The Time to Build
Don’t Build too Soon. All authorities warn against building prematurely.
“It is a risky undertaking for a board to erect a building in the first stage of their enterprise. Better wait until its wants are developed in temporary quarters.”—Wm. F. Poole.[83]
“Don’t build until you have the library, the librarian, and the money.”—J. C. Dana.[84]
“Get your librarian, books, and methods first. Use rented rooms until you know what you want. Almost any rooms can be made to serve as a beginning, and can be so planned that the fixtures and furniture are all available for a new building. Experience will then teach just the kind of building that is needed for that particular town and library.”[85]
Alter Sparingly. In a building given you already occupied, make such not too expensive enlargements or alterations as growth absolutely demands, but take a long look ahead toward rebuilding. With the changes in library methods developing so rapidly, a patched old building soon becomes hopelessly out of date, and clogs progress. Better save up money and cultivate opinion in favor of building anew. Looking a generation ahead, economy alone will demand, at some not distant time, a building in which economy of time and service will be possible. Do not go down to posterity in patched-up old clothes.
But Begin to Prepare Early. As soon as your librarian is selected, your books bought, and your method started, it is never too early to think and talk building. It will take a long time of fixed purpose to work up to a gift or an appropriation. To canvass merits of sites, to study precedents of management, to calculate chances of development, to educate your librarian, to watch and ask about architects, to pick out deliberately the ideal building committee, will occupy many interesting hours at board meetings and consume months or years of preparation. While you are about it, time so taken will allow you to accumulate a lot of information, and to mature your judgment. If you have your librarian get him to look up the files of the library journals, and the annual reports of libraries of your grade and class, and such as are rather ahead of you, who have already realized what your future may be. In these you will pick up here and there many useful hints of experience. If you go to library club meetings and talk with trustees and librarians with similar problems to yours; if you take an occasional leisurely jaunt to well-managed neighboring libraries, you will absorb and be able to digest ideas which a hurried search, after beginning to build, might not elicit just when you want to use them.
And do not Put Off too Long. But when you are ready, go! Patient preparation has fitted all for wise decision and prompt action. There is a psychological moment at which public or donor may be carried by storm, and the necessary funds can be secured. He who hesitates then, is surely lost. When the money is secured, and sufficient experience or advice has been accumulated, the sooner you decide to begin to plan, the better. Beginning to plan, however, is remote from actual building. “Well lathered is half shaved” is a homely proverb, and the analogy holds in library planning, even for the smallest building. Months to formulate and fit together the first sketches, months to work them out practically with the architect, many conferences with the building committee, time after decision to prepare working plans, time still to invite and compare bids, then the slow processes of building,—there is a deal of delay ahead after the decision is made to build. You have just about got half through when you finish these preliminaries.
The time to build is therefore when you are very sure everything is ripe for action;—methods, preparation, plans, enthusiasm, harmony, good advice, suitable agents, sufficient funds.