properly, differences between the two towns will perhaps be first
reflected in these, for a library’s ability to serve its community
depends primarily on certain correspondences between the books and the
readers. These correspondences may be summarized by saying that the
books in a library must represent a combination of the readers’ wants
and their needs. These might always coincide in an ideal community, but
in practice no librarian thinks of paying attention to the one to the
exclusion of the other. At the same time the demands of the readers
should always be known and always considered even if they want what is
unnecessary; and we must likewise try to ascertain what they need, even
if they have no desire for it. The extremes in a community without
library taste would be a library of trashy fiction and one of serious
standard works at which no one ever looked. A book-selector who uses
good judgment will of course steer between this Scylla and this
Charybdis, and the result will be a collection that the community can
use with both pleasure and profit. Moreover, as time goes on, the
readers’ taste and the quality of their library will both slowly but
surely rise. No two towns are alike. Where the books have been thus
selected, the collections will reflect the character of the communities,
not only in literary taste but in many other things. The industries of
the towns are likely to differ. In one, perhaps, there are potteries; in
the other, shoe factories. The workers in the industries and even
outsiders interested in them for local reasons, should have an
opportunity to consult their literature. The natural resources of the
regions doubtless differ--their crops, their mineral output, their
attractiveness to the summer tourist. Transportation facilities vary.
All these things have their reflection in books and the differences of
the towns have their corresponding reflections in their libraries.
Many years ago, your lecturer called the attention of librarians to the
fact that they have in their own statistical tables a means of
ascertaining whether they are keeping up with the reading-tendencies of
their communities in book-purchase. Nearly every library classifies both
its stock and its circulation, and tabulates both for the year, giving
also the percentage of each class to the whole. Now suppose, for
instance, that his tables show nine per cent. of history on the shelves,
we will say, whereas the circulation of the same class is eleven per
cent. Evidently his readers are fonder of history than he is. They read
it in greater degree than he buys it. Moral: buy more history. Of course
this would be the moral only where the tendency shown was to be
encouraged. For instance the average percentage of fiction on the
shelves in a public library is probably about thirty, whereas its
circulation runs from sixty to sixty-five. We do not say here “Buy more
fiction”, because fiction reading needs no encouragement, but rather
judicious restraint, although I certainly am not one of those who
condemn it. I wish, however, that we could divide our novels into three
classes, good, indifferent and bad, and then test the public demand by
the method outlined above. I am convinced that some surprises might be
in store for us.
Among the subjects that differ totally in two localities, local history
and biography are conspicuous. Both citizens and visitors are often
interested in them. There are features of each that are of more than
local interest, but the purely local side must generally be taken care
of by the library or not at all. Sometimes there is a local historical
society whose work, of course, the library will not try to duplicate;
but there is always room for co-operation, stimulation and aid. A
moribund historical body may often be galvanized into life by an
interested librarian. The library may offer such a body the hospitality
of its building and shelf-room for its collections with mutual benefit.
But in scores of towns there is only languid interest in local history
or local worthies, and the library itself must do all that is done.
Material bearing on these local matters rarely consists of books. It
will include local newspapers, clippings, a pamphlet or two, menus,
leaflets, programs--all sorts of printed things issued by churches,
schools, clubs and societies, and lost as soon as issued unless caught
at once and preserved. Here is the library’s chance to possess a
collection that is the only one of its kind in the world; for outside
the home town no one would think of getting it together. Supplementing
these printed records may be all sorts of manuscript material--letters,
diaries, reminiscences or narratives written or dictated especially for
the library by persons who have something locally interesting to tell.
If there are maps showing the growth of the town or anything else of
interest about it, the library is the place for it. The collection and
arrangement need take none of the busy librarian’s time, for there is
always someone in the town whose interest and labor can be enlisted. If
nothing else can be done, at least a file of the local newspaper can be
kept and indexed on cards, especially for names of localities and
persons. Work of this kind done currently and not allowed to accumulate,
does not take much time.
In these days of universal snapshots, local photographs are easy to get.
The librarian may take a few herself and the library may well defray the
expense. A hundred years from now, twenty views of your main street,
taken at five-year intervals from the same point and showing the
progressive changes, would be worth their weight in gold. Groups taken
“just for fun” or for family reasons, are often worth keeping because
they show the fashions of the day. These are of no particular interest
to us now, but any of us would be glad to have in our libraries a
collection of groups showing prevalent modes of dress in our towns
during each year in the last century. Old buildings are often torn down
to make room for new. These should be photographed before they go.
All material of this kind is peculiar to the library where it is
preserved and helps to make that library’s collections a departure from
standardization whose importance we need, perhaps, insist on no further.
It may not be possible to collect in the library all of the interesting
local material in the town. Much of it may be in the hands of private
owners who will not part with it. Some of it may be owned by clubs,
churches or public bodies. In this case there should be an index
somewhere to indicate where it is, and there is no more appropriate
place for this index than the library. I have elsewhere suggested that
where this privately-owned material consists of books, cards for them
may be inserted also in the library’s public catalogue. But, in
addition, there is no limit to the extent to which the library may go in
indexing material, and this work may well enlist the interest and
efforts of volunteers. There may be an index to old furniture, one of
colonial houses, possibly illustrated and annotated like the fine one
prepared by Mr. Godard for the Connecticut State Library, one of
soldiers sent by the town to various wars, one of noteworthy storms or
of very high or low temperatures, one to local organizations, past and
present. The special interests of the community will guide those
efforts, and here too the library of one town will differ materially
from that of another.
Possibly library standardization has affected buildings more than
anything else about a library. There was a time where its absence was
doing a great deal of harm, especially in the case of small or
medium-sized libraries put up under the Carnegie gift. Every board and
every local architect had a different idea, but all seemed to agree that
the building, no matter how small, was to be a monument, with a rotunda
and a dome; and a good deal of waste resulted. There was a loud call for
some kind of a standard plan, and small library buildings, whether for
branches or independent libraries, are now a good deal alike, so much so
that we can often pick out a library building by its outward guise, and
that we will sometimes say of a post-office or an art gallery, “That
looks exactly like a library”. This ease of identification is of course
good as far as it goes; but it should not interfere with a certain
degree of adaptation to local conditions. This is obvious in the case
of sites offering local peculiarities. For instance, the High Bridge
Branch of the New York Public Library is built on a steep hillside. The
architect has taken advantage of this fact to arrange an entrance on the
ground level on each of the three floors. The lowest is a service
entrance, the next above leads to the children’s room and the upper-most
to the adult department. Each door opens on a different street and the
three facades are respectively three, two and one story high. Evidently
no standard plan would have been of use here. The building, inside and
out, had to be planned for this site and this alone. And although not
many sites require such special treatment as this there are many that do
not lend themselves to the erection of a rigid standard building. In
Detroit the Carnegie Committee, I am told, were inclined to insist on a
basement assembly room in branches to be built on ground where any
basement at all would involve wasteful expense of construction. The
proposed contents of a building should often affect its plan. Some
architects have not yet learned the difference between an independent
library and a branch of the same size and probable circulation. An
independent library may have to house treasures, and should be of
fire-proof construction. A branch rarely houses anything that can not
easily be replaced and it may be waste of money to make it fire-proof.
The architectural style of a library building is often properly made to
conform with some style peculiar to the locality or regarded as suitable
for it. The Riverside Public Library in California is properly in the
Spanish colonial or Mission style; that of New Haven, Conn., is a
modified New England Colonial, the Jackson Square Branch in New York is
Dutch, the Chestnut Hill Branch in Philadelphia and the Public Library
in Harrisburg are of the irregular stone masonry so familiar in many
parts of Pennsylvania. Some of the branches in Portland, Ore., used to
be and perhaps still are of wood, built of the Douglas fir of the
surrounding region.
The power of the purse is an important thing in libraries as elsewhere,
and possibly we should have taken up earlier the variations of library
income with locality. Not only are some communities better able to
support a library than others, but of two with equal ability one will
excel in interest and willingness to give. An attempt to regulate income
by rule is the requirement of the Carnegie Committee that a municipality
shall appropriate for the support of a library in a Carnegie Building,
not less than ten per cent. of its cost. I know that the condition is
primarily stated the other way around. The town is supposed to decide
what it can give to support a library and then the Carnegie Committee is
willing to capitalize this at ten per cent. But the library once built,
its cost becomes the fixed item and the appropriation the variable one,
and in many cases it has varied so far downward as to constitute a
violation of the town’s library contract. Of late the Committee is
making an effort to detect and tabulate these violations and to use them
as a basis for withholding donations in neighborhoods where they have
been frequent. A man is known by the company he keeps, and it may be
just to regard with some suspicion one who lives in a neighborhood where
dishonest persons congregate. Still, towns are unlike men, since their
locations are fairly permanent, and it scarcely seems right to turn down
Jonesville’s request for a Carnegie library because Smithtown, 35 miles
away, has been unable to appropriate the ten per cent. that it promised.
The Committee has also made what I regard as the mistake of finding
fault with the library that suffers from an unduly reduced
appropriation, instead of with the city or town government that is
responsible for the reduction. To throw blame on the head of an
institution that has just been robbed of its birthright would seem to be
adding insult to injury. But despite the failure of this particular
effort at standardization, there seems to be a feeling that library
incomes should be so far standardized as to be calculable from the
particular set of circumstances under which the library is working. The
State of New York once attempted to regulate its library appropriation
by home-use alone--so many cents per volume circulated. This was a very
crude attempt, but possibly we ought to be able to say just how many
dollars ought to support a library in a building of specified size with
so many books, and a circulation of so many per year. This matter was
the subject of earnest discussion for a year or more in the American
Library Institute, but no definite conclusion was reached. It has always
been my belief that some sort of formula could be deduced by
mathematical methods from a large number of observed data, that is, the
statistics of a series of normally-conducted libraries. Observe that
this is not so much standardization as an attempt to systematize the
recognition of differences.
With the average librarian the practical question is not so much what
sum he ought to have to run his library, as how he can and shall run it
with what he has. Limitation of income invariably limits service, and
unfortunately the kind of service on which it bears most sharply is that
which is the library’s specialty--namely the provision of books. The
purchase of books should be the last thing in which the library ought to
economize but in practice it is generally the first. The building must
be cared for--lighted and heated; the public must be served. But it is
easy to stop buying books, and it is in book-purchase that the library
with small income differs from its neighbor with plenty of money. There
are some curious exceptions where the library can not wholly control the
expenditure of its money, which is regulated by the dead hand of a
testator. Thus the Forbes Library of Northampton, Mass., now sensibly
consolidated with the Public Library of that city, was obliged for years
to expend most of its income for the purchase of books, leaving
practically nothing for keeping up its building or paying its staff. It
was thus rich where a library is usually poor and _vice versa_.
The earliest efforts at standardization among librarians were directed
toward cataloguing; and probably cataloguers are our greatest sticklers
for a rigid adherence to rules. Those who read Mr. E. L. Pearson’s
column in _The Boston Transcript_ realize that there are some librarians
who consider this fact a legitimate target for ridicule. And it is
clear, I think, that both the methods and results of cataloguing ought
not to be immune from modification to adopt them to local peculiarities.
Some public libraries are used so much for scholarly or antiquarian
research that their catalogues need to approximate that of a university
library; others are of so popular a nature that they hardly need a
catalogue at all. The needs of a certain community may require the very
full analysis of certain books, whereas elsewhere these could do very
well with less analysis, or possibly none at all. The selection of
subject headings may have to be made with due regard to the use that a
catalogue is likely to receive. Books on open shelves do not need
precisely the same kind of cataloguing as those to which access is not
allowed. A library’s public, too, sometimes gets into habits, and if
these are unobjectionable, it may be better to humor them than to try
to change them. Some bodies of readers like as many printed lists as
possible; others rarely use them. In some places there is great demand
for a monthly bulletin; elsewhere it is little used. Any librarian who
does not stand ready to adapt his catalogue in some respects to the
character and needs of his readers runs the risk of limiting his field
of service.
Methods of distribution may require selection or modification to suit
local peculiarities. Take, for instance, the choice of a charging
system. “Which is the best charging system?” is a question frequently
asked of experienced librarians or library school instructors. This
query is on a par with “What is the best material for clothes?”, or “Is
paregoric or ipecac the best medicine?” A librarian who finds in her new
job a charging-system that she dislikes, which has been used without
complaint for years, should investigate before changing. Acceptance of
the system may be simply due to habit. Even then, as we have seen, there
may be reason for retaining it. And there is a fair chance that it may
have held its ground because it is in some way better adapted to the
community. Of course the adaptation may be to something else--size, for
example. A rapid rise in the circulation may take a library out of the
small-library class and necessitate changes not only in charging system
but in many other things.
Some day an industrious student of library economy will tabulate these
things that are independent of local conditions, or so nearly so that it
is better to standardize them, and tell how the others should be varied
with local topography, climate and population. There is no time for that
in a single lecture; and if I can leave firmly fixed in your minds the
idea that some things are better standardized, while others should be
functions of variable local conditions, I shall have accomplished all
that I set out to do.
I have already noted some of the differences between a branch library
and a central library. Possibly these deserve further mention as an
instance of the adaptation of methods of distribution to locality. I
have frequently had occasion to deal with complaints which on
investigation proved to be due to the fact that the complaining reader
expected to find at a branch library all the facilities of a central
library. He had lived near the central library in one city, and had
moved to another where it was more convenient for him to use a branch.
The first thing that strikes him is that the reference collection is
inadequate. He does not realize that the central reference collection
can not possibly be duplicated at branch libraries. Such complaints,
however, may often give the librarian a hint. He may have equipped all
his branches with the same small, good reference collection, forgetting
that reference work varies with locality. Several complaints of this
sort from the same branch may indicate the necessity of enlarging the
reference collection there or perhaps of adopting some such scheme as we
are trying in St Louis of a central reference collection of duplicates
for supplying temporary branch needs.
It is not always realized that the character of the book-collection in a
branch library is influenced by the mere fact that it is a branch, apart
from considerations of size, circulation and character of readers. There
are many standard books, in small demand, that no library should be
without. One copy will serve the needs of the whole town. If there is
but one library there the book must form part of that library’s
collection, whereas if there are a central building and branches, it
should be in the central library--not in the branches. It is for this
reason that the A.L.A. catalogue should not be used for stocking a
branch. I know of cases where numbers of books lie idle on the shelves
of every branch in a city system, because they are not branch books at
all. One or two copies at Central would have been sufficient, and to
place them in branches has been waste of money.
When the New York Public Library took in a considerable number of small
independent libraries as branches I had the opportunity, a year or so
after the event, of ascertaining from the librarians, what difference to
them and to their readers the change of status had made. They were
unanimous in saying that although they, as librarians, felt less
independent, the service to readers was vastly improved, owing to the
fact that the library now formed part of a large system. This is always
the result of any kind of union of effort, whether by consolidation or
co-operation. The individual is somewhat hampered but the community is
benefited. This, of course, is something of a departure from our
subject.
Sometimes the chief difference between two localities is in the
character and temper of the readers. The whole scheme of relations
between library and public needs often to be altered in moving from one
place to another. This is perhaps most noticeable in a city where there
is a system of branch libraries. The assistant who has been transferred
from a Jewish to a Scandinavian district and then to one occupied by
well-to-do Americans will understand what I mean without further
explanation.
But this difference in readers is of course much wider than mere racial
difference. It may be a difference in social status. We Americans are
too apt to pretend that this sort of thing does not affect a public
educational institution, but it decidedly does. Some librarians make
the mistake of thinking that these differences are racial also. It is a
matter of common knowledge among city librarians that in a “slum”
library the problem of discipline is simplicity itself compared with a
library where the readers are nearly all well-to-do. This is often
asserted to depend merely on the racial difference between the newly
arrived immigrant--Russian Jew, Italian or Pole--and the native
American. But we find that when the immigrant has learned the customs of
the country and has made enough money to raise him in the social scale
and enable him to move from his slum surroundings, he quickly takes his
place with the well-to-do library patrons. He is more exacting and his
children are harder to manage. The difference is really a social one.
The immigrant is accustomed to being looked down on in his native
country, to living on little and having few principles. He is humble and
thankful for small favors. What he gets at the library fills him with
amazement and gratitude. Mary Antin has told us all about it. But the
well-to-do citizen, whether by birth or recent acquirement, realizes
that the library is being supported by his taxes. He realizes it, in
fact, so keenly, that he gives it somewhat undue prominence in his mind
and sometimes shows this in his treatment of the library staff. Knowing
that the library belongs in part to him, he may often forget that it
belongs in equal degree to others. He is impatient or even resentful of
rules intended to maintain equality of service. His children
unconsciously absorb this same attitude. They resent control and are
hard to keep in order. Much of the librarians’ time must be given to
smoothing down ruffled feathers and maintaining discipline--time which
ought to be given to bettering the quality of service.
Evidently these two kinds of communities must be handled differently.
They call for different training on the part of the staff--a different
stock of books--almost for different buildings. Then there is the
indifferent community, which may be anywhere in the social scale and
which requires special handling. It is even difficult to tell at times
whether or not a community is really indifferent. Their reaction to the
library is often a phase of the local feeling that is the subject of
this lecture. It is present in some communities and absent in others,
but its presence does not always mean real appreciation of library
privileges, nor does its absence mean lack of such appreciation.