The Trustees
To the trustees falls full and final responsibility for all library building. They formulate the needs of the library, get the funds from the proper body, choose the site, elect the librarian, and select the architect. After hearing the librarian and architect, they decide on all its exterior and interior features. With them should really rest either praise or blame for the result. Unlike the librarian and architect, they serve without stipend. They deserve every consideration and full support.
But not every trustee is an archangel. Boards of trustees may harbor many faddists, many cranks, many busy-bodies. How to head these off from meddling with building is a problem in tact. There is often a member who “knows it all,” and cannot be moved by any expert advice. He is just the man who wants to take control. He is dangerous.
“More buildings are spoiled by clients than by architects.”—E. B. Green.[115] And this kind of trustee is the client who is most apt to spoil the library.
“The trustee will be careful not to consider himself an expert.”—Dr. Jas. H. Canfield.[116] But if there is a sane majority who realize the seriousness and extent of their task, they can at least select their sanest three to serve as a building committee, delegating to them details of investigation, reserving to the full board only important points reported by the committee.
In small communities the trustees will probably be men of greater experience in affairs than their librarian, and better able to make investigations than he. They will also be better able to deal with the architect, and to judge the soundness of his advice. As the library is larger, large enough to have a mature and trained librarian, the board need not take an active part but may be content to serve as a court of appeal.
Experience of the past has shown that there are two prevalent dangers: first, the idea that the board has a primary function to make their building an ornament to the town or institution; second, the delusion of some member that a little dabbling in architecture or building has made him competent to advise the architect.
If a library can be made both practical and beautiful within the appropriation by expert advice, free from amateur experience, it is enough for the trustees to take pride in, that they have furnished wise guidance to such a happy result. Interference with technical details on their part is very unwise. The board should realize that they are trustees of the library, not an Art Commission, and that the special trust committed to them, the trust to which they must be true, is the use of books, not the abuse of architecture.