in the more progressive municipalities, where public opinion has been
properly educated and the authorities mean to do their best, whatever
the financial impediments, and have a clear conception of what is the
best, and the perfunctory service in places where the library is an
unwelcome addition to the municipal family, which cannot be got rid of
but must be prevented from becoming a burden on the rates. The most
progressive of librarians and library committee-men would freely admit
that no public library in this country is doing all that it might for
the community, or anything like what it will do when the library habit
has been instilled into the average citizen. The most progressive are
but leading the way; the goal is still in the future. Accordingly, an
account of the best work now being done by the best libraries will
serve two purposes: it will show the possibilities that are actually
being attained; it will help the reader to build up mentally a complete
type of what a library service might be.
LENDING LIBRARIES.
“The jug and bottle department,” as it has been cynically called by
illiberal critics, is the oldest and, in a sense, the fundamental part
of a public library service. There were lending libraries before 1850,
but none that could be regarded as its prototype. It was a consequence
of the new democratic idea. In earlier times a library simply provided
books to be read on the spot. Circulating libraries, such as began to
be common in the eighteenth century, were shops that lent out books,
chiefly light literature, to subscribers of the leisured classes.
The literary and scientific institutions allowed their books to be
borrowed, without troubling to divide their stock into distinct
collections, or worrying themselves with the standing puzzle of the
modern librarian, should this book, which is neither a novel nor an
encyclopædia, go on the lending or the reference shelves?
The strongest argument for rate-supported libraries was that the
studious person who could not afford to buy books, or the no less
meritorious person who wished to enjoy good literature in an armchair
but could not pay a subscription, should be enabled to read at home.
Access to libraries was an excellent thing, and every seeker after
knowledge was entitled thereto, but a supply of books in the home was
a greater boon, and one that would have a far deeper effect on the
mental life of the nation. Even a Freeman could not work in a reference
library, but had to borrow--or buy. Circumstances of a different kind
make the library of the British Museum, and even the local reading
room inaccessible, or at any rate insufficient, to most busy people.
The existence of the London Library--the finest lending library in the
world--is proof enough of the most serious kind of reader’s need for a
home supply of books.
Catering for all classes, for all ages, and for users having all sorts
of motives for reading, the municipal lending library will not admit
any petty or restricted purpose to limit the scope of its contents.
Costly books, if it acquires such by purchase or gift, and works of
the atlas or dictionary type, will for different but equally obvious
reasons go into the reference department, however small that may happen
to be. Very cheap books, with certain exceptions, it will not supply.
College text-books may be refused, on the score that students should
have them for their own, unless there are circumstances that justify
a different course. Some books may be rejected for reasons of public
morality, though a narrow-minded puritanism must not be tolerated.
Otherwise, the lending library should develop on the most catholic
lines.
The light literature that was the staple of the old-fashioned
circulating library will, with the rubbish sternly and drastically
sifted out, form a considerable proportion of the stock-in-trade. In
the minds of some short-sighted people, indeed, the public library is
identified with over-thumbed and dog-eared novels, and supposed to
be a purveyor chiefly of books for private amusement at the public
expense. The statistics that seem to authorize such a view are
misunderstood. Half-a-dozen novels usually take less time to read than
does a single substantial work of science, history, or even the other
kinds of belles-lettres; and make six times as much show in the record
of issues. If allowance be made for this obvious fact, study of the
figures will usually reveal that a greater amount of reading having
a serious value is going on than of reading for mere pastime. One
ought to apply a different kind of calculus; but till a sort of mental
foot-pound, a unit of energy expended effectively in self-development,
has been fixed, we can merely ask that statistics should be interpreted
with a due consciousness of what humane literature is, and with common
sense. Over-thumbed novels are no argument against public libraries,
but a very strong argument for making sure that the supply of fiction
is of the best, and for doubling, quadrupling, and multiplying further
the supply of first-rate novels. If there are always enough of these
to go round, critics on the one hand and grumblers on the other may be
disregarded.
The workshop theory, which is on the face of it a sound guide for the
development of the reference library, though by no means a complete
statement of its functions, applies also to the lending department. On
the one hand, this should minister to our recreations and our æsthetic
and spiritual needs; it will be well-stocked with excellent novels,
the best poetry, drama, essays, and humane literature in general. On
the other hand, it will cater for the student and serious reader in
all branches of knowledge, and will provide all the books it can of
general use for industrial and amateur craftsmen, shopkeepers and
other business people, and the professional classes. The librarian
and the book-selecting committee will have a keen eye for the needs
of teachers, journalists, ministers of religion, and all who are in
any way intellectual leaders. One healthy consequence of the workshop
theory is the rule that a library must never be cumbered with dead
stock. Books that have been superseded or have outlived their interest
must be ruthlessly discarded. The workshop library has no room for
any but live books. Such from the first have been the aims of the
great bulk of our public libraries, with, naturally, some laxity
here and there, and in rarer instances too much strictness in regard
to education and mental improvement or the cult of mere utilitarian
efficiency.
There are between five and six hundred library buildings under the
Public Library Acts in this country, and with few exceptions each
contains a lending library, and some hardly anything else. A corollary
of this distributing service is the branch library. Liverpool had two
branches by 1853, and other towns quickly followed suit. A very large
proportion of these buildings are branch libraries, established so as
to bring a stock of books for lending as near as may be to your door.
To-day, the biggest provincial cities have each from a dozen to a score
such district libraries; the average town or metropolitan borough has
two or three. Some places are content with delivery stations; some
have these and branches as well. The delivery station is a device for
bringing books that have been asked for from the central reservoir to
the nearest point, and is a convenience to readers who have not the
time, or do not think it worth while, to visit the library in person.
Given a first-class catalogue and intelligent readers, the delivery
station is a useful makeshift. But there are weighty reasons why
it is much better to invite Mahomet to the mountain--why a service
through district libraries will have more valuable results than one
through delivery stations. The best systems combine the advantages of
both methods, making the reader free of all the branch libraries in a
town, with the right of direct access to the book-shelves, and at the
same time bringing books from other branches to the one nearest the
reader who is unable or finds it inconvenient to visit the library
in person. Manchester and Glasgow, for example, have a motor-service
whereby all the books in a score of district libraries are pooled as
one vast stock, accessible, with a minimum of expense, difficulty,
or delay, to the borrowers situated at any point in the civic area.
Make your library area big enough, and you can provide the maximum of
opportunities at the minimum cost.
During the last two decades, public libraries have been reverting to
that old and sensible mode of working which, on its reintroduction,
was styled “Open Access.” Practice varied in former times between
letting the reader loose among the books and shutting these behind
doors or shutters. When the new era began in 1850, the new race of
librarians beheld themselves confronted with an unprecedented and
hazardous problem. Here was the multitude of famished readers, who had
never experienced the civilizing influence of libraries, who might be
dishonest, and who certainly had to be served expeditiously and in
large numbers; and there was the stock of books, which must be kept in
working order and unpilfered. Hence the closed library--the books on
one side of a counter and the reading proletariat on the other. Then,
in an ill-omened moment, indicators were invented, and the proletariat
could not even see the books at a distance, but must try to find out,
first, what it wanted from a catalogue, perhaps an abbreviated form of
hand-list conveying little meaning to the unbookish and then, through
a numerical system compared to which Bradshaw or a census competition
is an intellectual delight, whether there was a chance of getting what
it wanted. The library movement would have spread with far greater
rapidity, and its results on the national mentality would have been far
deeper and more extended, but for the long reign of the closed system.
Very large libraries must keep the main bulk of their accumulations in
a place apart; otherwise they could not contain them at all. When the
stock begins to approach six figures, a librarian begins to think of
having a stack, or some analogous form of magazine, accessible to none
but officials and attendants. But in libraries of moderate dimensions
there is no reason why the public should be locked out, and the most
convincing reason why it should be invited and persuaded to come
in. One must be something of a book-expert to know always precisely
what book one wants; and then one may fail to obtain it through the
mechanism of a catalogue and an indicator. The ordinary person will
assimilate more mental food from browsing among the shelves than he
would in thrice the time from reading what the chance of the indicator
brought him under this discredited system. It may be that more books
will disappear; but a certain percentage of losses may be faced with
equanimity; it is one of the running expenses of true efficiency, and
the results are well worth the cost.
In all the most recent public libraries, and in a very large number of
the older, reorganized in the light of this reform, the public have the
inestimable advantage of handling the books, and seeing, as it were in
a bird’s-eye view, their relations to the other books in the sphere of
knowledge or of art, before deciding what they want now and will want
later on. This has had an immeasurable effect on the quality of the
reading--on the education of the public taste. Only librarians know how
difficult it used to be to lift a certain class of reader out of an old
rut, to persuade him, or more often her, to try an unfamiliar author.
Once get over the difficulties of an introduction to George Eliot,
Thomas Hardy, or Tolstoy, and the devotee of Guy Boothby and Charles
Garvice, who was stone-blind to the blandishments of the printed
catalogue, will march on steadily in the new world that has been
opened. It is the first step that counts in his literary salvation, and
in an open access library the first step is pretty sure to be taken, if
the contents have been well and tactfully selected.
An inducement to read other things than fiction is offered in many
progressive libraries. This is a general permission to borrow two books
at a time, provided only one is a novel. Teachers and other privileged
persons are often allowed as many as half-a-dozen at once. There is
indeed no reason except insufficiency of stock why any intelligent
reader should not be able to have three or four books together, and a
great many arguments for liberality. Three are regularly allowed at
Coventry, and in American libraries, generous concessions are made on
any reasonable grounds; in some the daring principle of “Take as many
as you like” is in vogue, and many libraries lend freely to all comers
without the irritating insistence on local residence or local guarantee
which rules over here. To a man pursuing a serious course of study it
is a manifest advantage to have several works in hand; the habit should
be encouraged. The cost will be considerable; but it will be a cost in
books not buildings, since the extra books will usually be in the hands
of readers and not in need of house-room and larger premises. The cost
can and ought to be borne now that library incomes are more elastic,
if authorities take a serious view of their responsibilities and the
part they should play in the business of education. Look at the empty
shelves in almost any popular library, and the nature of the problem
will be apparent.
The actual situation is significant. The need is for more books, and
better books, rather than more buildings. The one essential to a
successful library service exists, a great public demand--wanting
more guidance, perhaps, and susceptible of education in the wiser use
of books, but still vigorous, spontaneous, and unsatisfied. There is
an unprecedented demand for books, fully commensurate with the demand,
all over the country, for educational facilities. And there is an
unprecedented shortage of books on the lending library shelves. During
the war, expenses were kept down, and the gaps due to wear and tear
were not filled up. Binding was allowed to fall into woeful arrears.
Now, the cost of bookbinding has gone up threefold, the price of books
has doubled. Yet under these disabling conditions, many a provincial
town and a number of London boroughs have an annual issue of a million
or thereabouts. Manifestly, the municipal lending library is a mighty
power in the land. One librarian, in a borough where, it has recently
been affirmed, the average intelligence is eighty under proof, tells me
that out of 690 volumes of Rider Haggard’s various novels, which have
to be duplicated over and over again, he would not expect to find more
than sixteen on the shelf at a given moment. Sir Henry Rider Haggard is
not a classic; he lies on the border between the kind of fiction to be
tolerated and the kind to be encouraged. Nevertheless, empty shelves
are a powerful argument.
The following paragraph surely speaks with a most convincing eloquence
of the work public libraries are performing; it is from the prospectus
of the latest London borough to set up a library system, the borough
that has the largest population of the lower middle class and the
poor. This system is still in its infancy, yet it has achieved an
annual issue of nearly a million volumes, and the separate uses of
its libraries and reading rooms are estimated, on a count, to number
3,496,000 during the year.
“The cost of the Public Libraries to each inhabitant of Islington is
one-fifth of a penny per week. For this outlay each person has at his
or her disposal: Lending libraries containing 75,000 volumes; Reference
Libraries containing 10,000 volumes; Children’s libraries containing
10,000 volumes; Reading rooms containing all the best current
newspapers, magazines and periodicals of importance; and all these
resources are constantly increasing.
“A penny newspaper daily costs 35 times as much as this extensive
service.”
Books are not the only wares in which the lending library deals. Most
of them circulate music in bound volumes, in sheets, in portfolios;
some lend pianola records. Ordnance Survey maps are issued to ramblers
and tourists, geological maps to students; prints and technical
diagrams and other articles of use to the scientist, craftsman, or
student are sometimes among the circulating stock.
REFERENCE LIBRARIES.
The lending library is for study and recreation, the reference library
for study and information, the latter term covering the sources to
be explored by the research student. A reference library is a much
more expensive thing than a lending collection of the same numerical
extent. Dictionaries, miscellaneous modern encyclopædias, atlases,
many-volumed treatises, books having costly illustrations, and the
numerous and rapidly multiplying books of inquiry, directories,
year-books, and other compendiums of information, bibliographies
and other registers--all these find their appropriate home in this
department, where also are stored calendars of state papers, Annual
Registers, Hansard, bound periodicals, transactions of learned
societies, and other long sets, the risk of mutilating which renders
them unsuitable for lending out. Such works as the Cambridge History of
English Literature and the Mediæval and Modern Histories are usually
duplicated, one set at least being available for lending; a host of
smaller works, even the expensive ones, are likewise duplicated when it
can be afforded.
In the large centres of population, reference libraries were opened
soon after the passing of the Ewart Act, and they have grown apace, to
no small extent as the result of windfalls in the shape of gifts or
legacies of private collections amassed by amateurs and other experts.
In the lesser towns, the lending department bulks large in comparison
with the reference department, which too often has had perforce to be
neglected. The one has been regarded as a necessity, the other as a
luxury that must wait for better times. The places in the kingdom where
a scholar could live and pursue his tasks with most of his material
within easy reach, in public or semi-public libraries, can still be
counted on the fingers of one hand: London and Edinburgh, the two
ancient university cities, perhaps Manchester, and possibly Dublin.
These towns have been favoured by other dispensations than the Public
Library Acts. Yet Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow each command at
least a quarter of a million books in their reference libraries; and
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff, Nottingham, and indeed
most towns with over 100,000 inhabitants, possess reference collections
respectable in the size and quality of their contents.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Donald Macbeth._
READING ROOM IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.]
To regard this department as merely a luxury is a bad mistake. True,
it is not a daily necessity of life to the average man; but there was
a time--there still is a time in many parts of the country--when even
a lending library is not supposed to be that. Yet the more lending
libraries are used to good purpose, the greater will be the average
man’s need for a place where he can seek or verify information of
every sort; where the student may consult the larger works of which
his text-books are but elementary abstracts or expositions, and find
encyclopædias, lexicons, atlases, and commentaries to aid and elucidate
his reading; where the busy worker, whatever his occupation, may see
the expensive technical treatises and illustrated monographs that are
indispensable to an intelligent pursuit of his calling. The political
and social worker will find here the statistical returns, the inventor
the Patent Office specifications, the researcher, if he cannot get all
he wants, will discover where it is to be found from a liberal supply
of catalogues and bibliographies.
Reference libraries are the obvious complement to a service of books
for home consumption. The boundary between their domains is not
easy to mark out, nor will any attempt be made here to answer the
favourite question of the gravelled examiner in library routine: What
distinguishes a reference book from one for the lending library?
In most cases the distinction is obvious; in the more difficult,
local circumstances may settle the point. Librarians in charge of
comparatively small libraries may well shirk a final verdict, and
allow much latitude in the use of reference books for lending, and the
converse when the lending library book is in. Thus the whole stock of
books on the premises is at the reader’s disposal without any pedantic
restrictions. As an American authority sensibly puts it, “Obviously
there is no book that may not be used for ‘reference.’ A reader who
consults one of Anthony Hope’s stories to ascertain the name of a
character or to refresh his memory in regard to some incident, without
reading it consecutively, is using it as a reference book.”[4] Even a
magazine or review may be a work of reference. Back numbers of all that
are worth taking in are worth preserving for reference purposes; and
these, with the bound sets of past years, should be always available
for use. Energetic librarians index all the important articles as
they come out; the published indexes to periodicals forming a key to
the older numbers. Lastly, the very newsroom has its place in the
reference scheme, its contents being a daily appendix to the stores of
information in the library. No department of the library economy should
work in isolation.
In London, principally through the circumstance that the twenty-eight
boroughs now existing were preceded by eighty-two parishes, two-thirds
of which had set up libraries for themselves before the present library
districts and borough authorities came into being in 1902, there are
far too many reference libraries in proportion to lending libraries.
Most of these are of indifferent or inferior quality, and, if they
were suppressed and their collections centralized in a series of large
district reference libraries, few would miss them, and the general
gain would be enormous. All the same, more numerous ready-reference
libraries are wanted. Every branch library should have a collection
of dictionaries, atlases, and general encyclopædias, in short all the
books that a business firm, a school, or the like usually provides
for daily use. But, since reference libraries are so expensive,
it is a vain and wasteful policy to duplicate them at random; and
the result is merely a scattered series of middling libraries, far
inferior to those open to all the world in Birmingham, Liverpool,
and Manchester, with a crippling of resources in other directions.
This is not said to belittle local effort. The point is that, though
Islington, Westminster, or Chelsea may each build up a reference
library not inferior to that found in the average provincial town of
like population, Islington, Westminster, and Chelsea are, after all,
parts of London, and the Londoner ought to be vastly better off than
the average provincial--else why should he stay there?