Some of the principles of library work with children, and the
qualifications of a children's librarian were discussed by Miss
Eastman in the following paper read at the fourth annual meeting
of the Ohio Library Association held in Dayton in 1898. Linda
Anne Eastman was born in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1867; was educated in
the Cleveland Public Schools, and taught in the public schools of
West Cleveland and Cleveland from 1885 to 1892, when she became
an assistant in the Cleveland Public Library. In 1895-1896 she
was assistant librarian and cataloguer in the Dayton, Ohio,
Public Library, and in 1896 became vice-librarian of the
Cleveland Public Library, where she has since remained. Since
1904 she has been an instructor in the Library School of Western
Reserve University. She was a charter member of the Ohio Library
Association, and its president in 1903-1904, Miss Eastman has
made frequent contributions to library periodicals.
In the planning of a new library building, or the remodeling of
an old one, there is no department to which I should give more
thought in the working out of the details than in the children's
department, in order to best adapt the arrangement to its use.
Its location in the building is the first matter for
consideration. It should be easy of access from the main
entrance, or, better still, have an entrance of its own directly
from the outside, in order that the noise of the children may not
become a disturbing element in the corridors and in other parts
of the library. It would seem desirable, also, for many reasons,
to have the children's department not too far removed from the
main circulating department.
The children's department in a large library should contain at
least two large rooms, one for the reading and reference room,
the other for the circulating books. The rooms should be light,
bright and cheery, as daintily artistic and as immaculately clean
as it is possible to make and keep them. Wall cases seem best for
the shelving of the books, low enough for the children to reach
the shelves easily. These low cases also allow wall space above
for pictures, and plenty of this is desirable. A children's room
cannot have too many pictures,[1] nor any which are too fine for
it; choose for it pictures which are fine, and pictures which
"tell a story." Provide, also, plenty of space for bulletins, for
the picture bulletins have become an important factor in the
direction of the children's reading. One enthusiastic children's
librarian wrote me recently that her new "burlap walls, admitting
any number of thumb-tacks" were the delight of her heart. There
should be reading tables and rubber- tipped chairs, low ones for
the little children; and wherever there is space for them, the
long, low seats, in which children delight to snuggle down so
comfortably.
[1] If this paper were now open to revision, the writer would
omit "cannot have too many pictures." The reaction against bare,
bleak walls may not make it necessary to warn against
over-decoration, but its undesirability should he recognized.--L.
A. E.
As to the arrangement of the books, I should divide them into
three distinct classes for children of different ages:
(1) The picture books for the very little ones, arranged
alphabetically.
(2) The books for children from seven to ten or twelve years of
age. While these books should be classified for the cataloging, I
should place them on the shelves in one simple alphabetical list
by authors, mixing the fiction, history, travel, poetry, etc.,
just as they might happen to come in this arrangement. I believe
this would lead the children to a more varied choice in their
reading, and that they would thus read and enjoy biography,
history, natural science, etc., before they learned to
distinguish them from stories, whereas by the classified
arrangement they would choose their reading much more often from
the one class only.
(3) The books for boys and girls from ten or twelve years of age
to fifteen or sixteen. These should be arranged on the shelves
regularly according to class number, in order that the children
may become acquainted with the classification and arrangement,
learn to select their books intelligently, and be prepared to
graduate from here into the adult library.
Where it is possible to duplicate the simple and more common
reference books in the juvenile department, these should form a
fourth class. Then there should be all of the good juvenile
periodicals, with some of the best illustrated papers, such as
Harper's weekly, for the reading room.
With many libraries a children's department on such a scale is an
impossibility; but if you cannot give two rooms to the children
give them one, and if you cannot do that, at least give them a
corner and a table which they can feel belongs to them; and if
you cannot give them a special assistant, set apart an hour or
two each day when the children shall receive the first
consideration--establish this as a custom, and both adults and
children will be better served.
Whatever one's specialty in library work may be, however far
removed from the work with the children, it is well to understand
something of the principles which underlie this foundation work
with the children.
It is only recently that these principles have begun to shape
themselves with any definiteness; the children's department, as a
fully equipped miniature library, and the children's librarian,
as a specialist bringing natural fitness and special preparation
to her work, are essentially the product of today; but they have
come to stay, and they open to the child-lover, and the educator
who works better outside than inside of the schoolroom limits, a
field enticing indeed, and promising rich results. It is to the
pioneers in this field, the earnest young women who are now doing
careful experimental work and giving serious study to the
problems that arise--it is to them that the children's
departments of the future will be most indebted for perfected
methods.
The library must supplement the influence of the schools, of the
home, and of the church; with some children it must even take the
place of these other influences, and on its own account it must
be a source of pleasure and an intellectual stimulus. If it is to
accomplish all or any great part of this, not only for one, but
for thousands of children, what serious thought and labor must go
to its accomplishment! The children's librarian stands very close
to the mother and the teacher in the power she can wield over the
lives of the little ones. No one who lacks either the ability or
desire to put herself into sympathetic touch with child-life
should ever be assigned to work in the juvenile department, and
the assistant who avowedly dislikes children, or who "has no
patience with them," will work disastrous results if allowed to
serve these little ones with an unwilling spirit --she should be
relegated to some department of the library to which the sunshine
of childhood can never penetrate, and kept there.
I would name the following requisites for the successful
accomplishment of the juvenile work:
(1) Love for children.
This being given, the way is open for intimate knowledge and
understanding of them, which are likewise essential.
(2) Knowledge of children's books.
This is imperative if one is to give the right book to a child at
the right time. Familiarity with the titles and with the outsides
of the books is not enough, nor is it sufficient to know that a
certain book is recommended in all of the best lists of
children's books. A child will often refuse to take what has been
recommended to him as a good book, when, if he be told some
graphic incident in it, or have some interesting bit pointed out
or read to him, he will bear it off as prize; with it, too, he
will carry away an added respect for, and sense of comradeship
with, the assistant, who "knows a good thing when she sees it,"
and he will come to her for advice and consultation about his
books the next time and the next, and so long thereafter as she
can hold his confidence.
Carefully prepared lists are most valuable in directing your
attention to the best books, but after your notice has been
called to them read them, form your own judgment on them, and if
you recommend them, at least know why. What? some one asks,
attempt to read all of the best children's books? Yes, read them,
and do more than that with some; the children's classics, the
books which no child can grow up without reading and not be the
poorer, with these one should be so familiar as to be able to
quote from them or turn instantly to the most fascinating
passages--they should form a constant part of her stock in trade.
Other books one could not spend so much time on, nor is it
necessary--the critical ability to go through a book quickly and
catch the salient points in style, treatment and subject matter,
is as essential for the children's librarian as for anyone who
has to do with many books, and it therefore behooves her to
cultivate what I once heard called the sixth sense, the book
sense.
(3) Knowledge of library methods.
In any work, interest and enthusiasm go a great way, but they can
never wholly take the place of accurate technical knowledge of
the best ways of doing things. The more general knowledge of
library work and methods one can bring to the children's
department, the better it will be both for the work and for the
worker; and given these methods, one must have ability to fit
them to the conditions and to the peculiar needs to be
accomplished, or, where they will not fit, to modify them or
originate new ones which are better for the work in hand.
(4) A thorough knowledge of the course of study of the public
schools.
This is very necessary in order to intelligently supplement the
work of the schools. A child comes wanting information on some
subject upon which his ideas are exceedingly vague; for instance,
he wants something about the mayor--what, he cannot tell you, but
he was sent by his teacher to look up something about the mayor.
You ask him what grade he is in, and he tells you the fourth.
Your familiarity with the course of study should give you the
clue at once, for the fourth grade topics in conduct and
government include lessons on the city government, with its
principal departments and officers, so you will look up, if you
have not already done so, an outline of municipal government
describing the position and duties of the mayor, which will be
within the comprehension of the child. It should not happen that
a dozen children ask for Little white lily, and be turned away
without it, before it is discovered to be a poem by George
MacDonald which the third grade children are given to read.
This course of study the children's librarian should--not eat and
sleep with exactly, but verily live and work with; it is one of
her most valuable tools, and she should keep it not only within
reach, at her finger's end, but as much as possible at her
tongue's end, keeping pace with the assignment of work in the
different grades and studies from month to month, and from week
to week. She should know beforehand when a certain subject will
be taken up by a certain grade, and have all available material
looked up and ready, and new books bought if they will be needed
and can be had--not wait until several hundred children come upon
her for some subject on which a frantic search discloses the fact
that the library contains not a thing suitable for their use, and
then ask that books be bought, which, of course, come in after
the demand is over, and stand idle upon the shelves for a whole
year, taking the place of just so many more new books on subjects
which will be needed later.
The course of study, too, will furnish more useful hints for
bulletins, exhibitions, reading-lists, and other forms of
advertising, than can come from any other source; and not only in
supplementing the school work, but also in directing the children
in their general reading, is an intimate knowledge of the course
of study an invaluable aid, as it gives you the unit of
measurement for any child which enables you to correlate his
reading along certain lines to that which has gone before, and to
that which is to follow.
(5) A knowledge of the principles of psychology and of education.
I have placed last the requisite which I feel sure some
theorists, at least, would place first, because I believe that,
as a rule, it will come last in point of time, and will be worked
up to through the preceding stages of the development of the
children's librarian; but her work will not be grounded upon a
firm foundation until she has consciously mastered these
principles, and clearly outlined her own work, this new work of
the book, in perfect harmony with them.
There are many features of the children's work which I should
like to dwell upon in detail, but I can do no more than mention a
few of them. One of these is the Library league, with its
threefold object of training the children in the proper care of
books, of serving as an advertising medium for the library among
the children themselves, and of furnishing a means of directing
the reading of hundreds of children who cannot be reached
individually. The possibilities of the league are beyond
anything we have been able to realize.
Another thing is the necessity of guarding against letting
children read too much, or too entirely along one line. There is
a habit of reading along lines which deaden, instead of
stimulating, thought, and the habit, if carried to excess,
becomes a mental dissipation which is utterly reprehensible; but
the pathway to this habit is entered upon so innocently and
unconsciously by the story-loving child that he (perhaps more
often she) must be guided very tenderly and wisely past its
dangers; the library which ignores this necessity may have much
harm laid at its doors.
The importance of providing, either in the school or the library,
for systematic instruction in the use of books was emphasized in
the report of the library section of the National Educational
Association at Washington this summer; it is a necessity which
must be met somewhere and somehow.
Of one more thing I should speak because of its provision for the
children--the expansion of the library ideal; not so many years
ago branch libraries and traveling libraries were unknown; now we
feel that one library is not enough for a large city; it must
have branch libraries and delivery stations to take the books to
the people, while traveling libraries carry them into the
scattered districts in the country. For the future, we have
visions of a system of libraries so complete that in no town or
country district of the state will a little child be deprived of
the pleasure of good books; and wherever it is possible to put a
live, warm-hearted, sympathetic and child-loving woman as the
medium between the library and the child, it will be done.
Library work in its entirety offers much play for the missionary
spirit, but nowhere else in its whole range is there such a labor
of love as is hers who tries to bring the children early to their
heritage in the beautiful world of books.