Your committee has not been active during the whole year, the present
chairman having been appointed to fill a vacancy. What it has done
has been in the way of a small beginning toward a general survey of
methods in public libraries, which it is hoped may be carried forward
to completion in future years.
The scientific position that the first thing to do, in making an
investigation, is to find out the facts, has only recently been taken
in work of this kind. It has generally been assumed by those who have
desired to better conditions of any sort that the existing conditions
were well known to all. The fact is that no one person or group of
persons is in a position to know all the conditions thoroughly and that
the elementary task of ascertaining them and stating them is usually
by no means easy. It is now generally recognized that we must have
a Survey--an ascertainment and plain statement of the facts as they
are--as a preliminary to action or even to discussion.
It has seemed to your committee that the general feeling, shared by
the educational and industrial worlds, that methods are not always
efficiently adjusted to aims should find some place also in the
library. We are spending large sums of public money, and investigations
by "economy committees," "efficiency bureaus" and the like are
taking place all around us. It will be well for us to take a step in
advance of these and get for ourselves some sort of a birds-eye view
of our work, from the standpoint of its possible lack of complete
efficiency--adaptation of end to aim. In order to do this we must first
have a survey, which we conceive to involve in this case a statement of
just what libraries are trying to do and just how, in some minuteness
of detail, they are trying to do it. Comparison and discussion of
methods will naturally follow later.
The method of taking up this matter was suggested by some very
preliminary work done in the St. Louis public library. The head of each
of the various branches and departments was asked to make a detailed
written list of the various operations performed by the assistants in
that particular department, dividing them into purely mechanical acts
and those involving some thought or judgment. This in itself proved to
be an interesting task and both information and stimulation resulted
from it. Certain operations, common to the largest number of kinds of
work, were then selected and tests were made, involving both speed of
performance and efficiency of result. From a large number of such tests
it is expected that some standardization of operations may result, or
at any rate the cutting out of useless details and the saving of time
for needed extensions of work. The object of an investigation of this
kind is of course not to discover ways of making assistants work harder
and faster but to find out whether the same amount of work, or more of
it, may not be done with less effort.
To extend this bit of experimental work, which has not progressed
beyond its first steps, to all the libraries of the United States is
of course impossible without modification. Your committee has not the
machinery to handle detailed lists of operations from thousands of
different libraries. Fortunately it is easy to select operations that
are common to very large numbers of libraries of divers sizes and kinds
and in all parts of the country. As examples of such operations, and
as a small beginning, we selected those of accessioning, charging and
discharging, and counting issue. Even with a narrowing of the field
to two operations, however, it was impossible to investigate these in
all our libraries, or even in a large number. After a discussion by
correspondence, revealing some difference of opinion, we decided to
select about twenty-five libraries, as representative as possible of
different sizes, different institutions and different localities. The
list as finally made up was as follows:--