varieties of readers the deficiencies of our reference libraries are
evident enough, it is none the less true that the richness of their
contents and the value they yield to judicious users are realized by
only a fraction of the public. Librarians have never been allowed to
advertize their wares; a notice in the press such as a university or
a State department would not consider beneath its dignity would have
called down a reprimand and probably a surcharge from the Government
auditor. In a strange town, the visitor may have some trouble to
find out, first whether a public library exists, and then where.
Advertisements in tramcars and finger-posts in the street are usually
looked for in vain. Things being so, it is better to lay stress on what
the reference library can and does do than on any delinquencies, since
public opinion is sure to learn in time from the books that are there
to be read, the immensity of the desiderata. In the cities previously
mentioned as possible abodes for a worker among books, one may acquire
a competent idea of this immensity. In other large towns and in several
London boroughs, one may find reference libraries sufficing for the
ordinary demands of all but the specialist and the researcher, and, in
addition, one commonly finds special collections that attract readers
from far away.
Thus Manchester, besides the ample provision of general works that
everybody would expect to find on its reference shelves, and a large
mass of works on textiles which would also be anticipated in the
metropolis of Lancashire, has a fine collection of English dialect
literature, others on music, the gipsies, and shorthand, and in the
Greenwood collection the largest library of works for librarians
in this country. The magnificent Hornby Library of engravings at
Liverpool is as great a pride to the city as its Walker Art Gallery.
Birmingham is famous for its Shakespeare Library, and possesses smaller
collections relating to Milton, Byron, and Cervantes. The Boulton
and Watt collection is also there. Stratford-on-Avon, again, is a
depot for Shakespeare literature, having the memorial building and
the valuable collection housed at the birth-place as well as the town
library. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, owns the Bewick collection, Northampton
the library of the poet Clare, Nottingham another accumulation of Byron
literature and association books, Kilmarnock a Burns library, Glasgow
among its many special sections a vast collection including not only
Burns material but Scottish literature in general; Bristol is rich in
works concerned with Chatterton, Cardiff specializes in Welsh books,
though the National Library of Wales, at Aberystwyth, designed to
be a British Museum for the principality, is fast outstripping this
as a storehouse of Celtic literature in the wider sense. A library
is fulfilling only its obvious duty by specializing in the staple
industry. At Stoke-on-Trent, however, the valuable library of ceramics
collected by Louis Solon, and acquired after his death by the Carnegie
United Kingdom Trust, has been placed, not in the public library,
but in the National Pottery School, where the library of the Ceramic
Society is also housed.
Many London libraries specialize in the same useful way, sometimes
in response to local needs, sometimes as the accidental result of
local associations. At Guildhall is the national Dickens library, at
Hampstead the Keats collection, at Chelsea one devoted to Carlyle. The
Bishopsgate Institute vies with Guildhall and St. Paul’s Cathedral
Library in a huge collection of London books, prints, maps, and other
miscellanea. The typographical library at the St. Bride Foundation
contains the notable collection of William Blades, biographer of
Caxton. But to consider London without taking into account the public
and semi-public libraries that are not under the Acts, many of them
highly individualized in the nature of their resources, and fitted to
fulfil definite functions in the national library machine, would be
absurd; and to treat them properly would require a volume. In fact, the
volume exists, though it makes only modest and tentative suggestions
for the wider application of all this intellectual wealth, much of
which is lying dormant or only half-used.[5]
It goes without saying that every provincial reference library worthy
of the name has a local collection of some importance. Most county
towns collect county literature, and other large places have their
regional collections. Regional surveys are largely carried on now
by schools and local organizations, often with the library and its
local collections as their central depository, and at all events
helping and helped by the library. Some public libraries have been
made depositories for the local records, and there is a strong case
for conferring or imposing this duty upon them by law. A librarian,
properly trained in palæography and the treatment of archives, is the
right sort of custodian; a well-appointed library is the right place
for the safe preservation, calendaring, and public use of documents.
The historian, social student, biographer, and genealogist would always
know then where to go for local information not to be found in London.
There are many other abiblia which Charles Lamb himself would approve
that are rightly supplied in generous measure by a good reference
library: modern maps, both of our own country and of the world, those
of the neighbourhood within a wide radius, including large-scale
Ordnance maps, accompanied by older maps of historical importance;
prints and drawings in well-organized series, and lantern-slides for
illustrating library lectures, or even to be issued on loan. The
systematic collections of lantern-slides at the Croydon Public Library
will be mentioned again later on. In this enterprising library numerous
other things are collected and made accessible for general use; for
example, illustrations, cut out and preserved, not because of their
individual merit as prints, but because of the value they acquire
in organized sets illustrating definite subjects. They are mounted in
uniform style and classified in vertical files; thus they are available
for reference purposes, and may be borrowed by teachers to illustrate
lessons in class. Croydon has about 12,000 such illustrations, and
the stock is constantly growing. Photographs of lace, woodwork,
astronomical phenomena, and other subjects are collected on similar
lines, and lent in sets to artists, craftsmen, and students. The
vertical file in which the Manchester commercial library stores its
press clippings and other items of information will be mentioned
later; it is an object-lesson in the preservation, classification,
and indexing of material which was erstwhile discarded as soon as it
had served the moment’s use, a lesson in the value created out of the
well-nigh valueless by mere organization; and teachers and business
organizers have not failed to bring their pupils and their staffs to
study what sheer method can accomplish.
[Illustration: GUILDHALL LIBRARY.]
But the whole library should be an object-lesson of high educational
value. A large, well-organized collection of books, especially if the
public be admitted to the interior, is a graphic example of method and
order, not to mention the enormous increment of value given to any
stock of material by systematic indexing. The art of classification
is not only an excellent mental discipline, but may be applied
with advantage in every province of business and life. Though a
classification of books is not the same thing as a classification of
things, and may depart widely from the exactness of logical theory,
there is no better way of inculcating the benefits of system than by
allowing the reader to find his way from shelf to shelf, and follow
the tracks pointed out for him to other book-cases the contents of
which are more distantly connected with his subject. It is superfluous
to point out the assistance the library gives in the choice of books,
not only to the reader who relies on it for his whole supply, but
on the book-lover and the purchaser of books. Of the aid offered to
the student and the potential student, over and above the library
organism itself as an efficient reading machine, more will be said
under the heading of library extension. In American libraries certain
members of the staff are told off for “floor duty,” that is, to keep a
sympathetic eye on persons looking out books and to offer guidance. It
is a duty calling for high attainments and insight into the particular
requirements and idiosyncrasies of readers. It would be unfair to
say it is a duty unfulfilled in libraries over here, since the more
active public libraries are beginning to organize themselves as real
bureaux of information; but in the precise form just described it is
practically unknown. Our method is to be ready with advice when it is
asked for; and in big libraries, such as the British Museum, it is
the most useful kind of advice, that of the specialist, which is our
particular forte. Yet we still repeat, “The librarian who reads is
lost!” More specialism, not less, is what we want.
NEWSROOMS AND MAGAZINE ROOMS.
Among the old-established departments the reading rooms where
newspapers and other periodical literature are displayed must, to judge
by statistics of use, take a foremost place. Hundreds of thousands
enter these newsrooms daily, twice as many as come into the lending
libraries. Until the question was raised ten years ago by the late
J. D. Brown, a librarian who attempted reconstruction in library
administration long before the word began to be written with a big R,
it seemed the most natural and unchallengeable thing in the world to
put a newsroom in every library building and furnish it with a motley
array of dailies and weeklies of all denominations. Brown induced the
committee of the Islington Public Libraries to reform the reading room
in a drastic way. No newspaper except the “Times” was provided for
public consumption, though the advertisement columns were cut out from
others and posted for the benefit of the unemployed.
This violent departure from routine did bring out the fact that
newsrooms, at any rate as they were and as they are at present, occupy
a somewhat illogical position. At first sight, there hardly seems any
better justification for their inclusion in a library than that they
also provide reading matter. But it is reading matter, too often, of a
very different and doubtful kind; and the awkward fact that it is not
the same people who use the newsroom that use the library, in short
that the library proper and the newsroom, but for an inconsiderable
overlap, cater for two different publics, gives occasion for thought.
To put it roundly, the proper place in the library scheme for the
newspaper and its like has never been thought out. Brown went too far,
and the library which was the scene of this experiment is now furnished
with a careful selection of newspapers as well as with magazines and
reviews of good standing. But he gave the problem serious thought. In
the various public reading rooms which were under his care, he saw
to it that the right kind of periodicals were provided, and the best
of each kind. Among his many publications on library practice was a
classified and annotated list of English and foreign periodicals, which
ought to have done even more than it has to help provide something far
better and more scientific than the mere hotchpotch of journalism with
which too many tables are littered. Here again, economy of the baser
sort has been the offender; for the poorest journalism is, of course,
the cheapest, and a steady provision of the high-class periodicals
recommended by Brown is an expensive drain on slender funds.
[Illustration: READING ROOM, STEPNEY PUBLIC LIBRARY.]
The library cannot do without the newspaper any more than it can do
without the review, the technical periodical, and the learned society’s
journal. All of these are necessary supplements to the books, since
they are records of new knowledge; and they require the same care in
selection, the guiding principle of which must be a clear idea of
what they are there for. The much-debated dictum that history is past
politics and politics current history needs no debate as a reason why
the leading newspapers and the weekly reviews should be accessible
in public libraries. Almost every one takes in a paper suited to his
opinions: the public newsroom should give the opportunity of studying
other opinions, and also of checking information by comparison of
different sources and versions that conflict. The newsroom is to the
library as the open-air excursion to the botany class, the laboratory
to the lecture-room. Here theory and doctrine are seen in action;
applied politics, applied sociology, all the different phases of the
science of life set forth in books illustrated, tested, verified,
or confuted. Which study is of more importance than the other?
Fortunately, that is a futile question: the relevant one is, how
incalculably each gains by conjunction with the other.
There is no need to provide the paper that every one buys. Nor are
those that deal in police news, divorce cases, spice and sensation, the
journals that a public institution is called upon to buy. The most
authoritative journals, representing each of the recognized parties,
weekly reviews of similar credentials, and the leading provincial
organs, are all that need be supplied in this group. Even in a large
and prosperous library, it is better to duplicate such than to make
too wide a selection. Subsidized journals, sent gratis by political
or social cliques or by advertising agents, might as well be rejected
altogether; where they are accepted, the approved course is to
pigeon-hole them until there is an applicant. The least approved is to
employ this worthless stuff to cover serious gaps, and offer the public
a stone when it asks for bread. A library committee should feel the
same responsibility for a newspaper as for a book. By admitting either,
they virtually give it a public guarantee.
But if the newspaper is to be treated as the organ of current history,
then the newspaper room should be equipped with every facility for
rendering current history real and intelligible. Maps of every part
of the world should be hung over the reading stands. The room itself
should be in the closest contiguity with the reference library, and
should contain a ready-reference collection on open shelves, enabling
readers to consult dictionaries, encyclopædias, statistical year-books,
compendiums of geography, and other sources of general information as
they read. That it should not be separated from the reading room where
the periodical magazines and reviews are kept goes without saying.
Files of such as are preserved should be close at hand. All this
means that the reading room for newspapers will be another expensive
department; yet the policy of making it a vital part of the whole
library undertaking is in the long run economic. Here, surely, that
training for citizenship which so many are preaching may be carried on
without the features that make it objectionable to the old-fashioned
party man. The existence of public newsrooms where the daily papers
are read intelligently and their pronouncements checked and compared,
might, in the course of time, react healthily on the daily press itself.
As to the lighter class of periodical, the same discretion has to be
exercised in shunning the frivolous and worthless as an intelligent and
responsible committee, not devoid of a sense of humour, would display
in handling fiction. It is high time that the policy of treating this
department as a kind of bait for the unregenerate, something to make
the library popular, were abandoned. It is a delusive policy, grounded
on two false assumptions--the first, that it is our duty to get people
to read, no matter what they read; the second, that if you start them
reading and bring them into the library they will eventually proceed
to higher things. Every librarian knows that the habitual consumer
of silly and pernicious reading-matter never can, without some almost
miraculous change of mind, be taught to read and enjoy anything else.
If you lure him with rubbish, you are encouraging tastes that are a
greater obstacle to library progress than absolute illiteracy; you are
putting obstacles in the road you propose to take him. The remark of an
American librarian about certain popular novelists, that the people who
like that sort of thing would be more sensible and better educated had
they never learned to read, applies even more forcibly to the besotted
victims of our periodicals of the baser sort. But the mere fact that
the public who kill time with this sort of chewing-gum are not the
public that borrow books or use the reference library, at once disposes
of such a plea. By all means, let us have light literature, but let it
be literature, and not an unrecognizable imitation.
Much, however, and far the largest amount of the material in a
well-appointed reading room will not be literature at all, but simply
information. In the chief London and many provincial libraries a large
number of scientific and technical periodicals are taken, including
publications of research societies and a good many foreign periodicals.
More are required, and, as our public libraries are able to spend more
money, one at least in each large area of population ought to be as
well provided in this respect as are the science libraries at South
Kensington, the university libraries, or, say, the Manchester Literary
and Philosophical Institution, to take a good provincial example. These
publications are as necessary as it is to keep editions of scientific
and technical books thoroughly up to date. Their contents should be
fully accessible, and to ensure this every library must subscribe to
the Subject-Index to Periodicals. A practice increasing in frequency
is that of indexing the current periodicals as they arrive, and
mounting the entries in a mechanical guard-book or vertical file.
Such libraries as possess a stock of long sets will naturally be
provided with Poole’s and the other older indexes to periodicals; even
libraries not possessing such long sets ought to have the indexes, for
the same reason as they have other bibliographical guides, namely,
to show inquirers in what books or periodicals information exists,
an intelligent staff being relied upon to point out in what nearest
libraries the books or periodicals are to be found.
SPECIAL READING ROOMS.
Not much is to be said nowadays in favour of separate reading rooms for
ladies; the segregation of the sexes is going out of fashion, even in
railway travelling. Yet they are still provided; for instance, the fine
library building now all but completed at Dunfermline has a ladies’
room worthy of its scale and dignity. Far more urgent is the need for
separate rooms where students can read and write in peace and quiet;
children’s reading rooms will be discussed under another head. The
Adult Education Committee wisely emphasized this desirability. “It is,
in our view, essential that in all public libraries, in addition to the
usual reading room where newspapers and magazines are consulted, there
should be a room for the purposes of study. It is too often forgotten
that many students have no place where they can study in comfort. It
is also most desirable that all public libraries should possess a room
large enough to be used for classes, lectures, and discussions.”[6]
The latter requirement should have been framed differently. A lecture
room is not a good class room. Every library should have its lecture
room; it should also have one or more small rooms suitable for classes,
tutorial or other, of the cosy size and character that help so much
to bring out comradeship and intimacy. Whoever has tried to conduct a
seminar numbering more than a dozen members will have experienced how
difficult it is to break down shyness and evoke a frank and genuine
exchange of thought. Rooms that are small and intimate are wanted for
reading circles and discussions; at a pinch, the study room can be
utilized; but both purposes must be served, and often at the same hour.
The need for still other rooms dedicated to special uses will appear
when we deal with the various forms of library extension.
THE CHILDREN’S DEPARTMENT.
During the nineties of last century a good many libraries began to
allot separate reading rooms to the children, at first, as a rule,
to boys only, but later to boys and girls, sometimes in separation,
sometimes together. At first experimental and subsidiary, this
children’s reading room, usually combined with a children’s library,
has come to be an essential part of the modern public library: those
that are without it have no claim to be considered modern. Its relative
importance varies according to the views of different committees and
librarians, and also according to the local ability or willingness
to meet the heavy cost of running such a department on proper lines.
When we remember that the children are our future reading public, and
when, taking a broader view, we imagine what it would have meant had
every man and woman been trained from childhood in the intelligent
use of books, we see how impossible it is to overrate this side of
public library work. We must treat the child in the library in the most
liberal, sympathetic, and respectful way. We must give the child in our
libraries and reading rooms, from the outset, all the privileges and
dignity of a citizen, and the future of our libraries and reading rooms
will be ensured.
Birkenhead seems to have been the first town to become alive to the
need of special provision for the youngest readers. Child readers
enjoyed the advantage of a special section in the lending library
there as long ago as 1865, and a few years later they were furnished
with a separate catalogue of the children’s library. At Nottingham,
a benevolent M.P., the late Samuel Morley, gave a sum in 1882 to
found a separate building for children. These English libraries laid
the first stone; but it was in American libraries that most of the
building now took place. In the United States, the mere children’s
corner rapidly developed into the separate library and reading room,
and then gradually into a very peculiar and admirable thing, the
children’s room--a distinct department, under the control of persons
trained to work with children. It is a sort of autonomous children’s
institute, combining something of the kindergarten with a well-planned
school library ministering to both teaching and recreation. There are
readable books to be read on the spot or taken home; works of reference
to help in doing school work and make this more interesting; pictures,
statuettes, and miscellaneous exhibits, which have more meaning given
them by reading courses, talks, and illustrated lectures; and, finally,
there is the story-telling--an art on which the American librarian
pins much faith as a mode of awakening interest and evoking the right
atmosphere before a child reads books on any given subject.