The work of the Free Library Commission may be briefly summarized as
follows:
_Supervision._ Works for the establishment of public libraries in
localities able to support them.
Visits libraries for the purpose of giving advice and instruction.
Collects and publishes statistics of libraries for the guidance and
information of trustees.
Prints a bi-monthly bulletin, news notes and suggestions to keep
librarians and trustees informed in regard to library progress
throughout the state.
Gives advice and assistance in planning library buildings and collects
material on this subject for the use of library boards.
_Instruction._ Aids in organizing new libraries.
Assists in reorganizing old libraries according to modern methods
which insure the best results and greatest efficiency of the library.
Conducts a school for library training for the purpose of improving
the service in small libraries.
Holds institutes for librarians to instruct those who cannot attend
summer school.
_Traveling Libraries._ Maintains a system of traveling libraries which
furnishes books to rural communities and villages too small to support
local libraries, and to larger villages and towns as an inducement to
establish free public libraries.
Aids in organization and administration of county traveling library
systems.
_Clearing House._ Operates a clearing house for magazines to build up
reference collections of bound periodicals in the public libraries of
the state.
_Document Department._ Maintains a document department for the use of
state officers, members of the legislature and others interested in
the growth and development of affairs in the state, and catalogues and
exchanges state documents for the benefit of public libraries.
_Book Lists._ Distributes a suggestive list of books for small
libraries to insure purchase of the books in the best editions.
Issues frequent buying lists of current books to aid committees in
securing the best investment of book funds.
Compiles buying lists on special subjects or for special libraries
upon request.
V
It must not be supposed, because the great library growth has been
manifested in the last decade, that there were wanting prior to that
period interested men and women hopeful and active to give impulse
for like conditions. Away back in 1840, when Wisconsin was a frontier
territory ambitious to advance to statehood, the council and assembly
enacted a law to encourage subscription libraries. A public library
supported by taxation was not then dreamed of, for there was then
none in the entire United States, nor for ten years thereafter. It is
interesting to note that in these territorial days, the little hamlet
of log houses known as Madison enjoyed the advantages of a library open
to all who cared to use it. It was the private library of the governor,
James Duane Doty, which he threw open to the public. Col. Geo. W.
Bird, in his account of it, says that it contained about five hundred
volumes of a general historical, educational and literary character
and a number of the best maps known at that time. It was housed in the
governor's private office, which was a small one-story frame building
of one room situated among the trees in the little backwoods town. The
books were arranged in low shelving around the sides of the room, and
the scanty furniture, consisting of a small desk, a deal-board table,
three or four chairs, a pine bench, and a register in which to enter
the taking and returning of books, completed the equipment.
Over the shelving on the westerly side of the room, was this direction,
painted in black on a white field: "Take, Read and Return." There
were only two regulations as to the use of the library and they were
displayed conspicuously in red ink about the room, and they were as
follows:
1. Any white resident between the lakes, the Catfish and the westerly
hills, his wife and children, may have the privileges of this library
so long as they do not soil or injure the books, and properly return
them.
2. Any such resident, his wife or children, may take from the library
one book at a time and retain it not to exceed two weeks, and then
return it, and on failure to return promptly, he or she shall be
considered, and published, as an outcast in the community.
"I do not remember of there ever having been occasion for inflicting
this penalty. I do remember my father sending me one day when the
time-limit of a book was about to expire, with a note to a family,
requiring the return of a book that day, and calling attention
pointedly to the above penalty of failure; and I remember how concerned
the mother was, and how quickly she got the book and dragging me along
after her, speedily returned it to the library, and thus escaped the
sentence of outlawry," concludes Col. Bird.