third of the collection kept regularly in our art room, have separate
plates. These are of course not usually on display but are in the cases
ready to be used in the room on demand. They thus correspond, not with
museum material displayed in cases, but with specimens packed away in
such manner that they may easily be secured for study by those who want
them. One may imagine a whole museum equipped for students in this way,
with nothing on display at all--no popular exhibition features. Probably
no museum was ever so administered, as an entirety; and as you know the
large museums are making more and more of features adding to the
attractiveness of the collection as a popular spectacle. The public
visits the Museum of Natural History in New York, much as it turns the
pages of the National Geographic Magazine--just to look at the pictures.
This treatment of material is justified because it increases popular
interest in the subject-matter and brings people to the museum who would
not otherwise enter it. Also, it predisposes public bodies to more
generous support of the museum. This is true again of such institutions
as botanical and zoological gardens, which have always been show-places
for the public as well as laboratories for the student. The library can
not afford to neglect such an opportunity of attracting the public and
of stimulating interest in its own subject-matter--books. It can not
continuously display any great part of its separate prints, as a museum
does with its specimens, but it can exhibit them from time to time, so
that one or another of them is always displayed in this way. Simple
screens can be cheaply made and the prints fastened thereto with
thumb-pins, taking care not to injure them by perforating with the pin,
but letting the edge of the head lap over the edge of the print to hold
it, and using sheets of transparent celluloid for protection, where
necessary. After beginning such displays in our own library, we found
them so popular with our readers and so helpful in our own work that we
are now holding thirty or forty yearly, sometimes two or three at once
in different parts of the library, supplementing our own material with
loans from interested friends.
The value of exhibitions of plates is so highly estimated by some
librarians that they are breaking up valuable volumes so that the plates
may be used separately. This is a second step toward the museum use of
the library. I have heard a well-known librarian assert that if
permitted by his Board he would dismember every art book in his
library, in this way. Most of us, especially if we are interested in the
exhibition side of library work--which is distinctly a museum side--will
be inclined to sympathize with him.
But although we hesitate, perhaps, to tear to pieces good books, even
for such a good purpose as this, there is much material that can be so
treated with a clear conscience. Many duplicates of art works can be
thus used, and there is hardly an illustrated book which when the
librarian is ready to throw it away does not contain plates or maps
which can be saved and used. In St. Louis when we condemn books they are
never destroyed and consigned to the old-paper dealer before passing
through the hands and before the eyes of all those who might use still
usable fragments of this kind. Taking the item of maps alone, some of
the best special maps are attached to volumes of travel or history, as
folders or in pockets. So long as the book is usable, the map, of
course, must go with it, but if the map has been reinforced with linen
when the book is purchased, as it ought to be, it will probably be in
usable condition when the book is worn out, and may at once be
transferred to the map collection. The same is true of other plate than
pictures--fac-similes of handwriting, for instance. A very fair
autograph collection may be made of such detached plates--not originals
of course, but originals are valuable merely as curiosities, in the way
that we have already noted. Fac-similes are as good for any other
purpose.
Of course all such torn up or detached material is very convenient also
for reference use--easily filed and quickly consulted. It may be kept in
vertical file cases, in loose-leaf binders or in ordinary portfolios.
One of the interesting things about it is the facility of assembling it
in different ways. In our own library we sometimes tear apart the
leaves of an art book simply to group the plates in an order that will
make them more valuable for reference purposes. This leads us to another
nearly related, though I should call it a still further, step toward the
museum region, which is taken when we deliberately create specimens by
clipping and mounting. Most libraries are now doing this freely, both
for reference work and for circulation. In many cases there are no
separate labels here except a brief descriptive title, the material
being classified according to its subject or its intended use. The
similarity to the school museum or circulating museum--a very recent
development of museum work--is striking. In this field the library has
been ahead of the regular museums. The material clipped and mounted is
usually book material--largely plates from books, magazines or papers.
There is much other material that can be so mounted and used--the kind
of thing that is familiar in memorabilia scrapbooks--theatre and concert
programs, announcements, invitations, tickets of admission, badges,
menus, photographs, advertising material, etc. It is usually a mistake
to make permanent scrap-books of such material. When they need to be
assembled in book form the separate mounts can be brought together in a
loose-leaf binder. A permanent scrap-book ties the material together in
a way that may prove embarassing. Suppose, for instance, that you are
keeping printed material from three clubs in your town, as you ought.
Clubs seldom do this for themselves. Several St. Louis women’s clubs
have told us that they visit the library when they want to indulge in
research into their own past doings. It might be natural to keep a
scrap-book for each club and insert the material as it comes. But
suppose you desire to display all your material on war activities and
that some of the material in these scrap-books falls under this head.
You will have to leave it out or tear out your scrap-book leaves.
Mounting takes time, and it is not necessary to mount everything.
Material used only occasionally may be left unmounted. For instance,
much newspaper-clipped material may be kept loosely in heavy manila
envelopes. Again, some material may be made more accessible if not
mounted, especially if in card form and in standard sizes. Such is the
postal card. The amount of valuable material obtainable in postal-card
form will astonish those who have not looked into the matter. Besides
the usual views of localities, embracing buildings, monuments and
scenery, good collections of sculpture, architecture, portraits and many
other things may be made in postal-card form. Postal cards are all of
the same size and very compact, so that they may be filed in trays and
treated very much like catalogue cards, guides being used with them as
in an ordinary catalogue. The amount of usable material that can be
stored to the square foot in this form is probably greater than any
other.
In all material of this sort, the similarity of collection, treatment
and use may be so close that the passage from the picture to the object
seems almost negligible; yet many persons apparently consider that here
we must draw the definite boundary line between the collections of the
library and those of the museum. They would say for instance that it is
perfectly legitimate for a library to acquire, preserve and use a plate
bearing a printed fac-simile in natural colors, of a piece of textile
goods, but not a card mount bearing an actual piece of the same goods,
although the two were so similar in appearance that at a little distance
it would be impossible to tell the colored print from the actual piece
of textile. Librarians will not be apt to attach much importance to
this distinction, and those whose collections include treatises on
textiles with colored plates will not hesitate to supplement them with
mounted specimens of the actual textile with typewritten descriptions.
Generally manufacturers are only too happy to furnish samples of their
current output, and older specimens, sometimes of historical interest,
can be bought from dealers.
There are precedents for the treatment of this sort of thing as library
material. Probably Hough’s well-known work on American Woods will occur
to everyone. No library, so far as I know, has ever thought of barring
this from its shelves because it contains actual thin sections of the
various woods instead of pictures thereof.
The peculiar adaptability of this kind of material to library use is a
physical one, and is shared by every flat specimen that may be mounted
on sheets. Instances will occur to every one. An actual flower or leaf,
for example, is generally cheaper than a color reproduction of it, and
takes up little more room when mounted. A good descriptive botany with
inadequate pictures may well be supplemented by a herbarium of this
kind. Historical material is quite generally flat--often written or
printed on card or paper--old programs, menus, railroad tickets,
dancecards, timetables, cards of admission, souvenirs of all kinds. One
of the most interesting exhibitions I ever saw was of foreign railway
material--timetables, tickets, dining-car menus, etc. Many Chinese and
Japanese specimens were included. A treatise on forms of railway
tickets, with fac-simile illustrations, would be eagerly sought by
libraries; why should not the objects themselves be equally valuable?
Librarians were glad to have Miss Kate Sanborn’s book on old wall
papers, with its realistic reproductions, but how many of them thought
of the possibility of making their own books of specimens, using the
papers themselves, instead of photographic facsimiles thereof?
This point of view may be commended to the makers of decorated bulletins
in libraries. Much laborious hand-work is often done in the preparation
of these, and the results are seldom worth the trouble. Even when a work
of art has been produced it may be questioned whether the time withdrawn
from other library work has been employed to the best purpose. By the
use of what has been called above “museum material” time may be saved
and better results reached. For instance, I once saw, in an exhibition
of picture bulletins one bearing a list of books and articles on lace.
It was made in white ink on black cardboard, and bore a most realistic
representation of lace, done with the pen, probably at a vast
expenditure of time. The most that could be said for this really clever
bit of work was that it looked enough like a real piece of lace, mounted
on the cardboard, to deceive the elect at a short distance. Why then did
not the maker mount a real bit of inexpensive lace on the board, at an
expenditure of a few minutes’ time? It should not require much thought
to see that bulletins prepared in this way are usually better and more
effective than elaborate decoration with pencil and brush.
Another point of resemblance between this kind of library material and
that utilized by museums is the fact that its value is so often a
group-value--possessed by the combination of objects of a certain kind,
rather than by any one in itself. For instance, a common earthenware jar
designed by John Jones in the Trenton potteries may have little value,
but if you add to it a thousand other earthenware jars, or a thousand
pieces of any kind designed by John Jones, or a thousand other specimens
made in Trenton, the collection acquires a value which far exceeds the
average value of its elements multiplied by thousands. The former may be
five cents--the latter five thousand dollars. In the same way an
illustration by Mary Smith, clipped from a trashy story in a ten-cent
magazine, has little value--zero value, perhaps. But a thousand such
illustrations showing the published work of Mary Smith from the time she
began until she acquired standing as an illustrator, is worth while.
It should not be necessary to tell librarians that the best way to make
such a collection as this is not to search for each element by itself
but to gather miscellaneous related material in quantity and then sort
it. If you have a pile of slips to alphabetize, you do not go through
the whole mass to pick out the A’s, and then again for the B’s and so
on. You sort the whole mass at once, so that while you are segregating
the A’s you are at the same time collecting the B’s and all the rest of
the alphabet. Likewise, if you want the illustration work of Jessie
Wilcox Smith, for instance, you need not hunt separately for bits from
her pen; you need only clip all the illustrations from magazines and
papers that would be otherwise discarded. Then you sort these by the
names of the illustrators, and you have at once collections not only of
Miss Smith’s current work but of that of dozens of other illustrators.
This is applicable in a hundred other fields.
It should be noted that this group value is potentially present in many
large collections of material, whether classified or not into the
particular groups in question. For instance, we have a large collection
of locality post-cards, filed by cities and towns. Here are groups ready
for use. If anyone wants views of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Stockton,
Cal., to show to a class, or for use with a reflectograph, or to copy
for newspaper work, they are already assembled. But also if someone is
going to lecture on court houses, it is the work of only a few moments
to assemble from the file a temporary collection of fifty or sixty
examples. The same is true of buildings of any other type, say college
dormitories, railway stations, libraries or warehouses, of parks,
mountain scenery and industrial processes and of a hundred other things.
The value here is a true group value; it is created by assemblage and
becomes dormant again when the items are distributed to their proper
places in the file.
The same is true of lantern-slides to an even greater degree, for slides
are practically never used except in groups. As a collection of slides
may be grouped in scores of ways, it is better to file them in some
order that will admit of quick selection, than to form groups
arbitrarily at the outset and keep these together. A slide in such a
group is practically withdrawn from the possibility of assemblage in
some other group. For instance, a view of Michael Angelo’s “Moses” might
find a place in a group to illustrate a talk on Michael Angelo, or
Renaissance Sculpture, or The Art Treasures of Rome, or Old Testament
Worthies, or any one of a dozen others. If we place it arbitrarily in
any one of these and keep the group together, we shall of course spare
ourselves a little trouble if anyone wants that particular assemblage of
slides, but we shall not only make it more difficult to assemble the
other groups, but practically put them out of the running. Several years
ago we had a valuable gift of a collection of slides illustrating phases
of city-planning, given by the Civic League of our city. They included
many foreign views now difficult or impossible to obtain. The donors
had assembled them in groups to go with lectures prepared in advance and
we maintained this arrangement for a time, although it was not in accord
with our general plan. But we soon found that persons who asked for
slides on London or Munich or Milan were missing some of our best
material, simply because we could not always remember to look through
the city-planning groups for something that might be there. Consequently
we broke up these groups and distributed their slides to the proper
places in our file, which is in trays arranged precisely as if the
slides were catalogue cards, with proper guides and cross-references on
cardboard slips. We have memoranda of the slides that belong in each
lecture group and these can be quickly assembled if wanted. Of course we
allow the public to go directly to the trays if they desire and assemble
for themselves any group that they choose.
This is all borderland material between library and museum. There is
much of it analogous to the lantern slide that libraries have not taken
up yet, but that they might handle to good advantage. I do not see why
we should not, for instance, circulate microscope slides or photographic
negatives. Stereoscopic pictures are now commonly handled by libraries
owing to skilful and perfectly legitimate exploitation.
There is perhaps some doubt whether we should include in this sort of
material musical records, either for the mechanical organ and piano or
for the phonograph. These should possibly be considered as books
containing music written in a kind of notation that admits of
sound-reproduction. The fact that there is this doubt should perhaps
suffice to throw these records into the borderland of which we are
speaking. They are to some extent capable of the group arrangement
spoken of above, as where a library patron asks to take out half a
dozen records from one opera or eight old French dances. They are also
capable of a kind of correlation with other library material that is
quite unique. Thus a reader may take out at the same time Chopin’s
military polonaise in ordinary notation and in music-roll form. The
pianola reproduction serves as a guide to his own reading of the piece,
or he may simply follow the musical notation as he operates the
mechanical player. Similarly, he may take out the miniature orchestral
score of a selection and the phonograph record of the same as played by
an actual orchestra. Here he can not play the piece himself but he can
follow the reproduction with score in hand, much to his own musical
pleasure and profit.
An exactly similar correspondence exists between an ordinary book and a
phonograph record of it read aloud. Such records are not often
available, but I see no reason why they should not become so, at any
rate in the case of poetical and oratorical selections. Our means of
popular instruction in spoken language are deficient and these might
prove useful. At present we teach children in the schools to read and
write, but not to speak. If they do not learn good colloquial spoken
English at home, they are apt to remain uneducated in this respect. This
plan has worked well in the teaching of foreign languages and it is now
possible to buy small phonographs with cylinder records in French,
German or Italian corresponding to printed passages in the accompanying
manuals. I certainly think it legitimate of libraries to purchase these,
and they would be “border-land” material, I suppose, in the same sense
as the musical records.
I may say before closing, in regard to this sort of museum material,
that the largest circulation of music rolls that I know of is that of
the Cincinnati Public Library, which distributes them at the rate of
60,000 per year. We have 3681 rolls and circulated 16,814 in the year
1917. Neither the Cincinnati library nor our own pays out money for this
material. It is all donated.
The status of phonograph records of all kinds as museum material is
hardly as high in this country as abroad. In the Sorbonne, in Paris,
records of French dialect speech have long been acquired and stored.
Records of this kind and moving-picture films, made of permanent
material and carefully prepared to show existing conditions would have
very high future value. I do not know of any systematic effort to
collect them in the United States. Possibly it might be difficult to
find permanent films. A moving picture man told me that only perishable
ones were being made, as it was not for the interests of the trade that
they should last long. There is too much of this spirit in modern
industry and trade, and it is responsible for poor materials of all
sorts--paint, textiles, dyes and furniture. Permanent carbon
photo-prints on paper can be made and doubtless the process can be
applied to transparent films if desired.
This is really museum material, but if no museum takes it up, I should
like to see the Public Library begin the work. We already have the films
of our great St Louis Pageant of 1915, which may serve as a beginning.
It has been said above that museum material adaptable to library use is
so for physical reasons. We may go further and say that the whole
difference between a library and a museum is a physical difference
rather than one of either object or method. The difference is one of
material and of the manner of its display, and these are conditioned by
physical facts. The difference between an object and a picture of it is
physical. It should not astonish us, then, that when this physical
difference is abolished, as it is when the object itself is a picture,
or is minimized, as when the object is flat like the picture and
resembles it closely, like a textile specimen, the boundary between the
museum and the library practically disappears.
THE LIBRARY AND THE LOCALITY
There is nothing more important than standardization, unless it is a
knowledge of its proper limits. Probably no more important step has ever
been taken than the introduction of standardization into the industries;
the making of nails, screws, nuts and bolts of standard sizes, the
manufacture of watches, firearms and machines of all sorts, with
standard interchangeable parts. If you take apart a thousand Ford
automobiles and mix up the parts a thousand automobiles may be at once
assembled from those parts, without any effort at selecting the
particular ones associated with each other at first. You know that this
principle is now being applied to what are known as “fabricated” ships
where certain types of freight-carriers are made standard and then
twenty or thirty of a kind are built at once in the same yard, being
assembled from steel parts cut out and punched in what are called
“fabricating ships”.
Now I need not waste time in arguing here that this process can not be
made to apply universally or be used indefinitely. To standardize a work
of art would be to kill it. Standardization is valuable where
interchangeability is necessary rather than adaptation to local
conditions. Portable houses, for instance, with interchangeable parts,
have been standardized to a certain extent, but only within the bounds
of uniform climatic conditions. The standard houses for Michigan and
Alabama would have to be different. It is important, therefore, as I
have said, to know, when standardization is being carried out, the
limits of its advisability and the conditions under which it becomes
useless or injurious. This is of interest to us librarians because our
methods and processes, our buildings, our book collections and the use
of both have long been undergoing this very process. And it is surely
desirable that almost all the routine processes of library work, and the
others to some extent, should be standardized.
This standardization has been going on ever since librarians began to
meet together and began to issue their own professional literature; in
other words, ever since the formation of the A.L.A. in 1876 and the
establishment of _The Library Journal_ about the same time. The
subsequent formation of State Library Associations and local library
clubs, as well as the establishment of other library periodicals, has
greatly multiplied the opportunities for librarians to talk over their
work with each other, to learn of other and better ways of doing things,
to compare existing methods and to determine, if possible, which of them
best serves the purpose for which it was devised. These things having in
some measure been decided, they were then crystallized and fixed by the
rise and success of Library Schools, summer-schools and training
classes, which selected the methods that had stood the test of time and
had emerged from the crucible of discussion and formulated them into
standards which were thenceforth taught to their students. This, I
think, is a fair statement of the way in which our present library
standards came to be standards.
It is a good way to select the best and to ensure that the best shall
not be departed from. If the best always remained best, we should have
no quarrel with it. Unfortunately there is flux and change all about us.
A method is best when it best corresponds to the conditions. We can
ensure that the method shall not be changed, but we have no control over
a large proportion of the conditions. They change, in spite of us; and
then the methods ought to change with them. In some instances we have
erred, possibly, by making it a little hard to change them. We are now
ready to consider some of the cases where standards ought not to
obtain--where one library ought to try to be different from another
instead of exactly like it.
It is evident from what was said above about portable houses, that
difference of locality is apt to introduce important exceptions into any
rule of this kind; and it is on these exceptions that we are to dwell
particularly to-day. There are thousands of particulars in which it is
desirable that a library in one town should be conducted exactly like
one in another town. What are the particulars in which the library must
or should be different?