approach as any we have made to the American idea. It occupies one of
the largest rooms in the central building, and combines the functions
of lending and reference library and magazine room. There is a platform
and a lantern screen; ferns and other plants are dotted about. Any
child of school age is admissible on the recommendation of a teacher.
The librarian in charge and the one assistant do nothing but work
for children; the children make it possible for them to carry out an
extremely full and varied programme by acting as voluntary helpers,
and are trained to serve at the counter, put books back in classified
order on the shelves, and act as monitors. Others are drilled in groups
for various duties, such as cutting out and mounting pictures for
the great cyclopædia of illustrations, lettering posters, writing up
bulletins of topical information for their fellow-readers. Lectures
are delivered once a week at least, and story hours come much oftener.
The children’s librarian takes classes brought from the schools, and
explains the value of classification or the use and pleasures of books.
Teachers, also, are allowed to use the children’s library at times as
a class-room, illustrating lessons from the books and other exhibits
there. Sometimes a class is brought and the children are simply
allowed to browse at will. The collection of pictures is utilized in
many ways. Sets of illustrations are hung on green baise screens to
illustrate current events, the seasons of the year, the birthdays of
notable men, and so on, with lists of the books in the library on the
subjects to which the children have been introduced. A large part of
the librarian’s time is taken up with showing the young readers how to
find their way about among the reference books, and how to make the
easiest and most remunerative use of these in their school lessons and
their private hobbies. But the children are also gradually trained to
help each other, and eventually to help the librarian in the daily
routine of what they soon come to regard as their own library; they
grow, in fact, into a sort of union society, running all sorts of
affairs on their own account, with the official but not too officious
eye directing and assisting rather than controlling their efforts.
They might be compared to a group of patrols under a scoutmaster. The
library in the children’s room contains about 4,000 volumes, and issues
from 1,000 to 1,200 every week; in the period of five months from the
report on which many of these details are taken, 1,200 new borrowers
enrolled themselves.
Discipline, of course, must be maintained; this is essential to smooth
working; but it must be evoked rather than imposed. Only the right
sort of person, having had the right sort of training, even if born
with the right disposition, is competent to evoke it and at the same
time keep the children friendly, happy, and occupied with interesting
things. Scores of children’s reading rooms have been a failure from the
lack of this well-qualified superintendent. It is a waste of time to
try running them as a minor department, to be committed to the hands
of each junior assistant as his turn comes on the time-sheet. A mob
of youngsters idling their time away and making the pleasant place a
bear-garden would be the certain result. One common mistake that has
a bad initial effect is to make the junior readers enter the library
at a separate door, usually guarded by a special custodian who is a
martinet. This preliminary insult to a child’s dignity is, perhaps
unconsciously, resented; it strikes a wrong note. The idea that he or
she must be segregated from grown-up readers subtly provokes a spirit
precisely the opposite of that which needs to be cultivated. It is more
fatal than the contrary mistake of pampering and idolizing children.
Put him or her on nearly the same footing as their elders; mutual
deference is infinitely better than the eighteenth century doctrine
that every child is either a limb of Satan or a little imbecile.
To attain full success, librarian, teacher, and parents must learn
to co-operate. Few parents take any interest in what their children
read, and those few often take too much; they do not understand that
coercion, or even a too didactic purpose, is fatal to the true object
of an apprenticeship to reading, and will assuredly not lead children
to love and enjoy reading, or to discover for themselves the values it
can give to their own interests and pleasures. Until parents in general
are capable of taking a wise interest, it is better perhaps that they
should remain as indifferent as most parents are. In the fulness of
time, when our children’s rooms are less markedly inferior to those
across the Atlantic, when each has an adequate staff of persons trained
for this highly specialized work, and teachers understand how much can
be done by suggestion to direct the child’s reading and so lighten
their own labours in teaching, by then the parent will doubtless have
learned to take a proper share of interest and responsibility. All this
cannot be achieved in one generation. We have now had public libraries
for three-quarters of a century; but, for the arrears of intelligent
use we have to make up, we might have only just begun experimenting
with them.
The secret of success is to bring out the child’s own initiative.
This, it may be taken for granted, is not a tendency to original sin.
Good taste, like good art, is at bottom a natural thing: a misguided
belief that it must be painfully instilled has done more than aught
else to pervert it. Children perceive as much instinctively; hence
their suspicion of well-meant efforts to put them on the right paths.
A boy will hate even _Robinson Crusoe_ if he is told he must read it;
rather let him discover the realms of gold for himself. All which means
that children want handling in matters of taste with a refined skill
to which the mere common sense and tact required by the adult reader
in a library is nothing. It means, again, that though the children’s
librarian is sometimes born, when he, or rather she, has to be made,
the making is an important and highly specialized process.
Other obvious points must be borne in mind, by teachers, parents,
and librarians. The mere posture in reading, and the need for a good
light at the proper angle, are not minor points, for bad habits in
this respect are ruinous and alarmingly common. Many children read far
too much. They must not be allowed to become bookworms; the parent
ought to see that they have a healthy outdoor life, and the teacher
that the charms of the book-world do not lead to the neglect of tasks
set at school. Steady co-operation with the teachers in leading
children to find in books aids to the business and the pleasures of
life, is characteristic of those library systems where the children’s
department has been given its due place in the scheme, and is not a
mere side-show, ignorantly mismanaged and not thought worth spending
money on. It is characteristic, for instance, of the admirable group
of children’s libraries and reading rooms in the Islington Public
Libraries, with its stock of 10,000 volumes set aside for the junior
clients. There are numerous others in London and the provinces where
co-operation is carried on in some form or another; but differences
of opinion on the comparative merits of school libraries and of the
library in the children’s reading room make for differences of method.
Yet access to a school library does not render the public library any
the less valuable to an intelligent child; and there ought to be the
fullest mutual understanding and the keenest desire to help each other
between librarian and teacher.
The fare provided in the children’s department consists, not only
of books, but also of the best juvenile magazines, together with a
sprinkling of illustrated weeklies and monthlies intended by the
producers for readers of any age. Easy French magazines are sometimes
provided. On the reference shelves stand suitable encyclopædias,
atlases and gazetteers, dictionaries of several languages, works on
local history and topography, illustrated natural histories, the works
of the poets, and many other books that are likely to prove useful to
children in their home work. The choice of books for children is a
different thing now from what it was before the advent of Kingsley,
Kingston, and Kipling. With a few exceptions, the didactic trash that
constituted the whole stock of children’s literature a century ago may
now be jettisoned, along with a still greater volume of more recent
lumber depressingly written down to the childish intellect. Any modern
author, for children or any one else, knows, if he knows his business
at all, that the first thing to avoid is the habit or affectation or
process of writing down to an inferior mind. Lewis Carroll, Sir James
Barrie, Walter de la Mare conquered the child by writing as children
themselves, and writing their best, writing with all their genius and
with all the gusto due to things that are high and serious. Didactic
writing is always bad. It cannot help being bad. The moment a writer
begins to think of his audience instead of his subject, he becomes
self-conscious and artificial. Worst of all when he has the effrontery
to think of that audience as inferior to himself, and tries to adapt
his thoughts to feebler understandings. Children are not slower than
those of riper age to detect the false note, and be insulted by the
condescension. Thus it is far better to offer children books that have
been written for their elders than such as have been manufactured on
the plan of mild adulteration. In fact, a very large proportion of
the best books in the junior library belong to this higher category.
_Robinson Crusoe_ and _Gulliver_ are obvious examples; _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_ is another; _Kidnapped_ will be received as warmly as _Treasure
Island_ or _The Black Arrow_, and if _Lavengro_ has not such a
universal appeal there will be no hesitation about _The Cloister and
the Hearth_. Many of the novels of Blackmore and Stanley Weyman, most
of Dickens’s, some of Thackeray’s and all of Scott’s are on the shelves
of every good children’s library; and Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, and
some at any rate of George Eliot’s novels will meet the taste of girls.
Many works of travel, some histories, and biographies not a few,
such as the delightful life of Frank Buckland, are as much in place
here as in the senior library; and among the poets and essayists the
same freedom of choice may safely be exercised. Both publishers and
librarians are now at one in seeing that there is nothing shoddy in
the format of the books provided for children any more than in their
contents; good paper, readable print, and illustrations of artistic
merit, are becoming the rule. In the last-named particular children’s
books at the present day are immensely superior to the volumes of
popular fiction that seem to be perfectly satisfactory to thousands who
are obviously their elders, but hardly their betters.
The advantages of a closer relationship between education authorities
and library authorities are manifest both in children’s rooms in
libraries and children’s libraries in schools. The library is certainly
part of the educational fabric. On the one hand, the teacher is aided
enormously by the child’s work in the library, all the more if that
work is spontaneous and enjoyable; on the other hand, the children
who find out the vital part a library can play in their work and
recreations, who have become familiar with books of reference and
periodicals, with the uses of catalogues, the vistas opened by files,
albums, and indexes, and the order and intelligibility brought about
by a clear system of classification, will have acquired something of
inestimable value in the process of self-development to be carried on
long after school-days are over. The Adult Education Committee were of
opinion that the intimate relationship required could not exist without
a common administration; and they would accordingly have placed all our
public libraries under the care of the education authorities. There
is no need at this point to discuss their proposals, beyond assenting
to the argument for the closest bond between school and library. Even
if they continue to be managed by different authorities, all library
activities in the schools should be worked from the library. Whether
school libraries are stationary or circulating collections, they should
be administered from the children’s library as the base, and their
complementary relation thereto should be an important fact in the mind
of every child reader.
In England it must not be hastily assumed that every town or even the
majority are blessed with all the facilities described above for the
benefit of children. Only a few have faced the problem seriously, and
hardly any have faced the expense of a thorough service. A town like
Toronto employs twenty-one assistant-librarians in the mere work of
supervising the school libraries, and many American cities have much
larger staffs engaged on this alone. It is obvious, at all events, that
no library authority can be expected to carry on such an undertaking
except at the cost of the sister authority, ready though it may be
to furnish the knowledge and experience of a trained staff. Common
administration, or at least harmonious administration under departments
of the same supreme body, seems a logical consequence.
COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL LIBRARIES.
Libraries, like the books they house and distribute, have multiplex
reasons for their existence. Their highest aim, like that of education
itself, is to promote the mental and spiritual life of the community;
they are humanist foundations. But the race must be conserved; our
daily needs must be satisfied. National safety, liberty to develop
ourselves, the economy of our physical existence, must be assured, or
humanism is a chimera. Our libraries must perform their necessary part
in the functions we label utilitarian, without, however, omitting or
slackening in their higher purposes. A general library, in short, is
concerned not only with human knowledge, but also with every human
interest and activity; not only with science, philosophy, theory,
but with all the practical arts, those which are for the preservation,
as well as those which are for the highest development of humanity.
In the department of the public library now to be considered these
material objects are the main concern. A modern commercial library is
something utterly different from any library heretofore considered.
Here, as an advocate of more and better commercial and technical
libraries puts it, “The humanist will have to give way to the economist
and man of science.”
[Illustration: PATENT OFFICE LIBRARY.]
From their earliest years, public libraries have admitted these claims,
and they have put forth special efforts to supply the peculiar needs of
the working classes. The nature of the industries carried on has been
the chief factor determining the directions in which the stock of books
should differ in any given locality from what may be described as the
standard selection. Text-books on such industries and their subsidiary
subjects, illustrated treatises and other expensive works of reference,
have been provided as liberally as funds permitted; and the same
attention has been paid to the local trades and professions. Certain
obvious restrictions must be allowed for, besides limited resources.
Few places have been able to provide a law library or an extensive
collection of medical books. The solicitor usually has his own
book-case of legal literature, and so with the physician and surgeon;
they also have access to large professional libraries. Nevertheless,
if the public library seems to disregard certain professions, it is
rather on the score of expense and of limited demands than that it
disclaims its duty. A national system of libraries would certainly have
to provide for these classes, probably by organizing a central supply
and loans to the nearest library, in the way proposed for dealing with
the more advanced and costly technical works for industries.
The working mechanic, the small manufacturer, the factory workman,
the technical student, and the tradesman are in a more necessitous
condition; they cannot give a standing order for all the newest
manuals, they have no professional library from which to borrow. In
highly technical industries, only the largest firms can afford to keep
abreast of the rapid growth in scientific knowledge; and to do it
they must install, not only a costly arsenal of books, digests, and
periodicals recording the fruits of research, but also a special staff
to extract, register, and index the most recent information. So rapid
is the rate of progress in all departments of knowledge that books
are quickly left behind, and the proceedings of scientific societies,
technical periodicals, and even the daily press, must be systematically
ransacked by the information bureau, if a progressive firm is to be
sure of utilizing every invention and improvement in the fullest
economic way. Andrew Carnegie said that his own firm wasted hundreds of
thousands of dollars through failing at first to provide their managers
with the fullest information on what had been done throughout the world
in their departments. Is the public library to confine itself to the
narrower mission of assisting the needy worker, or to launch out on
this more ambitious project, and compete with the skilled staff work
employed by the wealthy industrial corporation? After all, the wealthy
corporation has contributed in proportion to its rateable assets to
the upkeep of the library, and has, on the face of it, as good a claim
to some return as the meanest ratepayer, unless the original idea
that the public library was only for the working classes is still to
prevail. If the public library were, in the full sense, a working part
of the machinery for national welfare, there could be no doubt about
the answer. As it is, only a few of the more prosperous and energetic
libraries have accepted the larger obligation; and, even so, no British
library can be compared with the great commercial libraries of America,
with such a foundation as the Commercial Museum of Philadelphia, with
its exhaustive collections of technical and business information and
its staff of consulting specialists, or with the Institute of Commerce
at Antwerp.
The utter inability of the public library service to cope with the
requirements of industry and commerce was growing more manifest
before the war. It was true then as now that no single library could
satisfy the technical needs even of its own district, and that some
system of mutual aid and central supply must be devised to supplement
the finest local provision. With the violent awakening to the lack
of organization of our resources which the war brought about, the
problem came into clearer focus. The Library Association took the
matter up with due seriousness in 1916, first inquiring into the
best methods of developing the scientific and technical departments
of public libraries, and then into the collateral problem of
commercial libraries. The dual subject was before the important annual
conference of 1917, and strong resolutions were passed in favour of
establishing commercial libraries in the chief centres of trade, and
technical libraries in all large manufacturing towns, in both cases
as an integral part of the public library systems.[7] Since then,
the Technical and Commercial Libraries Committee appointed by the
Association has put together a mass of evidence on the subject, and
has carried on a vigorous propaganda. Their views did not, however,
meet with the full approval of the Adult Education Committee, who
inclined to the representations of the Committee of the Privy Council
for Scientific and Industrial Research that an independent series of
technical libraries should be created in connexion with industries
rather than with the existing libraries.[8] The weak point of the
Library Association’s case had been a certain vagueness as to the
methods by which, and the particular authority by whom, their admirable
proposals should be carried into effect. Although they acknowledged
that the work could not be done on a proper scale by the public
libraries unassisted, or without some measure of co-operation, they
hesitated to recommend that the public libraries should be organized
into a reciprocating system for the purpose. They declined to say who,
in their opinion, should set up and who should control the machinery of
co-operation, or precisely what the “measures of co-operation” should
be. This, of course, is the essential point of any scheme for concerted
action, and the rival project of the Adult Education Committee,
unfortunate as it must appear to any one experienced in the working of
libraries and alive to the wastefulness of duplication, at any rate was
free from this defect.
The question between the rival proposals now lies in abeyance. It is
as well that it should lie there, till a more constructive plan is put
forward on behalf of the public libraries. The country cannot afford to
set up an independent system of libraries at a time when expenditure
must be adjusted to strict necessities; it would be uneconomic to do
so at any time. Whatever the shortcomings of the nation’s libraries,
shortcomings due to the nation’s neglect in the past, these libraries
are a going concern, a machine well able to carry a larger load, under
which indeed they would run all the better and at a lower rate per
output. How absurd to erect new machinery when the old wants only a
little oiling! The proposals of the Adult Education Committee are
mistaken; those of the Library Association are defective. The theorist
failed to call in the expert: the expert suffered from obtuseness of
vision. Will they come together now to talk it over?
Meanwhile, the public libraries have been strengthening their
collections of technical literature, and commercial libraries have
actually been established as an offshoot of the central library
at Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Leeds, Bradford, Bristol, and
Manchester, whilst at Norwich, Northampton, Bolton, Croydon, and
Rochdale parts of the library have been set aside as business sections,
and catalogues or guide-books printed showing how their contents may
be utilized with the maximum of ease and profit. The advent of the
commercial library has done more at a single blow to rouse the public
imagination than any other event in the history of public libraries.
Business men, who had been indifferent to mere accumulations of
literature, found in this new species of library, containing hardly a
single volume that Charles Lamb would have dignified with the name of
a book, a bureau performing gratis all the useful services that the
wealthy business concern obtains at exorbitant expense from its large
office library or department of information. Within a year, the Glasgow
librarian was able to report that 30,000 visits had been paid to the
new establishment by business people, and a large number of inquiries
by letter, telephone, or telegram satisfactorily answered. The average
daily consultations during the first year at Manchester, by all sorts
of persons from managing directors to messengers, was three hundred.[9]
In Bristol last year the consultations of books, periodicals, files,
and indexes totalled 51,181. Elsewhere the tale is the same.
A more particular account of the Manchester Commercial Library, the
latest to be opened, will indicate the distinctive features and
functions of these new departments. Its quarters are a large room in
the Royal Exchange, in the heart of the business region of the city:
here it was inaugurated by the Lord Mayor on October 23rd, 1919. A
handbook stating its aims and explaining its uses was issued, in which
it is pointed out that the commercial library is there to provide “any
and every kind of commercial information that may be obtained from
printed matter, and such additional information as it may be possible
to procure from public or private sources; and for the collection,
arrangement, and cataloguing of such printed matter, so as to render it
quickly and conveniently available for inquirers and readers. It is not
a technical library; those who want books on processes of manufacture
must consult the collection in the reference library in Piccadilly. Its
object is to cater for the man who markets commodities, and buys and
sells them; not for the man who makes them.”