The trained librarian in a small library
Julia A. Hopkins, of the Rochester (N.Y.) Public library, in Public
Libraries, December, 1897
The value of training for the man or woman who shall take charge of a
large city library is now so firmly established that no one thinks
of discussing the question. If it is true that technical training is
essential for the headship of a large library, why is it not equally
necessary for that of a small library? Trained service is always of
greater value than untrained service, be the sphere great or small. If
a woman argued from the standpoint that, because the house she was to
take charge of had only seven rooms instead of twenty she needed to
know nothing of cooking, sweeping, and the other details of household
work, I am afraid that her house and her family would suffer for her
ignorance. So in many departments of library work the accident of size
makes little or no difference; the work is precisely the same. The
difference lies in the fact that the head of a large library oversees
and directs the work done by others, where the village librarian
must, in many cases, do all of the work himself. In the distinctly
professional duties, such as the ordering, classifying, and cataloging
of books, there is a difference only in amount between the greater and
the less. And it is precisely these professional duties of which the
person untrained in library work is in most cases wofully ignorant.
It is inevitable that in starting a library there should be some
mistakes made; but with a trained librarian in charge, these mistakes
will be fewer in number. For example, what does the novice know of
classification? He realizes that the books, for convenience in use,
must be grouped in classes. If he has had the use of a good library
(as a college student would) he has some idea as to how the class
divisions are made, and knows also that there must be some sort of
notation for the classes. Necessity being the mother of invention, he
contrives some plan for bringing together books on the same subject.
But with the addition of books to the library and the demand which
growth makes, he finds that constant changes have to be made in order
to get books into their right places; and then some day he awakens to
the fact that there is some perfectly well-known and adopted system of
classification which will answer all his purposes, and be a great deal
more satisfactory in its adaptability to the needs of his library than
the one he has been struggling to evolve. Then he exclaims in despair:
If I had only known of that at the beginning! He feels that the hours
which he has spent in rearranging his books, taking them out of one
class and putting them into another, although hours of such hard work,
are in reality so many hours of wasted time. And he is right; for
every minute spent in unnecessary work is so much lost time. Not only
that, but it is unnecessary expense, and one of the most important
things which a small library has to consider is economy.
Is it not of value to the library that its librarian should know how
best to expend the money given him to use? that he should not have to
regret hours of time lost over useless experiments? Surely if training
teaches a librarian a wise expenditure of money and an economy of
time, then training must be valuable.