Following in the wake of the great public library movement, which in
less than two decades has dotted the cities of the United States with
buildings that house millions of books for the people, came systems
of traveling libraries. The institutions which Jenkin Lloyd Jones
satirically terms Carnegeries, provide city dwellers with an amplitude
of reading material, but there was until a few years ago no provision
for similarly meeting the greater needs of the isolated persons living
remote from centers of population--in thousands of little hamlets, in
mining and lumber camps, in uncounted farmhouses.
Just fifteen years ago, Mr. Melvil Dewey, then state librarian of New
York, ever foremost in progressive library work and originator of most
of the far-reaching methods for making public libraries useful and
efficient, solved the problem which had bothered many thinkers on the
subject: How to give country people access to collections of books
selected by experienced and educated buyers, and how to renew these
collections so as to keep a fresh and plentiful supply on hand at all
times. Mr. Dewey's solution of the problem was absurdly simple. Anybody
could have thought it out without effort--but nobody else did. It was
this: From a centrally administered library, groups of books carefully
selected so as to comprise fifty or sixty volumes each, were packed
into suitable boxes or cases, and sent to small villages, country
schoolhouses, and centrally located farmhouses, to be distributed to
the neighborhoods on the same plan as books are given out from branch
stations in cities. At the end of six months, the books would be
gathered by the custodian, shipped back to the central distributing
agency, and a fresh lot would take their place. By this simple and
economical method the people of these little neighborhoods would secure
an opportunity to read the best and most interesting books without
financial burden.
"In the work of popular education," said Melvil Dewey pertinently, "it
is, after all, not the few great libraries, but the thousand small that
may do most for the people."
In fifteen years, the first little chest of books that went upon its
travels has multiplied to more than 5,000. Probably a third of a
million books are now constantly "on the go" in this fashion. Figures
are available for only twenty-two of the states, and according to
these the circulation for the states enumerated was 600,443 books last
year. It must be remembered that for a few years after the plan was
transplanted from New York to other states, private contributions were
the only reliance for maintaining the systems of traveling libraries.
It is only within the last half dozen years that the demonstration of
their usefulness prompted state legislatures to make appropriations
for this purpose, to enable state library commissions to extend this
great work on a liberal scale. The ease with which the traveling
libraries may be adapted to meet various needs may be shown in a rapid
summary compiled by Mr. F. A. Hutchins, who has been one of the leading
promoters of them in this state.
Some women in New Jersey have used them to lighten the long winter
days and evenings of the brave men who belong to the life-saving
service, and that state has now taken up the traveling library as a
definite part of the work of its state library; other women, in Salt
Lake City, send them regularly to remote valleys in Utah; a number of
state federations of women's clubs use them to furnish books for study
to isolated clubs; Mrs. Eugene B. Heard of Middleton, Ga., is devoting
herself to the supervision of an admirable system which reaches a large
number of small villages on the Seaboard Air Line in five southern
states; an association in Washington, D. C., puts libraries on the
canal-boats which ply on the Washington and Potomac Canal in the
summer and "tie-up" in small hamlets in the Blue Ridge Mountains in
the winter; the colored graduates of Hampton Institute carry libraries
to the schools for their own people at the base of the Cumberland
Mountains, while to the "mountain whites" libraries are sent by women's
clubs in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama. In Idaho, California,
Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, and many other
states, women's clubs are doing the same work for miners, lumbermen,
farmers, and sailors. The people of British Columbia and New Zealand
are successfully imitating their American cousins in this work. In
Massachusetts, where nearly every community has its public library, the
Woman's Educational Association is doing a most helpful work by using
traveling libraries to strengthen the weak public libraries in the hill
towns.
Of all the states of the Union which reported on traveling libraries
last year, Wisconsin stood first with a circulation of 122,093.
Wisconsin was the third state to adopt this method for bringing
wholesome books to people in the country. This was in 1895. The Free
Library Commission has charge of 563 of these little libraries,
which are sent to stations scattered all over the state and are
exchanged every six months. Each group contains books of history,
travel, fiction, biography, useful arts, and miscellaneous literature
so proportioned as to meet the needs of the average community as
determined by experience. The Wisconsin Commission also sends to
communities where there are many persons of foreign birth, the best
literature in their own tongues. In some sections of the state, people
go ten to twenty miles at regular intervals to secure these books.
The Commission also makes up study libraries for the use of clubs
engaged in serious study. The topics deal with English literature, art,
history, village and town improvement, questions of the day, etc.