PRESENT CONDITIONS AND TENDENCIES OF LIBRARY WORK IN GREAT BRITAIN
Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen: I should like first of all to express the peculiar personal pleasure I feel at being privileged for the second time to attend a conference of the American Library Association. As you have said, sir, it was my pleasure in 1904 to attend a meeting of your body, then as now the accredited delegate of my Association, but that meeting of 1904 was, as you know, an international meeting, and an international meeting anywhere is apt to take on general rather than special characteristics, and I have long wished to be present at an ordinary meeting of the American Library Association, so that I might see for myself how you conduct your work and hear you discussing your own problems in your own way. So that I trust, Mr. President and ladies and gentlemen, that you will kindly forget that
"A chiel's amang ye takin' notes."
I am authorized by the Council of the Library Association to extend to you, sir, and the members present their very heartiest greetings and to express on their behalf their high appreciation not only of the special invitation which you sent to them to send a delegate but for the extremely generous offer of hospitality which was attached thereto. My Council felt that to such an invitation only one response is possible and that was to accept.
We were in hope that Mr. Henry R. Tedder, who is the chairman of the Council of the Library Association and its honorary treasurer and an ex-president,—and otherwise the secretary of the Athenaeum Club,—would have come as our delegate, because Mr. Tedder's importance is intrinsic and not like mine purely adventitious and depending wholly upon the office which I at the moment have the privilege to hold; but it was impossible for Mr. Tedder to come on this occasion and, ladies and gentlemen, I am the best that we can do for you at this time.
But I am happy to say that it is the general feeling of the Council that in future we should not let many meetings of the A. L. A.—at all events in the eastern states—go by without sending one or more members of our Association to be present at them. I do not think that there is anything from which our Association is likely to get a more valuable return than by the visits of some of its more prominent members to America in order that they may see for themselves and not merely read about what you are doing, and how you are doing it and get some knowledge of the conditions under which you are working, of your achievements and of your difficulties, and so bring to library work in Great Britain that added power which must inevitably come from a wider knowledge. So that I trust that the imperfections of the present delegate will be overlooked, in the hope not only of more but of better to come.
I am also requested by my Council to extend a very hearty invitation to the members of the American Library Association to attend the annual meeting of the Library Association to be held in 1914. That meeting will almost certainly be held at Oxford, by invitation of the University and of the city. I need not of course point out the extreme suitability of the city of Oxford for a meeting of librarians, nor the attractions which Oxford must possess for everyone who likes an atmosphere of ancient learning and who revels in the architectural glories of a bygone day. So we hope that as many of you as possible will come over there for that meeting in order that we may make of it a sort of Americo-Anglican conference. Observe the order, please, in which I mention those words. I draw special attention to that because I believe I have somewhat of a reputation for an absence of tact on these occasions—at any rate among our own members.
When I informed Mr. Utley that I was coming he was good enough to write me a letter, which I received just before I sailed, and he asked—not knowing me very well of course, or he might not have been so liberal in his invitation—that I should talk to you on any subject I liked. I thought that it would be best perhaps if I should say something about the present conditions of library work in Great Britain. Of course it is impossible, in an address lasting only a few minutes, to cover anything like the whole field, and if I did attempt it I should only bore you. But you may be interested in one or two of the outstanding features of our recent work, because they throw light upon conditions which are in many respects very different from yours. First of all, there are two features in what I may perhaps call the domestic situation, which to us are of considerable significance. The most important step which the Library Association as an association has ever taken has been the recent reorganization of its membership along the lines of the professional qualifications of the members. In our old grouping we took no account whatever of whether a member of the Association was a professional librarian or merely a member of a library committee or just a person interested in library work. The honorary fellows of the Association and the fellows were any persons, whether librarians or not, whose names would add dignity and importance to the Association, or who had distinguished themselves by some special service rendered to the Association or the movement as a whole. Then in addition Mr. Tedder himself had a small group of what he called very honorary fellows who were the honorary fellows who insisted on paying their annual dues. That was an entirely private group of Mr. Tedder's. Now we have changed all that. Fellows and members of the Association are now professional librarians only, and non-professional librarians are known as associate members. The privileges of membership including the power to vote and to serve on the Council are shared equally by all members of the Association. The fellows consist in the main of librarians only, but there is a small sprinkling of deputy and sub-librarians. The by-law referring to fellows who do not hold chief positions states that "they must be librarians of approved status," but we interpret that phrase "approved status" in the widest possible way. The members consist of assistant librarians—all those assistant librarians who are not in the small group of fellows; they must be twenty-five years of age and have had six years' experience. That is so at the moment. But after the 31st day of December, 1914, only librarians who possess the diploma of the Association will be entitled to fellowship, and in order to receive the diploma you must have taken in addition to possessing practical experience in an approved library, the six examinations held by the Association, have obtained the six certificates, have gone through if necessary a vive voce examination and have submitted a thesis. Then professional librarians who possess four out of the six certificates will be entitled to membership. A good deal of criticism has been leveled at the scheme owing to the fact that the librarian of some pettifogging little library, with perhaps a total rate income of a couple of hundred a year or even less, because he is a chief in a small way, is entitled to fellowship, while an assistant in a big library system, who may have infinitely more responsibility, is only entitled to membership. But we had to begin somewhere and we had to draw the line somewhere and we drew the line at the sub-librarian, because when we got below the sub-librarian we should not know where on earth we were, because there is no accepted nomenclature of library positions in our country. I do not know whether there is in yours. "Sub-librarian" does not always mean the same thing. The term "chief assistant" is used in a very different way in different libraries. Moreover, the Privy Council would not have approved these by-laws unless we had opened the door as widely as possible to the holders of all existing chief positions.
There is one weak point so far which we have discovered in our scheme. We have no provision for non-professional members corresponding to professional fellowship among the professional members, but we have a new by-law now before the Privy Council creating a group of associate fellows and the associate fellowship will be conferred upon chairmen of library committees and upon non-professional members of the Association who have served the Association in some definite capacity as members of the Council or in some other way.
That, I think, then is the most important domestic thing that we have ever done because we have now made the beginnings at all events of a definite organization of the profession.
The other important thing will not have the same interest for you, but I mention it because it throws light upon our own conditions. We have settled, by a new by-law, the relations of branch associations to the parent body. Until recently we had a by-law which merely provided that branches in any particular district may be formed but it did not state what the powers of the branches were, and owing to that absence of definition we have suffered for a great many years past from a considerable amount of trouble. One or two of the branches grew considerably in recent years, in numbers and in importance; and they began to resent the fact, the inevitable fact of course, that for the most part the actual work of running the Association fell upon the members of the Council who were resident in London or near it. It may seem absurd to you to speak of the distance of London from the great provincial centers in Great Britain, but it is not absurd, because every country measures distance on its own scale, and to all intents and purposes Manchester is just as far from London as Chicago is from New York—because we think it is. As Hamlet says, you will remember—anticipating Mrs. Eddy by several centuries—
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
And as an illustration of the result of this friction I may mention that in London, at the library school—which is hardly a library school because it has not the organization that your schools have, so I ought not to use that term really, but a department of library lectures at the London School of Economics and Political Science, which is a department of the University of London; at these lectures all persons are admissible whether they are librarians or not, but at similar lectures in the provinces everybody was excluded who was not already engaged in library work. So that you had the absurd situation that while the parent body was running one policy at headquarters you had branch associations running an entirely different policy in their own centers. The question of the "open door," as it was termed, was a very hotly debated one at one time in our Association. Well, the general effect of the stress between the branches and the Council was of course bad, each branch being a more or less permanent storm center. While no absolute harm was done perhaps, and while the fireworks let off at the annual meetings were of a more or less harmless character, at the same time we had a general condition of irritation which affected injuriously the work of the Association as a whole. Now we have done away with that, very largely at all events, at least, we hope, by a new by-law, the main points of which are these: First of all, membership of a branch association includes membership of the parent body; the parent body receiving the subscription to the branch association returns to the branch association a rebate of so much a head for the expenses of the branch and, most important of all, the constitution and by-laws of a branch must be approved by the headquarters council and must in no case conflict with the by-laws and constitution of the parent body.
The Council meets monthly, I may say, and one of the quarterly meetings is held on the occasion of the annual meeting. So that means that the expenses of the provincial members are paid to three of the quarterly meetings held during the year; and all the important business—especially contentious business—is relegated to those quarterly meetings.
Leaving the domestic question and coming to the library situation as a whole in Great Britain, I think that the phrase "marking time" fairly describes it. The public libraries in the United Kingdom have accomplished, I think, great things with extremely limited means. But though the first library act was passed in 1850, though the libraries have since then justified themselves many times over, though the demands made upon the libraries have gone on increasing time after time, yet the libraries are still strangled by the statutory limitation of one-penny-in-the-pound on the tax leviable for library purposes which was imposed not by the Ewart Act of 1850, which limited the rate to a halfpenny, but by the amending act of 1855. It is quite true that about forty of the large towns of the country have promoted special parliamentary bills giving them power to levy a rate of two-pence or even more in the pound, but in very few cases is two-pence actually levied, and of course it is the smaller towns, which can not face the expense of promoting special legislation, which really need greater rating powers even more than the larger boroughs.
As the incidence of a library tax in Great Britain is quite different from yours I may perhaps give you some general idea of what it means by taking the case of my own town, simply because I happen to remember the facts more clearly. Croydon is a town in the outer London ring, with a population of 174,257 people. Its income from the penny rate is a little over £4,000 sterling. It circulates about 555,000 volumes per annum and its fiction percentage is about fifty. Whether that is something to be apologized for or not I am not quite clear, after the president's address of last evening. Then one has to remember that the ratable value of a place like Croydon is a good deal higher than the ratable value of most of the provincial towns. But those figures will give you a general idea of the yield of the penny-in-the-pound rate. A rate of that kind results, you will easily see, in the case of the smaller towns, in a condition of genteel poverty, and in the case of many small towns of absolute hopeless starvation. And this unfortunate position has been accentuated by the tremendous growth of branches in recent years. Of the three b's which constitute a library—building, brains and books,—the ordinary British rate-payer thinks mainly of buildings. The building usually does not cost him anything, because he gets it from Mr. Carnegie, and it is something to look at and something "we've got for our ward, don't you know," books will drop from the sky, and "anyhow you don't require brains to hand books over a counter." Hence, from this you have a town, which will perhaps support, in passable efficiency, one central building and two branches, endeavoring to support one central building perhaps and six branches, and so on. Hence the limited book funds which we have in our libraries and hence on the whole the poorly remunerated library staffs.
And that brings me to a point which it was suggested to me by one of your members I should say something about, and that is the position of women in English public libraries. I am not going to express any opinion on the subject of women in libraries. After all, as George Bernard Shaw says somewhere, opinions are really only serious when you act on them, and my capacity for courage has never been equal to the task of acting upon many of my opinions. But as things are at present, a number of libraries employ women assistants. There are very few places where women are chief librarians; there are a few in the quite small towns. There are very few libraries which have women sub-librarians or deputy-librarians. These are almost invariably men. But the number of women employed in secondary and tertiary positions in English public libraries is considerable and is very definitely increasing. And whether that be a good thing or a bad thing, I am quite clear about this, that it is increasing for the wrong reason. Women are employed in English public libraries not because they are better, but because they are cheaper—with the unfortunate result that the increase of women in the library staffs tends necessarily to lower the already low average of salaries paid.
The Library Association have long recognized of course that the root of all our present difficulties lies in the limitation on the library income, and in order to do away with that they have been promoting for the last three or four years or more a library bill, the main clause of which permits a town to levy a rate, not exceeding two-pence-in-the-pound, that is exactly double the present amount. When we originally drafted the bill we did away with the limitation altogether, but we have now put a limitation in order to placate possible opposition. That bill has been already read once before the present parliament—but the first reading of course is a purely formal matter; it is the second reading which is the crucial one; and owing to the exasperating nature of the orders of the House of Commons any one member has only to rise in his seat and say, "I object," to a private member's bill for that bill to be labeled "contentious business" and for its second reading to be deferred to the Greek kalends, owing of course to the enormous number of private members' bills and to the growing inefficiency of the House of Commons as a legislating machine. It is choked with bills and it can not adequately attend to the thousand-and-one matters which call for its attention. The best chance for the bill would be for the government to grant facilities for it. If they would do that I have not the slightest doubt that the bill would pass because so far as we can see there is little or no serious opposition to it; but we can not get it discussed. The unfortunate fact seems to be that the government will not worry about anything which does not sway votes. Nobody is going to get excited about a library bill. If it is true that there is no particular opposition to it, it is also true that there is no crowd of electors passionately demanding it.
Then we suffer to a considerable extent in Great Britain from the attitude of the superior people to the public library. In America all the superior people are sympathetic with the public library—apparently so anyhow. In England usually they sneer at it. Why, Heaven knows! Only the other day a cabinet minister who was considered to be a friend of ours, whose name before he reached cabinet rank was actually a backer to a bill on similar lines to the present one, in a meeting which he addressed referred to the country as being "drenched" with public libraries. I think his point was the far greater importance of public wash-houses or something of that sort. And, as I say, he used the extremely unpleasant, and peculiarly unappropriate adjective "drenched." Now of course no one objects to a cabinet minister talking nonsense. After all, what else can you talk to a popular audience in politics but nonsense? But this particular variety is pernicious nonsense. The press, of course, with their usual avidity for seizing on anything silly, print that sort of thing ad nauseam and a good deal of real harm is done and difficulty created. I think the minister in question has stated somewhere that he owes a great part of his own education to the public library. Mr. Carnegie has said the same thing. Behold how differently men requite the benefits they have received!
Well, Mr. President and ladies and gentlemen, I have perhaps given you the idea that I take a rather pessimistic view of library conditions at the present moment in Great Britain, but that is not so at all—most emphatically not so. I am absolutely convinced that the future of the public library in Great Britain is as certain as it is with you, and though the next step forward may be delayed, the longer it is delayed the bigger that step will be when it is taken.
The PRESIDENT: Mr. Honorary Secretary and our Guest: I would that the gift of speech had been given me that I might adequately express to you the sense of appreciation that we all feel for your coming, for your gracious words of greeting in behalf of your Association and for the view that you have given us of not only the conditions that obtain in Great Britain but also what the future holds forth for the libraries of your country. In our American assemblages it is customary, when some procedure is taken that no one is particularly interested in, to pass it by; but when something transpires that requires further and more careful thought it is our parliamentary custom to refer this to a committee. In this particular case I am sure that I am meeting the wish of the Association as well as my own personal desire when I refer your splendid message to a committee of the whole, consisting of all the librarians present, all the members who have unavoidably been kept at home and that other, smaller group who come within the classification of Mr. Dewey's "private collections." What you have said to us, sir, has emphasized to us particularly that not only is there in the relationship between your libraries in Great Britain and ours in this country a kinship of interest, brought about through identical language, and a kinship of literature, but also there are common aims and aspirations. Just as the language is subject to local variations, due to the customs of geographical centers, so there are differences in method perhaps. But, after all, we are each, in our own way, attempting to do the same things and to achieve a common purpose. I trust, sir, that you will convey to your associates in Great Britain our gratitude for the kindly expressions which you have brought to us from them, and we venture the hope that we shall be enabled to carry forward the splendid precedent which has been set in your coming.
As you glance at the names of those who are to participate at this session, you will note that this is practically New York Day; the one, sole participant who is credited to another part of the country is after all perhaps merely loaned to Missouri, because he is a graduate of the New York library school. I shall ask the First Vice-President, Mr. Anderson, to preside over the rest of this meeting.
The FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT: Ladies and gentlemen, I can take that kind of punishment with great composure. The subject for the regular program this morning, as you all know, is work with foreigners and with the colored races. I have the honor to be a neighbor of the first speaker and I may say to you confidentially that she has recently moved a mile or two farther away from me without adequate explanation. The author of "The Promised Land" needs no introduction to this audience. All of you have read with enthusiasm and appreciation the chapter of her book in which she testifies to the value of the service of the Boston public library to her. It gives me very great pleasure to introduce to you MARY ANTIN, who will talk to you on