difficult advice to procure, with any degree of satisfaction, is
regarding fiction, whether in English or in foreign languages. It has
been said that one may approve a book simply on the author’s name, or
even on that of the publisher, and this is still true in isolated cases,
but in these days, when both author and publisher are continually trying
experiments, continually varying standards and style, each book must be
dealt with individually. I do not see how one can decide whether a given
novel should or should not be bought for a library without reading it
through from cover to cover or hearing a report from someone who has so
read it and who understands the wants and limitations of the American
public library. This is a line, it seems to me, along which great
improvement in our selection is possible; but I confess I do not see my
way to an immediate solution of the problem. Possibly this is a good
opportunity to say a word for a method of testing the adequacy of one’s
collection which has scarcely been used as it deserves. One of the most
difficult things for a librarian to ascertain is whether his collection
is properly distributed among the different classes, and by this I mean,
as before, distributed in accordance with the legitimate requirements of
the community. It is not possible to find by a statistical method
exactly what people need, but it is possible to find out what they want,
as indicated by the kind of books that they read. The statistical record
of this will be found in the class percentages of circulation. Whether
or not the library is equipped to supply this need is indicated by the
class percentages of books on the shelves. A comparison of these two
percentage tables is always most interesting to the book selector. It
does not enable him automatically to select books, but it does indicate
points for fruitful investigation. To take some actual cases, I find a
library with four per cent of history and six per cent of literature on
the shelves, whereas the corresponding circulation percentages are five
and seven. This is prima facie evidence that the collections in those
two subjects are used rather more than the others and could well be
increased. In cases where it is not desirable to encourage circulation
in a given class, such an indication should evidently meet with no
response. The circulation of fiction always runs far beyond its
proportion, and it is neither proper nor desirable for the library to
try to keep up. Thus in three libraries where the percentage of adult
fiction on the shelves is 20, 19 and 17, respectively, I find the
corresponding circulation percentages to be 34, 35 and 27. What, let us
ask ourselves, are library statistics for? Is all the labor concerned in
their collection and assemblage to result simply in a table that is to
be glanced at for a moment with more or less interested curiosity, or do
we intend to do something with them? It sometimes seems that the foreign
reproach that we Americans care only for money, which we are properly
disposed to resent, is partly justified by the fact that the only
statistics that appear to mean anything to us are financial. When a man
learns that he is living beyond his income or that he is getting a
smaller per cent for his investments than his neighbor, or that the man
at the desk next to him is receiving a larger salary for doing the same
work, he does not sit still and say, “Ah! how interesting!” He gets up
and does something about it. But statistics that convict him of all
sorts of incompetency and foolishness along lines other than monetary
ones, he regards simply as objects for intellectual absorption.
These percentages, of course, are not the only indications by which a
librarian may adjust the proportions of the classes in his collection.
If his library has the reserve system, for instance, the call for books
in circulation is an unfailing index of the popular demand. If that
demand is one that should be heeded, the number of copies in the library
may well be proportionate to the number of names on the reserve list.
But a librarian who keeps in continual touch with the public by contact
with users at the desk needs none of these somewhat mechanical
indications. It is the inestimable privilege of the librarian of a small
library in a small community to know her public, its wants, its needs,
its abilities and its limitations in a way that is denied to custodians
of huge collections.
In closing, let me suggest the following “Don’ts” for selectors of
library books:
(1) Don’t buy books that are intellectually far above your readers, in
the hope of improving their minds; a man may walk up stairs, but he
can’t jump from the sidewalk to the roof.
(2) Don’t buy fine editions of books that need rather to be extensively
duplicated; better two good souls than one fine body.
(3) Don’t buy McGrath and McCutcheon when you have reserves on file for
Dickens and George Eliot.
(4) Don’t buy biography in excess because you are fond of it yourself,
when a comparison of percentages shows that your supply of travel or
applied science is not up to the demand.
(5) Don’t buy books in flimsy bindings that will give out after the
first issue; work should not be done in gauzy garments.
(6) Don’t buy books in very strong bindings when their use is to be
light and small; overalls are not suitable for an afternoon tea.
(7) Don’t buy “sets” and “libraries;” they are adulterated literature,
coffee mixed with chicory.
(8) Don’t buy subscription books of an agent at a personal interview; it
is the agent’s game not to let you think; stand up for your rights and
think it over.
(9) Don’t estimate public demand by its effect on your own patience; one
persistent old gentleman often bulks larger than a crowd of quiet but
deserving persons without either push or pull.
(10) Don’t buy books of which you are not in immediate need, when you
are morally certain that copies in good condition will be thrown on the
markets as remainders at one-quarter the original list price.
(11) Don’t buy costly “new editions” of reference books without assuring
yourself that the newness is more than nominal.
(12) Don’t buy novels because you see them advertised in the trolley
cars.
(13) Lastly--and this is the most important thing of all--don’t get
discouraged. Our methods of selecting books, and their results,
doubtless need improvement, but so do those of all the other libraries
we know. Let us try to realize our deficiencies, and then try to make
this year’s book list just a little better than the last. If we can
succeed in this, the standard will take care of itself.
SYSTEM IN THE LIBRARY[10]
It has been said by Mr. W.H. Mallock that what we call
labor-organizations are mis-named, because their object is, in most
cases, the organization not of labor, but of idleness. This somewhat
cryptic statement may be understood to mean that trade unions have
endeavored usually not to improve the methods and results of labor, nor
to make its output larger and more satisfactory, but rather to improve
the condition of the laboring man; to make his life more comfortable and
his task easier, to shorten hours and lessen output, and often, as a
result, to make that output of lower grade.
This will be regarded as a base slander by many people, and it is
doubtless exaggerated; yet there is an amount of truth in it that cannot
be overlooked by any worker or any combinations of workers--which is the
same as saying that it interests almost all of us in this country; for
the only Americans able to work who do not work are tramps and a very
few millionaires. We shall try to consider its bearing on library
workers, but before doing so, it will be well to look at it a little
longer in its more general aspect.
Those who desire to improve the worker’s condition will justify
themselves very properly on economic grounds by saying that to do this
is also to improve the methods of work and the quality of the product.
No one can do good work who is ill-housed, underfed, improperly clothed
or overworked. This is true; but it is not also true that if we make it
our primary aim to see that the worker is as comfortable as possible,
to lift from him all the difficulties and burdens of his task, we shall
also improve his output proportionally. Rather should we do away with
that output altogether. We should simply be “organizing idleness.” We
may consider, as an analogy, the difference between a tariff for revenue
and one for protection. The total abolition of import duties is
impossible, we are told. They are necessary for revenue. Even England,
the world’s greatest free-trade country, has import duties. Very true,
but the amount of the duty and the objects on which it is laid will
differ absolutely according to its purpose. Again, we will suppose that
the same company owns an elevated railway and a surface trolley line.
They will naturally, if left to themselves, adjust fares, speed and
stops on the former so as to induce a larger proportion of people to
travel by the slower surface line, which is less expensive to operate.
If the surface line were owned by a rival company, there would be an
entirely different schedule of fares, speed and stops on the elevated
road, intended to crowd it with passengers and to derive the largest
possible revenue from it alone.
In like manner, we must doubtless look out for the worker; and he must
doubtless look out for himself. His conditions of life and work must be
made such that he will perform his task as well as possible. But those
conditions will be adjusted quite differently if we regard the comfort
of the worker as the prime object from what they will be if we regard
the excellence of the output as the prime object and the worker’s
comfort as a means to that end.
This will bear statement in still another way. We are put into this
world to do our appointed tasks, and it is our business to do them as
well as we possibly can. This means that we must take the proper amount
of rest, eat good food, keep happy and contented, and all the rest of
it. But he who regards his work simply as a means of furnishing him the
wherewithal to be happy, to take expensive vacations, live in a fine
house, and so on, will neither do his best work, nor will he enjoy the
good things of life as he ought.
Our friends, the Socialists, whose propaganda is receiving more
attention from thoughtful men to-day than it did a few years ago, both
because of the truths that it presents and the menace that it offers to
our present civilization, are making the mistake of dwelling upon the
importance of the worker’s comfort rather than that of the worker’s
improvement. They promise us that we shall all be in comfortable
circumstances and will have to work only three hours a day.
Incidentally, the output is to be better. But by putting the matter
thus, instead of the other way about, they have appealed to the element
of laziness that exists in all men--they have held out the prospect of
idleness instead of labor.
I have not lived west of the Mississippi long enough to know whether the
same conditions obtain here as in the East; but there, comparing things
to-day with what I remember of my boyhood, I seem to see an increasing
tendency among all workers to put self first and work second. The policy
of “ca’ canny,” as they call it in Scotland--of “go easy”--doing as
little as one can and still keep his job--is creeping in and has secured
a firm foothold. It is increasingly difficult to get any kind of work,
manual or mental, done really well--so well that one feels like saying,
“Well done, thou faithful servant.” And yet the shirkers are all anxious
to get to the top; and they wonder why they do not. They comfort
themselves by saying that success nowadays is solely a matter of pull.
But it is not so. Look around you and you will see, for the most part,
men in charge of large enterprises who are efficient, and who have put
work before self--men who are engrossed in what they are doing, who love
it and therefore do it effectively.
There never was a baser slander than the common assertion that we
Americans love money. If we loved the dollar for itself alone, we should
never sling it about as we do. We love the excitement and the fun of
making money. Look at our working millionaires! They want no more money;
they can not use what they have. They enjoy the task of owning and
running a great railway system, of organizing and managing some great
industrial combination. We may find it necessary to clip their wings a
little, but we can not call them lazy and inefficient--they make the job
too hard for us. There is no “go easy” policy here, and those who favor
it will never get to the top.
Let us hope that this pernicious idea that self is worth more than work
will never find a foothold in the library. We see it here and there, but
I believe that, taken by and large, library workers love their tasks and
that they are efficient in proportion to that love.
As our libraries are growing larger, our organizations more complex, it
is, I know, growing harder to take a live personal interest in the work,
so much of it is specialized routine; one feels like a mere cogwheel in
a great machine. The assistant who pastes labels or addresses postal
cards in a big library, finds it harder to realize that she is doing
something interesting and useful than the librarian of a small library
who not only performs these tasks but all the others--meets her public,
selects and buys her books, plans in one way and another for the
extension and betterment of her work. Yet the rapid, accurate and
efficient performance of the lesser task is as important as that of the
greater. A label pasted awry may ruin the library’s reputation in the
eye of a casual user; a mis-sent card may cause trouble to dozens of
one’s fellow assistants. Routine work is dull only when one does not
understand its purport. Dullness is in the worker, not in the work.
Are libraries, indeed, introducing too much organization into the
work--is it becoming too machine-like? Now, it should not be forgotten
that there is in a machine something akin to personality--individuality,
at any rate, is not too strong a word. Every locomotive has tricks and
characteristics that its engineer knows and sometimes loves. He pats its
back affectionately and speaks of it as “she.” The idea that to be part
of a machine excludes personality and individual work is all wrong. One
can not go careering about eccentrically and unsystematically; the very
purpose of organization is to stop all that; but within the limits of
motion and action assigned to a person as his part in the larger motion
and action of the machine, there is still room for moving well or ill,
for helping on the greater work or antagonizing it and throwing it out
of order. If a cog-wheel thinks that it is manifesting its originality
in some meritorious way by making the whole machine creak and wobble and
turn out an inferior product, that cog-wheel has power to do just this;
but it should not complain if the machinist throws it into the scrap
heap.
Now, in the library, the parts of our machine are workers of all kinds;
their connection and relationship are conditioned and limited by
customs, rules and orders. To test the desirability of these or of any
change in them there is just one question to be asked; first, last and
all the time, namely--is this for ourselves or for our work? Is it
merely to make things easier for the assistants or will it improve the
work and benefit the public?
The asking of this question and its thoughtful consideration will
puncture many a bubble. We will take, if you please, the question of
vacations. Any one who has tried to make out a vacation schedule in a
large library knows that, next to making out a recitation schedule in a
large school or college, it is the most vexatious task of the kind that
is given to man to do. Everyone must have a vacation, and everyone wants
to have it at some time when the efficiency of the library will be
impaired by it. Everyone wants to go away at once, and there are times
when no one wants to be absent. Any possible arrangement means
dissatisfaction, heartburnings, a feeling that favoritism or prejudice
has been at work. Into the mind of most librarians has, I am sure, crept
the suggestion: What is the use of all this? Why not close the library
for a month? Is not that done by the schools: and are not we, too, an
educational institution?
The fact that librarians do not yield, in this case, to the suggestion
of a change that would benefit them and all their assistants, is, of
course, due to the obviousness of the other fact that it would be bad
for the public.
This test of the public advantage may be applied to the whole question
of system in the library--of how much system is good, and what kind and
how it shall be determined and applied. When a man comes in contact with
a library rule that incommodes him personally, he is apt to deride it
impatiently as “red tape.” When he finds absence of a rule where he
would have benefited by it, he concludes that the library is in “chaos”
or “confusion.” Now, there should evidently be neither one nor the other
of these, although we cannot allow the personal convenience of a single
user to be the test--our system should not exist for itself alone, nor
should we try to get along without system altogether. There should be
just so much and of just such a kind as will result in the maximum
degree of service rendered to the public.
The individual user is quite wrong, of course, in condemning a
regulation that annoys him personally, for this reason alone; but if we
should find that it annoyed all other users as well without other
advantage than the saving of some trouble to the library assistant, he
would, I conceive, be quite right in calling it “red tape.” This term is
applied primarily to annoying official restrictions that have no use
whatever, but we may well extend it to restrictions that benefit the
administrator without improving the administration. Rules, customs and
manners of procedure in a library, whether they say “thou shalt” or
“thou shalt not” are of two kinds--those addressed to the library staff
and those addressed to the public. Both, however, are intended to enable
the public to get more good out of the library. The members of the staff
are told to do certain things and not to do others, because this will
make it easier for the users of the library to get what they want. The
latter in turn are bidden to do this and forbidden to do that--not, as
some of them seem to think, to make the librarian’s work easier or to
save him trouble--but to throw the library open wider to their fellows.
System of this kind may bear very hard on the individual user; he may
chafe, for instance, at any restriction in the number of books that he
is allowed to borrow--but if no such restriction existed, the privileges
of his fellow borrowers would be curtailed thereby. He may grumble
because the time limit on his book has expired before he has finished
reading it, unmindful of the fact that some of his fellow readers are
anxiously waiting for it. But if the book in his possession is not
wanted by anybody; if there are other such unused books in the library
that he wants, should he not have and keep them? Assuredly. Every
library should make arrangements whereby none of its books should be
kept from use to stand idly on the shelves. Our test of public
usefulness declares as decisively for this as it does for the partition
of privilege in the case of more than one anxious borrower.
To return to that part of the library machine that affects the library
staff, I have many times heard assistants complain of incidents of
organization and systematization that seemed to them too much like those
in vogue in commercial institutions. Now it may be freely admitted that
there is a difference between the library and the store or the factory,
or more generally between any institution for the public good and one
for private gain. In the former the public advantage is the prime
object, and to attain it we must often consult the comfort or
convenience of the administrators. In the latter, the advantage of the
administrators is the prime object, and to gain it they are generally
forced to consult the comfort and convenience of the public. The primary
and secondary elements are reversed, but they exist in each. Both the
department store and the library must look out for the public. It is the
library’s business to do so, and it is in the store’s business advantage
to do the same.
It is hard to see, therefore, why any kind of system that will make a
store work better is not worth looking into by a librarian. The
systematization in the staff of an up-to-date, modern business
organization, and in its work, is a continual surprise to him who has
not looked into such things for a score of years. The stores and the
factories are ahead of librarians in this respect, and we may as well
admit it. After all, this is natural. What is to one’s business
advantage is always done better than what is merely one’s business. But
there is no reason why we should not study these better methods and
imitate those that are worth copying.
Take one little example. In a factory the raw material is followed
statistically from its purchase to its sale as a finished product; and
even after its sale its performances are watched. The owner can find
out, when he wants to do so, whether that particular article made or
lost money for the firm, and how much, and why; whether it gave
satisfaction to the purchaser, and if not, why not; to what its
excellence or deficiencies were due, whether to the qualities of the raw
material or the methods of manufacture. How many librarians can
similarly ascertain whether the purchase of a given invoice of books was
profitable to the library or not, taking into account the number and
duration of their issues, the time lost and the money spent in mending
and re-binding them, and so on? How many can tell you whether those
books gave satisfaction to the users, in their bindery, typography, and
paper; whether the reader found them hard on his eyes, easily soiled,
difficult to hold open--and whose fault it was, the publisher’s, the
binder’s or the mender’s? This, too, is merely the material and physical
side of the question--all that the manufacturer or the merchant needs to
consider. We librarians say we are on a loftier plane; we purvey ideas.
So we do. How many of us then can say what was the mental and moral
effect on our community of the books added last year, as compared with
those added the year before? How many of us know even whether the
readers liked the books of one year better than those of another? Again;
the individual worker in a good factory, the travelling salesman in a
good mercantile house, is watched statistically. His employers can tell
just how profitable his work is to them. If the failure of an operation,
or the loss of custom in a town, is due to him, they know it, and if his
service continues unprofitable, he is replaced. How many librarians
watch the work of individual members of the staff with such detail?
Suppose at the end of six months’ service, an assistant were confronted
with statistical evidence that she had mischarged ten books, made eight
bad mistakes in accessioning, written twenty catalog cards that had to
be replaced and caused four complaints by her bearing at the desk?
Suppose she were thereupon given notice that she must do better or go;
what would she say? I think I know. She would say that the library was
run just like a department store. And she would be quite right; only,
instead of being derogatory to the library as it would be intended, her
remark would be a compliment. It is time that we should carefully
discriminate between what is commercial, in commercial institutions, and
what simply makes for orderliness and efficiency.