MAKING A LIBRARY USEFUL TO BUSINESS MEN
On first giving consideration to this paper I was inclined to believe that the story of the personal use of the library (the public library) by business men would be almost as brief as the traditional story of snakes in Ireland. Few librarians have the means of knowing how many business men use their institutions, but where statistics of registration indicate the occupation of card holders it would appear that the library gets almost as many bartenders as bankers.
To get some definite data on this subject I had the library records investigated of the 198 officers and committees of the Grand Rapids Association of Commerce, the leading business organization of our city, with a membership of 1,300. These 198 men (and a few women) represent our most active business concerns, as well as a few professions. Of this number only 53, or 27 per cent, have live library cards. In looking over the names I recognized 38 of those without cards as persons who either individually or through their employees in the interest of the house, have used the library more or less for reference purposes. There are of course others who use the library in this way without my knowledge.
These figures indicate that the library is serving directly only about 50 per cent of the livest business men of the town. The specific questions I propose to discuss are, Why do business men use the library relatively little? What can the library do to get business men to use it more?
Progressive business men use the library because they recognize the enormous value of new ideas and of new knowledge to their business, no matter where they get them. The trouble is that public libraries can't always furnish them the knowledge they need. And furthermore not all business men are progressive. There are standpatters in the business, as well as in the political world. However, there is no class of men who have a better idea of the potential power of print, rightly used, than the business men who advertise. Such men are always ready to meet the library more than half way.
In discussing this question I should have preferred to use the term "business men" in a liberal sense. We are all more or less "business" people at times, but for this occasion I am directed by our president to limit it to that one of its 24 different meanings which applies to employer rather than employee in "the occupations of conducting trade or monetary transactions" and in "employments requiring knowledge of accounts and financial methods."
Before proceeding further permit me to state my conviction that the greatest service the library is doing for business men is not to business men personally, but rather for them through their employees,—in supplying knowledge and in promoting the general intelligence and the social welfare of the community. These things are of the greatest importance to every employer, for they are the foundations on which all efficiency is built. The social welfare work of the Panama Canal, much of it the kind libraries are doing, is a conspicuous example of the immense financial value of such work.
The male portion of adult society we may roughly divide, so far as occupations are concerned, into manual workers (laborers and mechanics), professional men, business men, and drones (the idle class) who, like the lilies of the field, neither toil nor spin, but who frequently outshine Solomon in the gorgeousness and variety of their array. They live a parasitic life on the productive labor of their fellow men, giving no adequate return. In the administration of our public libraries most consideration has been given to the idle class and to the professional classes. Real service for the manual workers and business men has been largely neglected until within recent years.
There are several reasons for this neglect. Among these may be mentioned the following: Working men and business men are expressing themselves in deeds and in things rather than in words and books; and therefore until recently there has been relatively little worth-while material available for the libraries to put on their shelves for the men directly engaged in industrial or commercial pursuits. Furthermore there has been a long standing prejudice on the part of these men (those who are rule-of-thumb men) against the reliability and the utility of things in print for their everyday work. And in certain quarters this prejudice still exists to a very considerable extent. They are inclined to look upon the writers and users of books as theoretical and impractical.
A further handicap in the use of libraries by business men, is the fact that so few of us in library work know the contents of books and things in print that might be useful to them in their daily work; and oftener we know still less of the problems business men must deal with. Therefore we cannot relate the inside of books with their work.
Much of the work of the public library is a kind of salesmanship, even though there is no direct exchange of the coin of the country. Salesmanship in its best sense is service, and service is what a city is buying for all its people when it puts into its annual budget a more or less (usually less) adequate sum of money for its library. As things are today I fear that in too many cases the public instead of drawing a plum from the library pie is not infrequently handed a lemon.
Recently I had the pleasure of dining with the vice-president of a department store that employs over 2,500 people to sell nothing but clothes—wearing apparel. He told me that the great secret of the success of his institution, through whose doors there enter from 30,000 to 40,000 people every day (and remember that nearly all these people enter with the expectation of parting with some of their good money), is the fact that every employee has instilled into him or her the fact that the salesmanship that brings success is service and that it is founded on knowledge; for, said he, "No one can sell goods satisfactorily unless he knows all about them,"—where they are made, how they are made, what they are, their history, etc. And these things everyone in this store is systematically taught. Incidentally, I may add that this department store starts its people at a minimum wage higher than the minimum in many libraries, and the maximum for women in this store is double the maximum of the highest paid women in library work in this country. This store uses the public library of its city and has a library of its own whose librarian is at this convention at the expense of the store. When a department store finds such a policy a wise one the business men responsible for its management will be the first in the community to support a policy of library service based on knowledge. But business men must be shown that the library is delivering the goods.
The business man places his establishment so far as possible where it will best serve the purposes of his business, and he spends loads of good money in the first place, and annually in the form of taxation, to get his building at the right place. Besides getting his establishment at the right place he also spends more loads of good money to arrange it for the economic and expeditious handling of his affairs in it. So far as libraries relate to serving the business man, as well as nine-tenths of the other people in the community, I am convinced that 95 per cent of the library buildings of the country are badly located, and furthermore that the large proportion of these buildings are badly arranged for the work they have, or ought, to do.
The place to serve the people is where the people daily congregate and pass by in the largest numbers. This is never on a side street or in the "best" residence section of the city. Your average "best" citizen today gets more satisfaction out of his public library in showing his visitor from out of town the Greek temple set back in a beautiful grove or garden as he whirls by in his six cylinder, 60 horse-power, seven-passenger touring car than in using the books and periodicals inside. Such a building in such a setting has a value as a work of art, but not as a library for service. Incidentally, it is only fair to say that business men in most of our cities are largely responsible that we have library buildings for show rather than for use.
Every block that separates the library from the principal lines of the movement of the people, every foot that people must walk from the sidewalk to the entrance of the building and then to its books, every step that must be climbed above the level of the sidewalk to reach the first floor, are all so many hurdles, barriers, which the people are obliged to overcome before they can get to their own books, whether it be to use them for business or pleasure, for education or recreation. The bad location and arrangement of library buildings in the United States are keeping hundreds of thousands of potential users and supporters of libraries away from them and out of them every day of the year. And there is no class of persons in the community more affected by such things than business men, for they recognize (consciously or unconsciously) better than any other class the commercial value of time and convenience.
Let me put this a little more concretely. The library building in which I work is better located and arranged than the average library building of the country. And yet the total distance walked to and from the sidewalk by all those who enter that building daily is nearly 35 miles to the point where the library begins to serve them. Furthermore each one of the thousand and more persons who daily enter this building, in addition to the energy he uses in walking 180 feet to and from the sidewalk must lift his own weight and the weight of the books he carries seven feet above the level of the sidewalk. In other words the location and arrangement of this building with reference to the sidewalk requires the people who use it daily to take an extra walk of almost the distance from Baltimore to Washington and at the same time carry a weight equal to that of a ton of coal 350 feet to the top of a skyscraper and down again. And all this is in addition to the walk of 450 feet from the nearest car line, which few people use, 800 feet from the car lines which are generally used, and over 400 feet from the nearest thoroughfare. The library to be a friend to man, and to serve him, must "live in a house by the side of the road where the race of men go by."
The business man who studies usually buys his own printed matter that deals directly with his work, and in this respect he is usually far ahead of the library both in knowledge and in material at hand; and the bigger his business the more is this likely to be the case. The librarian will almost invariably find such a man a most helpful person in the selection of things to be purchased and in the relative value of both authors and books. It should be the business of every librarian to know intimately, as far as possible, all such men in the community.
Our public libraries must largely increase on their shelves the number of things in print that are of real service to the business man in his work. First of all we must know what these things are, and next we need to have the nerve to spend money for them much more freely than we have ever done before. This is expensive and most such expenditures will not show in the statistics of circulation. As an illustration of this let me refer again to the institution I have the honor to serve. For a number of years we have been spending $400 a year for books in only one line of business. Besides the books, we take some two dozen current periodicals on the same subject. All are used to a considerable extent and the use made of them by only a dozen men is of the greatest commercial and financial importance to our city. And yet so far as the figures of circulation are concerned the expenditure of $450 of our annual book fund for this one business is practically nothing.
We must get away from the idea of measuring the usefulness or the efficiency of the library by the number of books issued for home use. So long as this idea dominates our public library work we can never do our best for the community, and especially the business part of it.
We need of course many books for the business man in our circulating departments, but these by no means meet the need. Many of these books are out of date in a few years at the best. To keep up to date there is necessary a liberal purchase of yearbooks, transactions and publications of industrial, technical and commercial associations which bring down to date annually, and in convenient form, the latest knowledge in their respective fields. For progressive business men such works are vastly more important than encyclopedias, important as encyclopedias of all kinds are.
Then too we must pay greater respect to the material published in pamphlet form. On a multitude of subjects some of the latest and best things have appeared in this form. Most of us do not handle this material properly, if at all. In many libraries pamphlets are regarded and cared for with about the same degree of disrespect as were public documents in most libraries twenty years ago, and I regret to say, in many libraries today. And as for the public use made of pamphlets, it is practically nothing.
But more important for the wide-awake business man than books, documents and pamphlets, is a large collection of current periodicals relating to every kind of business activity in your city, with clipping files on many subjects, for it is only through these that it is possible to keep up with the latest information or for the library to supply the thing that is most needed at the minute. As an illustration of such use I recall several recent instances of business men getting up briefs in connection with the proposed Underwood tariff bill. The latest information, even when compiled sometimes by government authorities, was secured from technical or trade journals before it could be received from the Government Printing Office.
In short the best work the library can do for the business men personally is in the building itself, supplemented by extensive use of the telephone and the mails (reference or information work if you please), and not by issuing to them for home use books whose information at the best is rarely less than a year old, but in reality is more likely to be five, ten, or even twenty years old. The circulating book has a most important place and I would not for one moment take from it the importance that is its due. My plea is that we recognize more fully for our business man, and especially the so-called small business man—the man of small business, or the young man who hopes to establish a business of his own, the great importance of library assistants who know the contents and the relative value of books, pamphlets and periodicals, and who understand the art of library salesmanship whereby the business man gets the things he really needs.
And then when we have done all this—have librarians who know, and the things in print the business man needs, this one thing more we must do, we must let the business man know what we have for his particular problem and how we can serve him. The library must advertise the utility of ideas and of knowledge in the every day work of the world as well as advertise its resources and its service.
The best advertising is that which comes from a well served patron. But our libraries have thrown away one of the best means of publicity by locating their buildings where people must go out of their way to find them and by so arranging them that the passerby sees nothing but stone, brick and glass—things that suggest nothing of the joy and usefulness of books. Seeing great crowds enjoying and using books, as well as seeing attractive things in print through properly arranged show windows, would appeal to the average library user in a way that would simply compel his interest and attention in the things we have for him.
The architecture of the average library building suggests a tomb—a place for dead ones—rather than a place chock-full of the things that appeal with tremendous force to the soul that is alive with the throbbing impulses of this wonderful time in which we live.
Since our buildings deny us this great means of publicity which the show window enables every merchant to use to such great advantage, we must use as best we may such means as we find available. In a general way I may state my conviction that we should make a much larger use of the specific personal appeal as over against general publicity, though the latter is also necessary. When a man has a definite task assigned him put the resources and service of your library directly up to him for his particular problem, especially if the problem is one a little outside the circle of his regular business. It will come to him at the psychological moment and he is most likely to act on your suggestion; whereas had it come to him as a general statement before he was personally interested most likely it would have been promptly forgotten. As a part of our regular routine letters from the library go to all such persons, as we see their names in the newspapers, on programs, etc.
At the meeting of the Associated Advertising Clubs of America early this month in Baltimore I had the pleasure of "getting next" to some of the livest business men in the country. The thing that impressed me most was not the interesting exhibitions there shown or the various "stunts" that were pulled off, but the new note that some of the men were striking. It was this: "Business and business efficiency for service rather than for profit." This is a high ideal, worthy of any profession, and I venture the prediction that it will be men of this type who will more and more dominate the business world of the future. Such men will appreciate and support the public library more than business men have ever done before; but they will also require more. To get their support we as librarians must think less of measuring our efficiency in terms of circulation statistics, a kind of impersonal, bookkeeping standard, but more of measuring it in terms of human service—human service not only for the business man, but for every man, every woman and every child in all this vast continent of America.
The PRESIDENT: Great as is the opportunity of the public library to serve the business man, it can't do it all, for so highly specialized are some of the departments of interest of the various business houses that no public library without a treasury like that of our millionaire concerns could hope to undertake a work of that character. Therefore, each large business concern necessarily must supplement the resources of the public library by means of library facilities of its own. We shall hear something of this form of work this morning in the paper which is to be presented by one of the most successful of the libraries of this type, that of H. M. Byllesby & Co. of Chicago, whose librarian, Miss LOUISE B. KRAUSE, will give us the paper.