the specific purpose
of getting information on which future action is to be based. Here
sometimes, where the opportunity of collecting statistics is very great,
and expense is no object, is a good excuse for gathering a great deal
that would seem to be useless, with the expectation that some of it may
turn out to be interesting and may suggest some line of work that had
not previously been thought of. To go as far as this, the institution
must be large and rich.
But how many of us do anything with our statistics? How many collect
statistics along special lines to assist in deciding what we shall do
along those lines? How many of us, rather, consider that, when our
statistics have been collected a disagreeable task has been done, and
put them behind us till the year rolls round again?
Perhaps we have had enough now of the philosophy of statistics. Let us
see what concrete kinds of statistics are necessary and in what order of
importance.
First comes an itemized account of receipts and expenditures. This is so
obvious that it is not generally considered as library statistics at
all. But it may and should be extended a little. Look at all your other
tables of statistics through financial spectacles. Compare your receipts
with your population. How much does your town give per capita for
library work? Compare this figure with the same for other towns. Compare
your expenditures with your circulation. How much has your library cost
you per book circulated? Compare your expenditure for books with the
number purchased and tell us the average cost of a book and how this
compares with the cost in former years. Do this for a half-dozen other
phases of your work and put the result in as many brief, crisp
sentences. If you haven’t room in your report, cut out some of the
platitudes; we all insert them in moments of weakness and, once in, it
sometimes requires an earnest search to detect and expunge them.
Next in importance comes an account of your books--how many there are in
the library, on what subjects, and how many have been added during the
year in each subject; how many gifts you have had; how many books have
been lost. This involves taking a careful inventory at least once a
year. You see I am putting this before any account of circulation. A
good many libraries take no inventory or take it at too infrequent
intervals, because they have no time. You might as well say you have no
time to keep a cash account. This is business and comes first. Leave off
counting your circulation if you must, but keep count of the public
property in your care as conscientiously as you keep count of the money
in your cash drawer. If you can do nothing else make a simple
enumeration of volumes without taking account of classes, but do it
thoroughly. The trouble with the inventory is that, like the
old-fashioned housecleaning, it is usually done all at once and becomes
an annual bugbear. One way of making it easier is to spread it over the
year, counting and reporting one class every month and treating it as a
part of the regular routine. In this category of statistical records
comes the list of your books, which you must surely have in some form,
even though you may not have accession book, shelf list and dictionary
catalog. For statistical purposes indeed, the last-named may be left out
of account.
Next in order of importance come statistics of circulation. You should
know how many books are given out for home use every day and how these
are distributed among the classes. Do not adhere too strictly to your
classification. Subdivide and combine your classes so that the results
will be of interest to your particular public. Always remember in
discussing these statistics that they are not so much a record of work
done as a rough proportional indication of that work, and are therefore
of relative, not of absolute interest. You are not to attach any meaning
to the fact, taken by itself, that your circulation was 5280 for the
month of May, but if you find that it was only 3120 in the previous May
you may justly conclude that the work of your library is increasing.