Flint
Carmarthen
Anglesey
Middlesex
Hampshire (Isle of Wight)
Hampshire (Southampton)
Worcestershire
Northamptonshire
Cumberland
Durham
Northumberland
Kirkcudbright
Nairn
Fife
Bedfordshire
Surrey
Linlithgow
Shropshire
Cambridge
Isle of Man
(Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, _Seventh Annual Report_, 1921; p. 9.)
[21] _Library Association Record_--“The Gloucestershire Rural Library
Scheme,” by Miss A. S. Cooke (Feb., 1921).
[22] S. B. Antrim and E. I. Antrim, _The County Library_ (1914), p. 238.
[23] Total number of vols. accessioned (Dec. 31, 1920) 37,302; number
in the library 30,597.
[24] J. H. Friedel: _Training for Librarianship_, p. 106.
[25] pp. 141-5.
[26] The character of the best type of village institute may be judged
from the following account of the Nettlebed Working Men’s Club and
Institute:--
“Perhaps the most original feature of the equipment of the hall is
the provision of a cinematograph apparatus. The provision of picture
palaces in all English villages would be a doubtful advantage, if they
showed the baser sort of ‘cowboy’ and other sensational films. Given
some restraint in the choice of subject, however, moving pictures make
winter evenings more changeful. During 1918 the cinema was used very
little, but it is now running every Saturday evening, and draws full
houses. Mr. Fleming’s main idea in installing a cinema at Nettlebed was
to make use of its educational possibilities. The Oxfordshire Education
Committee welcomed the provision, as also did the Inspector of Schools,
the more so because it extended advantages to the school children of
six parishes near Nettlebed. The Education Code permits teachers to
take the whole or part of a school for rambles or visits to places of
educational interest during school hours, and films have been shown
at Nettlebed on certain afternoons to a concourse of children. The
subjects of the pictures were chosen to illustrate geography, history,
English, and nature study. A village club can conduct its ‘cinema
department’ by joining a lending library of films, so that the subjects
can be duly varied.
“The higher aspects of village life have not, however, been neglected
at Nettlebed. Concerts, lectures, and dances are held in the men’s
hall, which is laid with a special dancing floor of oak, famous
throughout the district, and this is protected in the ordinary way by
a cloth covering. Dancing classes are held weekly for children in the
afternoon and for adults in the evening, and are conducted by a lady
resident in the village. An instructress, under whose care the young
girls in the village and district are taught cookery, laundry work, and
housekeeping, lives in a house near the hall. Across the road is the
school garden, divided into some fourteen plots, each cared for by one
boy. At the back of the playground is an old building converted into
a carpenter’s shop, in which another section of the boys work under
the supervision of the village schoolmaster. All of these branches
are under the control of the County Education Authority. Altogether,
it will be seen that in these various ways instruction as well as
amusement is provided.” Sir Lawrence Weaver, _Village Clubs and Halls_
(1920), pp. 82-3.
V
A NATIONAL LIBRARY SERVICE.
Centralization proved to be the only way of extending a library service
to the rural districts. No village, unless through the largess of
a plutocrat, could build up and maintain anything worth calling a
library for itself. Given a centralized system, some sort of service
can be run cheaply, and a first-class service can be run economically.
Does it not follow that some measure of centralization would be good
for urban libraries, enabling them to save in certain directions,
and making their resources go a great deal further than they go at
present in the direction of widest utility? The largest libraries
have managed to be self-sufficing, not merely because they have more
money to spend, but rather because their service is organized on the
principle of a centralized group. There is a point beyond which it
does not pay a library to provide from its own resources all that its
users may possibly require. Each library must determine this point
for itself. The everyday wants of its readers ought to be satisfied
on the spot and at the moment; but to go far beyond that point even
should a local Crœsus provide the wherewithal, would be extravagant,
entailing surplusage, overlapping, and waste. Spending money on books
only in occasional request is to spend too little on books in continual
demand. The library of moderate means cannot pretend to satisfy both
daily and exceptional wants, unless it is able to call upon outside
resources, such as a Central Library for Students developed to such a
capacity that it forms a sufficient reservoir for supplementing all the
moderate-sized stocks in the country. If most of the urban libraries
were brought into a co-operative network of libraries, with mechanism
for interchange by which the book lacking here would be supplied there,
or else from a larger regional library or a clearing-house at the
centre, obviously a service equal to the pooled resources of the whole
system would be provided without the present waste on overlapping.
Central organization exists in the big provincial cities; that is the
reason for their superiority, and they are superior in a degree far
beyond that of mere size. It does not exist in London; that is why
serious readers must have recourse to the British Museum or the big
special libraries, to satisfy their requirements; or if, like the great
majority, they can rarely do this, they must go without. London is the
most glaring illustration of the vices due to mere parochial methods;
it suffers, not so much because its library resources are limited, as
because they are not mobilized. For certain purposes, it has already
been noted, both London and provincial libraries acknowledge the
economic value of some centralization. Thus every municipal library has
given up buying books in Braille type for the blind, and relies for
this branch of its service upon the National Library at Westminster.
A great many subscribe to the Central Library for Students, and draw
upon that for books required by specialist readers. A large number
help to provide the funds for the great Subject-Index to Periodicals,
which makes the contents of reviews, magazines, technical and
scientific journals, filed in their reference departments, available
for instant use. This may not seem much compared with the results
of joint effort or of State supervision in America, where they have
co-operative cataloguing, co-operative publication of bibliographies
and aids for readers, and elaborate facilities for professional
training; but it is a beginning. The Adult Education Committee can
think of no way to endow the industries of the country with an adequate
series of technical libraries except by centralization. Although many
librarians, represented by the Library Association, do not approve of
the particular scheme put forward, they are at one with the Committee
in admitting that co-ordination of the separate libraries and the
establishment of a central supply is the only way to solve this
problem.
Although, however, the partial and unequal development of public
libraries which the Adult Education Committee by a slip in their
logic put down to the rate limit, is due, as the report conclusively
shows, to their having had to struggle along in isolation, it would be
disastrous to take the control of the local libraries entirely out of
the hands of the local authorities. This would stultify all efforts
to inspire public opinion and evoke local pride. No institution in a
civilized society is more sure to be an expression of corporate life
and local individuality than a communal library, in the building up of
which the actual users have had a hand. A system, however complete and
efficient, bestowed by a Government department, however benevolent,
would be sure eventually to stifle all such aspirations. The local
communities in both town and country must have a decisive voice in the
management of their libraries. They must have a larger voice, not a
smaller, than they have had hitherto. Local initiative has never had
free play. Why is it that public libraries rarely excite that interest
and enthusiasm in which the promoters hopefully confided? The answer
is obvious. Libraries have suffered from official repression, and have
not had even the doubtful advantage of official tutelage. If a town
wished to spend liberally on its library, it was pulled up by the rate
limit. If it wanted lectures, the Government auditor put in his veto:
he does so still. And so with any of the excursions from the programme
prescribed from above that would have helped to realize a higher
ideal. Library authorities have been confined to the unimaginative
duty of exercising circumscribed and inadequate powers, and the
library committee has enjoyed the least prestige of all the council’s
departments. More local control, more powers of initiative, and more
representation of the actual users of the library are needed, if a
vigorous and useful life is to be maintained.
But this is fully compatible with healthy co-operation between the
different authorities under the guiding supervision of a central
department. Some authorities may require a stimulus; they should not
be allowed to victimize those among their constituents who crave the
very necessities of civilized life. Cases are not unknown where borough
councils have failed to carry out, or have deliberately emasculated, a
library scheme approved by a majority of the ratepayers. Education is
compulsory: it is a question whether one of the chief instruments of
education should be at the mercy of a local body to grant or withhold.
For, so inconsiderable a place does the library take at present in
local politics, the average borough council, elected to manage the
trams, the streets, water, electricity, and other mundane affairs,
seldom represents the views of the citizen on such a different matter
as libraries; and the committee appointed by such a council hardly
ever represents or is fully cognizant of the views of the people who
actually use the library.
Fortunately, the times when a policy of rate-saving at all costs,
or the selfishness of a leisured class enjoying their subscription
libraries and not in favour of too much education for the lower orders,
or the interested opposition of the liquor trade and the music hall
proprietor, were able to keep out or keep down public libraries, are
gradually passing away. They have not gone altogether; but it would
be invidious to name the two or three distinguished boroughs where
these influences are still rampant. The problem now is to bring the
great crowd of under-developed and under-nourished libraries into
line one with other, to assist the halt, help the blind to see, and
by schemes for concerted action enable all to reach the same level of
efficiency as the big towns have attained without undue exertion. A
simple licence to spend more than a penny rate will not secure this by
itself. Reorganization on a co-operative ground-plan will do as much as
the mere expenditure of money, and money will not be spent lavishly in
these frugal days. The merit of such a reorganization is that so many
and so great values will be secured at a minimum cost. The material is
in existence for an enormous improvement of the services.
Had not the sweeping proposals of the Adult Education Committee for
making the local education authority the library authority been
negatived before the late Bill came into Parliament, the heterogeneous
units that constitute the library service of London would after the Act
of 1919 have come under the unifying influence of the London Education
Committee. It was such a near thing that we may pause to consider
the probable results. As already noticed, library development in the
metropolis has been unequal in the extreme. Certain boroughs are still
destitute of a public library system. The total number of books in
the remainder is about a million and a half. All these metropolitan
libraries are established under the same Acts; till recently they drew
their income from a uniform rate (except in certain boroughs where a
high rateable value allowed the penny to be reduced to a halfpenny);
the governing bodies are in each district a committee of the borough
council. Yet each group of libraries is a distinct entity. Each
authority is a law unto itself. A ratepayer in one borough is not
permitted to borrow from the library in the next though interchange of
privileges would have been, not merely a logical but a great economic
advantage. There has been no consultation between the authorities
to avoid overlapping in neighbouring reference libraries, though
correlative specialization would have been easy and remunerative.[27]
Every reference library develops on individual lines, perhaps as a
British Museum in miniature, with the result that, out of a number much
larger than the total number of boroughs, not one is above the standard
of a second-rate library in the provinces. Some committees offer a
cordial welcome to students at school or college in their boroughs.
Others repulse such students unless they are ratepayers or at least
residents in the borough.[28]
The immediate advantage of combining all the local libraries of London
and Greater London into one system, all available to any one living or
working in any quarter, and supplementing each other by a simple method
of interchange, is manifest. The majority of the reference libraries
should be shut up at once, and the space used for library purposes
that have hitherto been neglected. Provided that every branch has a
good collection of quick-reference books, there is no need for most of
these--many of them are legacies of the still more parochial government
of London before the present boroughs were formed. A proportion of the
contents should be used to augment the stock of the Central Library for
Students, which is now, in a small way, a central depot for the lending
libraries of both London and the country. The remainder, after all
useless and obsolete material had been sent to the destructor, would be
brought together to form the initial stock of some six or eight really
excellent reference libraries, so placed that every potential reader
would be within the radius of a tram-ride. Six or eight large central
libraries might be selected for the purpose, and would require little
alteration beyond the removal of the lending department, for which room
would have been found elsewhere.
Whenever the present haphazard library service of London is superseded
by a unified system, there will be a possibility of incorporating into
it, or associating as auxiliaries, various public or semi-public
libraries not belonging to the municipalities. London is not poor in
its bibliothecal possessions, though badly served. In 1910, Mr. R. A.
Rye calculated that in the public and administrative libraries and
those belonging to various institutions, Greater London had a total
of eight and a half million volumes, of which one and a half million
are inaccessible to the general public.[29] This gave a supply of one
volume per head, which may be compared with Berlin’s two volumes,
Dresden’s three, and the four per head in Paris. Such comparisons, it
should be observed, are not a matter of simple arithmetic. A larger
community may find its account in a smaller relative stock, be that
organized for use. A family of five with ten books would be badly off.
A town of 50,000 with 100,000 volumes would be opulent. London, with
a system of centralization and distribution comprehending all these
varied resources, would probably be as well off as any city in the
world. It is largely a question of realizing the intellectual capital
that is now paying such poor dividends. Special libraries, such as
that of the Patent Office, the National Science and the National Art
Libraries at South Kensington, the Public Record Office, and others,
like the various economic and sociological, historical, medical,
legal, and other libraries attached to technical or scientific
institutions, would continue to stand apart, but would stand in a
definite relation to the general service.
[Illustration: READING ROOM OF THE GENERAL LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF
LONDON.]
The proper balance between local control and the superintending
departments--and sub-departments, if the nation’s libraries are
reorganized as several great territorial systems--would not be
difficult to contrive, so as to preserve and foster the rights of
each community to self-expression. It is not proposed to work these
out in detail here. Briefly, the functions of the central board
would be:--(1) to install and operate the machinery for interchange
and central supply, the latter ultimately superseding the former
altogether; (2) to see that the local libraries and more especially the
selection of books are maintained at a proper level; (3) to undertake
such wholesale services as cataloguing and the compilation of aids
to readers, work which is now done over and over again by individual
library staffs at great expense, or else is neglected; (4) to organize
and finance the training of librarians, and see that they are properly
paid. Ultimately, librarianship might be organized as a sort of civil
service; at any rate, librarians ought to be as carefully looked after
by the State as are the teachers.
Many other enterprises of vast public benefit could be, most
appropriately, engineered by the central office; for example, the
publication of large editions of non-copyright books in a form
suitable for lending library use. Bookbinding is another item of
local expenditure that calls urgently for mass treatment. It is not
proposed, however, that the central library authority should set up a
binding factory in opposition to the trade. This would be unnecessary,
for it would be in such a commanding position, as by far the largest
purchaser in the market, that it could dictate its own terms to
publishers, printers, binders, and even to paper-makers. The fact is,
the rebinding of books in public libraries might, for the most part, be
done away with, if paper, covers, and binding were originally designed
to stand the wear. As a leading authority on the subject, Mr. Douglas
Cockerell recently said, “Publishers still design books to meet the
fancy of the casual buyer, and very largely ignore the requirements of
the libraries, which are for many books their largest customers.”[30]
Light, fluffy paper is selected by publishers solely to bulk out books;
the thicker the book the higher the price. “Now the public may like
to pay for fluff and wind, but the librarian’s interests are directly
opposed to this. Increased bulk means more shelf-room, and the use of
this paper means that the books will fall to pieces after a very short
time.” But our central authority would surely see to it that a book
produced for library use should be printed on paper of good quality
and cased in split boards, which “should last in ordinary library
circulation until the librarian is forced to discard it on account of
the dirt it has picked up.”
Another need of paramount importance to all engaged in the pursuit of
knowledge is that the contents of the numerous periodicals produced
throughout the world, registering advances in all branches of
science and research, should be abstracted and indexed, so that the
material should be rendered accessible or at any rate its existence
fully known.[31] Mention has already been made of the Subject-Index
to Periodicals, in which some hundred and fifty periodicals are
systematically indexed. This important undertaking was initiated some
years ago by Mr. E. Wyndham Hulme, late librarian to H.M. Patent
Office; it has been carried on successively under the auspices of the
“Athenæum” and of the Library Association. It is at present a heavy
burden upon a few devoted shoulders, although a very large part of
the labour is performed by volunteers; yet its scheme is susceptible
of indefinite expansion, if all the requirements of scientific and
technical workers are to be, even approximately, met. It is eminently
a task pertaining to the library, the university and college library,
the special library, and the research department of all types. Were
there a central library department in existence, it would undertake
this as part of its ordinary routine. It would also undertake the
collateral task of preparing and publishing a union catalogue of the
long sets of periodicals of all kinds to which the Subject-Index gives
the references, and it would indicate where these sets are to be found.
Besides the indexing, it would perhaps carry out the further but
hardly less valuable work of drawing up and issuing systematic digests
of important new knowledge contained in the learned periodicals. It
has been recently proposed that the British Museum should carry out
this necessary piece of national work, the cost of which, sales being
allowed for, would not be excessive.[32]
Such results, however, invaluable as they would be to the whole nation,
through the services rendered to several classes of workers, would be
only a by-product of the centralizing and systematizing process, the
immediate object of which would be the betterment of our libraries.
Let us return then from this digression. In the middle of last
century and towards its end, Edward Edwards and then his biographer,
Thomas Greenwood, both stated their conviction that central control
was necessary, and that one of its most useful instruments would be
systematic inspection. Greenwood quotes the following from Edwards:--
“If every Library in this country on which the public has any fair
claim, could be brought distinctly under public view, by a precise and
periodical statement, comprising at least three particulars: (1) what
it _is_; (2) what it _has_; and (3) what it _does_; a long train of
improvements would inevitably follow. But the systematic inspection of
Public Libraries to be effective must be national.”[33]
He goes on:
“The present writer is convinced that there will never be a full
measure of health and vitality in libraries generally until some
central control of this nature is established. The largest and best of
the public libraries do not need it, but would welcome it to secure
the welfare of the library body politic. But there is a class of
libraries, and it is to be feared that it is not a small one, which
seriously need to have light from the outside brought to bear upon
their administration. Such libraries are managed in a narrow, illiberal
manner, with rules which hamper rather than help the public. The staff
is selected without regard to conditions of suitability, training, or
merit, and every method adopted is of the tamest and least efficient
kind. Only national and systematic inspection can alter this state
of affairs. His Majesty’s inspectors of public schools perform an
efficient and salutary work without curbing local aspirations, and
similar inspectors of public libraries would be able to carry out an
equally useful task in connection with the municipal libraries. But
it is plain that no form of public Government inspection would be
agreeable to existing library authorities, unless accompanied by some
kind of substantial State aid.”[34]