natural home for all the intellectual activities of a social kind
going on in each community. Even if it is not convenient for all such
bodies to have their headquarters there, the library should entertain
the most friendly and active relations with every one. In the United
States, the public library in most cities performs a large part of
its most remunerative work through the medium of public and private
organizations outside. It may be likened to a nerve-centre, with
a network of efferent and afferent fibres and a series of ganglia
throughout the social organism. Thus the New York Public Library has
a long and miscellaneous list of clubs, leagues, musical societies,
classes of all sorts, business and other associations that hold their
meetings in its various branches. Many American libraries are ready
to plant a delivery station, dispatch a travelling library, or a
collection of special works, anywhere that it is asked for, or even
to provide an industrial firm with books, so long as accommodation
and an acting librarian are supplied. They will prepare select lists
of books on any given subject, get up an exhibition to celebrate any
event or help on any deserving movement: there is no end to the ways in
which they are prepared to put their services at the disposal of the
common weal. British libraries have laboured too much in isolation.
The future depends upon, more than anything else, its coming into the
closest touch with every intellectual and social agency in the body
politic. It should be a matter of course for the local scientific and
literary societies, the field club, the local branch of the Workers’
Educational Association and the National Home-Reading Union--to name
only two out of many--to make their home in the library building. The
antiquarian society should deposit its collections and books and maps
here, the natural history society its specimens and apparatus, thus
laying the foundations of a local museum to be housed in the situation
most favourable for study, both by themselves and by other inhabitants.
Local historical and regional surveys are rapidly developing, whether
as pieces of research aiming at the extension of knowledge or as a
practical form of education: the library, with its local records, maps,
and other historical material, should always be the base.
The Croydon Public Library is the centre from which the Photographic
Survey and Record of Surrey operates. Surrey took the lead in this
important branch of topographical history, and the photographic records
of buildings, scenery, and miscellaneous objects of interest now
collected in the library comprise some 8,000 prints and lantern-slides,
all elaborately classified and indexed for instant reference. Housed
along with these is the Regional Survey of Croydon, consisting of
maps prepared from actual surveys of the district within fifteen
miles’ radius, showing the geology, vegetation, surface utilization,
industries, etc. This also is accompanied by photographs. Further, an
artist has been commissioned to paint faithful records of architectural
or natural features that are likely to perish or be disfigured by
modern changes--a thing that will be of priceless value to future
generations. This logical extension of the work of preserving local
records, minute-books, newspapers, and various fugitive material is
being carried on elsewhere, notably at Coventry, Brighton, Northampton,
and Nottingham. It deserves the attention of the many local societies
that have not yet thrown in their lot with the local library.
LIBRARY EXHIBITIONS.
Libraries may themselves get up exhibitions or grant hospitality to
those organized by kindred bodies. The more the library takes a hand
in the preparation, the more can the series of exhibits be related to
the appropriate books, and the more effective will such efforts be
as aids to popular enlightenment. There is a wide choice of suitable
subjects--book-production and its various branches, engraving and other
arts, local history and geography, the sciences. The library will be
able to supply many of the exhibits from its own stores; usually it
is not difficult to borrow useful material from commercial or private
sources; and loan exhibits from the State museums are available
as nucleus, supplement, or even as forming the whole display. Such
exhibitions are placed under the care of keen and intelligent members
of the staff, and lectures or demonstrations are given illustrated by
the actual objects; the results are enormously ahead of those achieved
by the ordinary static exhibition. Lines of reading are pointed out,
and books brought into juxtaposition with their subject realities, in a
way that even the trained conductor in a museum or picture gallery can
hardly compass. Actual experience in organizing and running a number of
such exhibitions has left me with no doubt of their popularity or their
educational value. When an exhibition illustrating such a subject as
the production of a book goes on for three months in the libraries of a
London borough, and the average attendance during that period exceeds a
thousand a day, we may feel that we are beyond the experimental stage.
Even our rural libraries, when they are located in the village hall or
have a suitable building of their own, need not hesitate to attempt
an exhibition. In many ways, they have exceptional opportunities. To
begin with, there is nothing to compete with them; the novelty would
be absolute. And then there is suitable material of some sort or other
in abundance, botanical, geological, horticultural or agricultural, or
such as illustrates local history, local industries, or any subject
having strong associational interest. Differences of scope being
allowed for, the rural librarian would probably find he had much less
to do with his own hands than if he were getting up a show in the town.
Such places as rejoice in the possession of museums and art galleries
as well as libraries are specially favoured; but it does not inevitably
follow that these departments of public culture do combine forces so
effectually as do the places where the work is on a more frugal scale
but comes at any rate from one and the same fount of activity.
RELATIONS WITH THE SCHOOLS.
The chapter before this concluded with some account of library work
with children. The correlative of the children’s library and reading
room is the school library or the periodical loan of books to the
schools--sometimes it is the alternative. Under the Act of 1919 the
library authority in places newly adopting the Acts will be the local
education committee, and elsewhere the control of existing libraries
may be handed over voluntarily to that body. Long before this Act,
certain education committees had acted jointly with library committees
in establishing school libraries and other modes of bringing school
children into contact with good books. The aims and interests of
library and school in large measure coincide. Recent legislation
virtually admits this sound principle. Into the question whether it
is wise to vest the control of libraries in the education authority, a
question canvassed both for and against in the United States as well
as in this country, there is no need to enter at the moment. Everybody
agrees that children must be taught, or at least encouraged, at a
fairly early age, to read books for themselves and to have some idea of
the uses of a library. Most teachers and librarians would also agree
that every school should have a library of its own, and that at some
stage or other each child should be introduced to the public library.
Perhaps this is as far as we need go in the direction of agreement:
uniformity is surely not advisable, and local circumstances, relative
situation in particular, may have to determine the nature of the
interaction of library and school, and the more important point, how
soon should the school child shift the centre of his reading interests
from the school library to the public one, the one that is there to be
his intellectual mainstay throughout life? From the point of view of a
public librarian, it might be undesirable that a school library should
be so efficient and amply sufficing that elder children were deterred
from finding their way into the wider realm of the public library. The
school library should be but a tributary flowing into that main stream.
There are three modes of dealing with the problem of books for the
school child, and these may be variously combined. (1) There may be
a permanent collection, stationed in the school, consisting of graded
sets of reference works required to illustrate any of the subjects
taught or studied in the school; and further, a collection, large or
small, of such books, mainly of a recreational kind, as it may be
thought fit to provide for home reading. Such a collection may be
built up by the school itself or by the staff of the public library,
who would act, as a rule, in close consultation with the teachers. One
great advantage of having all the books permanently located at the
school is that the children look upon it then as really the school
library, and the teachers are able to familiarize themselves with the
contents, and thus can influence the children’s reading to the maximum.
If there are funds enough, a fairly large and representative collection
can be provided--one that the most voracious boy or girl is not likely
to exhaust till he or she is old enough to join the public library. The
best books become household possessions; children talk about them to
their chums, and not to have read them is a lapse that must be wiped
out. If, on the other hand _Westward Ho!_ or _Little Women_ is merely a
loan and has gone back to the central library, how can the young reader
get even with the luckier ones?
(2) To save the expense of a number of permanent school libraries,
an education authority may arrange with the public library to
organize a series of travelling collections or merely boxes of books
to circulate among the schools. This system may be combined with the
other, the reference collection being regarded, most reasonably, as
always indispensable and therefore permanent, and loans of books for
recreation supplied at fixed intervals. There is one unquestionable
boon attaching to this arrangement--the children enjoy the stimulus, as
the date comes round, of choosing and rejoicing among a fresh lot of
books. Many teachers too, no doubt, are not averse from a change.
(3) The third method implies suppression of the school library, at any
rate so far as it is anything beyond the indispensable collection of
volumes required for use in the school; it is to send the young reader
to the public library. If this is not far away, and especially if it
has a first-class junior department, where suitable reference books
can be used as well as books for entertainment borrowed for reading at
home, there is nothing to deplore; but to children in distant schools
the loss will be serious. The value of this third solution of the
problem, when it is a real solution and not an evasion, is that the
child is introduced early to a large collection of books, and also
comes into a different atmosphere from that of school. Its danger is
that the child may come unchaperoned to a library where there is but
a perfunctory service for the juniors, and will be turned adrift in a
pathless wilderness.
This third method may be seen at work in the schools of Poplar. One of
the poorest among the metropolitan boroughs, Poplar has been a leader
in many library movements, such as the scheme of interchange between
adjoining boroughs whereby all the books in a large group of libraries
are made available for borrowing by dwellers in any part of the area.
The libraries have long co-operated with the schools as actively as the
teachers would permit. Nothing is more essential to the mental life and
the economic efficiency of the future citizen than that the gap between
schooling and maturity should be bridged over. Poplar has realized the
fatal nature of that gap, and has long been doing its utmost to fill
up the chasm. School children come to the public library to do their
preparation and spend their leisure in the enjoyment of books. Classes
are brought by teachers during quiet hours, and sit in the public rooms
doing “silent reading.” For a long while measures have been taken so
that no single boy or girl in the schools shall go out into the world
without being introduced to the public library, and made acquainted
with all that books and libraries can do to help them in life and the
pleasures of life. Twice a week, the upper classes from schools in the
borough, coming in regular rotation, attend at the nearest library
to hear an address by the borough librarian, Mr. H. Rowlatt, or one
of his chief assistants, on the libraries of their own borough and
libraries in general, what they are and what they contain, and how
freedom and ability to utilize the manifold services they afford is
an invaluable part of the individual’s equipment for life.[17] The
librarian and his coadjutors have always thrown themselves heart and
soul into the work of co-operation with the schools; the children
listen eagerly, and the results are seen in the statistics of reading.
The vital importance of this work has now been recognized by the
London Education Committee. Similar schemes are being introduced in
the boroughs of Islington, Greenwich, and Hackney, and it may be hoped
that they will become general. This is by no means all that the Poplar
libraries are doing for the school children. Attempts are made to
help the older children in making up their minds on the occupation
they would choose. Sets of books illustrating various trades are put
before such children, from which they can gather an intelligent idea
of what is the real nature and interest of some craft or trade which
was previously a mere name. This has proved a real help in the critical
moment of many a child’s life. All formalities, such as monetary
guarantees against loss or damage, have been reduced to a minimum or
abolished for the benefit of school children, who are admitted to
full privileges on the bare recommendation of the teachers. Thousands
avail themselves of the opportunity thus held out, and many thousands
of books have been borrowed as a result without the loss of five
shillings’ worth of books per annum. The help given to the children in
general has likewise proved to be indirectly of inestimable value to
the teachers. They admit that the introduction of the library habit
among their young pupils has opened their own eyes to points they had
never realized. One head master volunteered the statement that it had
done away entirely with surreptitious reading of trash among the girls.
Poplar cannot afford a regular system of school libraries; yet, in
spite of poverty, it is signally doing yeoman’s service in moulding the
minds of our future citizens: it is a shining example to boroughs of
far superior resources.
On the whole, my own preference is for the stationary library, when the
school can afford a good one; but one’s preferences may be modified,
or even reversed, in altered circumstances. Whichever plan be adopted,
supervision, or rather sympathetic guidance, is essential. Such
guidance will, of course, be entirely of a positive, not a negative
kind, and will consist of tactful suggestion, suggestion as unobtrusive
as possible, by means of story-telling, illustrated talks, and personal
help. There is not the slightest need for attempting to fit the book
to the child. Let children read books for grown-ups if they have a
mind to, let boys read girls’ books; the girls will read the boys’
books whether you want them or no. It is taken for granted that the
whole library will be well-chosen, and everything in it worth reading.
Alarmist nonsense, emanating from English justices or militant New
England moralists, about boys led into crime by stories of brigands
and pirates, are not likely to upset parents or librarians with all
their faculties about them, including a normal sense of humour. If you
listened to these people, Stevenson and Dumas would have to be put into
a strait jacket, and Michael Scott, Aimard, and Mayne Reid burned by
the hangman. It is the last expiring gasp of the prudery and lust for
chastening the young which made the old-fashioned library for children
a byword. Far more important than any anxiety about moral or immoral
influence is an anxiety about good literature. Edification is thrown
away if the well-meaning author is unpossessed of charm. The first
requisite of a spell is that it shall work. Happily, the charm of fine
literature can hardly be attained but by the fine personality. Good
literature is healthy literature. Among the books a child will read
with delight, it is doubtful indeed whether a single example can be
found of a work of true literary worth that could lead a child astray.
Harrison Ainsworth’s _Jack Sheppard_ and Lytton’s _Paul Clifford_
perished from the catalogues of junior libraries, not because they were
wicked books, but because they were bad literature.
The best books should be duplicated over and over again, especially in
libraries that let their young readers roam along the book-shelves and
choose what they like--as all libraries should; and duplicated as far
as possible in various editions, especially illustrated editions. This
is a far wiser policy than aiming at a very comprehensive selection,
which means that quantities of second and third-rate stuff will be
introduced. After all, if life is short childhood is much shorter, and
if every child had the opportunity of reading all the books that are
fit, there would not be much time left before the date arrived for
migrating to wider spheres.
A bibliography of ideal works for children would not, however, be a
voluminous affair. The children’s librarian should form something of
the sort for use, and the books starred in its pages as superlative
should never be out--there should always be copies enough to ensure
this. The young reader will find it hard to resist the appeal, if he
sees one attractive copy and next week another staring him in the face:
it will assuage disappointment for the absence of something else, or
charming pictures may tempt to a second reading of a classic already
familiar. By such careful management the taste of a healthy child will
remain unspoiled, and in later life sound judgment and appreciation of
the best will show the results of this novitiate.
In America, the question of circulating versus stationary libraries has
been well thrashed out, though not to a unanimous verdict. At Buffalo,
the respective spheres of the library and the education authority
have been carefully defined. School libraries are limited strictly to
the works of reference required in school work, the public library
acting as book-selector. For all further requirements the school and
the school children rely on the public library. In New York City, the
public library deputes this branch of its work to a special department,
under a supervisor of work with schools. The city is divided for the
purpose into districts, in each of which there is a branch library and
a group of schools. A school assistant, usually a woman, is appointed
by the library to look after the work in each district, to make herself
personally acquainted with every teacher, to give advice, and keep
the machinery running smoothly. Formal regulations are kept down to
a minimum. Teachers are allowed to borrow books in large quantities,
and to keep them six months at a time if they need them; they are
expected and assisted to make themselves reliable counsellors and
guides to their pupils in the choice and use of books. Assistants in
the libraries are told off to address groups of teachers and assemblies
of school children on the objects and the resources of the libraries;
children are brought to the library in classes to have its working
and its benefits explained; and, finally, they are encouraged to do
their home lessons in the children’s library, and are provided with a
reference collection adapted to the purpose.
In this country, the relationship between the school and the public
library remains undetermined. Many of our primary schools are destitute
of a library worthy of the name, and if a census were taken it would
probably be found that the secondary schools are even worse off. Many
school libraries have attained a musty and precarious existence through
some passing gust of philanthropy, and maintain it in a more or less
accidental fashion. This is not the fault of the public libraries,
many of which have done more than their share in providing schools with
books, and most of which are ready with the expert services needed to
put school collections on a proper footing. The failure is due more to
lack of a clear realization of the function of school libraries than to
mere neglect or oversight. The work already described as done in the
junior department at Croydon, where as at Coventry and divers other
places, separate collections of books on education and teaching are
provided, from which the teacher may borrow and which the public may
use for reference, may be taken as representing the kind of endeavour
put forth by the more active library authorities. Loan collections for
schools are organized by some authorities, stationary school libraries
by others. But in a vast number of places, though many if not all of
the facilities enumerated above are held out by the library, the saving
propensities of education committees or the indifference of teachers
have left things as they were. The need for a comprehensive treatment
of the problem is still more apparent now than when the Library
Association in 1904 urged that the nation’s libraries were, or ought
to be, an integral part of the national machinery of education. It is
a vital part of the educational problem and of the whole problem of
public libraries; and, whether there are to be two sets of machinery,
working side by side or in reciprocation, or one set controlling both
schools and libraries, the library service for the schools and the
school children must be put on a proper basis, or the future of adult
education and of public libraries also will be in jeopardy. Here,
surely, Ruskin’s saying has a particularly forcible application--“It
is open, I repeat, to serious question, which I leave to the reader’s
pondering, whether among national manufactures, that of souls of good
quality may not at last turn out a quite leadingly lucrative one.”
(_Unto this Last_).
FOOTNOTES:
[15] The modern public library believes that it should find a reader
for every book on its shelves, and provide a book for every reader in
its community, and that it should in all cases bring book and reader
together. (Bostwick, p. 1.)
[16] The Adult Education Committee attribute the most obvious defects
of adult education to-day, to the discontinuity of much of the work
done, the tendency to rely unduly on lectures and to neglect classwork,
and the inadequate supply of books to the students attending lectures
or classes. “It is, in our judgment, essential that whilst regularity
of attendance and seriousness and continuity of study should be
insisted upon, there must be freedom of teaching and freedom of
expression.” (Final Report, par. 146.) The Committee are strongly in
favour of continuous courses of lectures, and of that grouping in
classes of moderate size that makes for “the frank interchange of
thought and experience which is essential to adult education,” and
without which “the work carried on will lose its vitality or change its
character.”
[17] METROPOLITAN BOROUGH OF POPLAR.
Lectures to Boys and Girls attending at the Libraries from Elementary
Schools.
SYNOPSIS.