THE MUNICIPAL REFERENCE LIBRARY AS AN AID IN CITY ADMINISTRATION
It is a very real pleasure to meet with the American Library Association, and to convey in behalf of my colleagues in the administration of the City of New York, and in behalf of other colleagues in public business throughout the country, our hearty congratulations and possibly a friendly warning and a word of appeal.
Congratulations are due you for having established on so high a plane and in so short a time the profession of librarian. Especially are you to be congratulated for having welcomed the new profession of municipal reference librarian; for your adaptability in the constant extension of the reference work, and for the resiliency which is showing again in another field that real Father Williams never grow old. Could Benjamin Franklin look upon this gathering, and hear your reports of social service, through circulating, home, reference and municipal reference libraries, I am sure that no fruit of his patriotism would seem to him more promising than the recent application of the circulating library idea to government affairs.
My friendly warning has to do with your requests to fiscal bodies for appropriations. In many parts of the country, there is the feeling that the less the library has to do with public officials the better it is for the library, consequently, as a short cut, we find compulsory minimum appropriations—so many mills or so many parts of mills for library development. We also find that too many towns are satisfied with this compulsory minimum tax, and that the only time their fiscal representatives hear about libraries is just before the budget appropriations are voted. You must be indulgent with those who vote the money, if the outcome of this habit suggests the man who was exasperated by his wife, who he said "just nagged and nagged him for money, when he came, when he left, on Sunday, always." Finally, when a neighbor summoned the courage to ask, "What in the world does she do with all the money?" he, perforce, must answer; "Well, I don't know; you see I haven't given her any yet." Councils and Mayors will understand your library problem best if you will help them understand at those quieter seasons of the year when they are not harassed, as they are at budget time, by appeals from every other city department and for every other thing.
When presenting your budget, give the fiscal officer credit for wanting to know the whole truth, and for wanting reasons for giving you the money you request. Seldom will it help to ask for a great deal more than you need. Always, it will help not to present in a single total items that do not belong together. Classify your budget. State your program clearly. If all the money you want is not voted this year, stick clearly to the plan that has been voted, and show both the fiscal authorities and the town where your service has been crippled, if at all, for want of funds. It will be well to begin your budget campaign so that the first idea which the public and the fiscal officers get is that of the service you wish to render, rather than the money you wish to get. Most library budgets, like most other budgets of the United States, are apt to be put in without the explanatory matter which alone will make the dollar-and-cent facts show social reasons for library support.
Now for my appeal. In asking you to consider certain needs of public business, I want to speak quite frankly, as a city official who, like thousands of other city and county officials, must step into other people's business, with no time for getting acquainted with detail, and with a public to deal with that not only expects us on the first day we take office to use all the machinery of our predecessor and to get better results, but also really expects us to fail. We inherit a stack of mail. We are flooded with suggestions and complaints; many of them in confidence and most of them confusing. We are urged to attend club and church meetings, and dinners, and graduating exercises. We are expected, without any change in subordinate personnel, while giving our attention to large community problems and to the political aspects of public works, to get an efficient product out of our employees, no matter who they are or what they have been. In most places, we find no disinterested adviser, either on the inside or on the outside.
Such a situation would not necessarily be serious if we stepped into a thoroughly efficient organization where every employee and supervisor had his place, and where the institution as such had its "continuing memory." When Mr. Rea succeeded Mr. McCrea as president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, he inherited a splendid organization, every part related to another part; a system under which experts had tabulated within a moment's reach the successes and the failures of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the costs of its various contracts, the difference between estimates and final costs, and an efficiency ranking both of its various employees and its stations. When the present administration in New York City stepped into office, we inherited an aggregation of departments and divisions then spending—if we count in installments and interest paid on the city debt—more than $160,000,000 for the expenses of a single year. There were ninety thousand employees. Side by side with one another were clerks paid one $600 and another $1,800 for the same kind of work; in another grade were clerks paid $1,600 and others paid $2,400 for the same kind of work. When salaries had been increased, and why, was not a matter of record. Supplies were contracted for by no standard form. Specifications, either for supplies or for construction work, were worded differently at different times, according to the individual wish or whim of the department officer preparing them. The public was but poorly protected at any point. Plans were made for new buildings, for new roads, and for other vast improvements, often without estimates of cost; often with assurances of only slight cost, where, too frequently, cost had been estimated as an entering wedge only. Thus a great city would stumble into an experiment or public improvement demanding millions of dollars, without ever reckoning the ultimate amount of its obligation. For example it may be fair in this presence to recall that the first bill for the New York public library carried with it an appropriation of $2,500,000. The city decided to spend this $2,500,000 and actually it spent $10,000,000. The New York public library is worth every dollar it cost, ten times over; I am merely emphasizing that the public should have had its eyes open and, in this case as in every other, should have known what it was doing. Although this same gap occurred over and over again—between estimate and actual cost—no steps were taken to recall the fact when each new amount was under consideration.
Ignorant as we have been of our own experience, still less informed have we been regarding the experience of neighbor cities. Some years ago, Denver, in operating its street railway, found it expedient to substitute electric motor power for the old cables. After Denver had discarded these cables, Baltimore adopted the cable. Rochester has recently adopted a device to attach drinking fountains to its ordinary fire hydrants. The idea is a new one, and may prove valuable. I say it merely by way of instance; but if it is a good idea, New York City and your city should adopt it. Each successive experiment of the sort should, at least, be brought promptly to the attention of public officials.
Again, New York City has worked out an improved system of accounting and budget making. The village of Dobb's Ferry, the cities of Duluth and Cincinnati have used an improvement upon New York's budget exhibits—recently called a new kind of "confidence game"—that is, taking the public into official confidence about the public's own business. Instead of waiting a generation for cities to adopt these new methods, their officials should promptly be given the facts they need.
Is it not criminal waste and error for one city to introduce a system of sewer disposal, or of milk regulation, which another city has found endangering the lives of its citizens? If a measure has proved bad and dangerous for one city, modern science in the hands of a librarian should make it unnecessary for every other city to go through the same experience.
To help us in ending all this waste, and to help us, in short, in putting city government upon a thorough scientific and efficient basis, the municipal reference library is beginning to take its highly important place. Without a municipal reference library, it will in future be difficult for any administrative officer to do his best. I will not attempt to review the laborious steps of my colleagues in the present board of estimate and apportionment—our governing municipal body—to incorporate into standard specifications, standard salaries and standard contracts the memory of our past failures, so that we may hold the gains that we have made and avoid the weaknesses and the errors of our experience. But I venture some suggestions as to a reference library that, although general in their application, will indicate our reasons for establishing such a library in New York.
Our reasons for placing the library in our new Municipal Building—as we propose to do—apply everywhere. It must be made easy for officials to get information, and for the librarian to get the information promptly and directly to the officials. It is not enough to know that it may be had. To have important information an hour away from the office is almost as bad as to have it a thousand miles away. It must be easier for the busy official to get the information he wants than to endure the thought of going without it. In putting the library where the users are, instead of where they are not, we are following the simple rule of trade that meters city property by the foot instead of by the acre.
The municipal library is a place not for everything, but for particular needed things. If it were true that Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other constituted a college, it is even more true that a librarian in a bare room, anxious to serve the public via the public official and knowing where the material is, constitutes an infinitely better municipal reference library than a place perfectly equipped which suggests erudition rather than immediate help. There is great danger that our municipal reference libraries will become junk shops, as interesting and as helpful, as out of date or as unrelated to today's problems as an encyclopedia or a "compendium of useful knowledge." A municipal reference library should suggest answers to today's questions; not answers either to yesterday's questions or to next year's. Will you, the librarians, consider the importance and the advisability of keeping these libraries workshops, as they ought to be, and of using your general reference libraries as the place for the storage of materials.
The ordinary city official hasn't the time to plough through a mass of pamphlets looking for what he wants. He wants the facts collated and marshalled, ready for use—and "he wants what he wants when he wants it." Some time ago I was interested in drawing an ordinance to license all vehicles using the New York streets, and to regulate the weight, the width and size of tires, etc., of our great trucks that have been tearing up our pavements. I wanted to know about the policy of other cities in this matter, and to devise, if possible, a way of making those vehicles that destroy the streets help pay for their maintenance. Similarly, today, as Chairman of the committee on the height, size and arrangement of buildings within the city limits, I am interested in the adoption of some reasonable basis for regulating our modern skyscraper in order to keep the city, literally, from choking itself to death.
Again, we have had to restore to the public many miles of city sidewalks that had been preempted by stoops, and other encroachments. We have wanted to plan our public buildings and related matters with a view to the future, and to the grouping of building sites in a "Civic Center." So, in dealing with our transit problem; in investigating the health department, and in improving the type and quality of street pavements, I have wanted not all the information there was to be had—not books or formal reports—but concrete answers to immediately pressing questions. I wanted to be referred to the latest article or report which would make it unnecessary to go through twenty or a hundred other articles, books or reports. It is enough to know that in a great central library are all the working materials for scientific research. Frankly, I feel that the actual use that will be made of the municipal reference library will be in inverse ratio to the number of books that are in evidence, and that require the time of the librarian.
I would go so far as to say that anything that a public official has not just called for, or that the librarian is not about to call to the attention of a public official for departmental study or report, or for the drawing of ordinances, should be kept in the general library, and out of the municipal reference library.
Comptroller Prendergast and Librarian Anderson are even planning to have New York's official correspondence "clear" through the municipal reference library—so far as the writing and answering of letters calling for special information goes. I am told that when Portland recently started its municipal reference library the mayor promptly availed himself of its facilities for answering innumerable sets of questions and special questions that came from outside the city, and advised his heads of departments to follow his example. I wish the Carnegie Institution for Scientific Research or some other great foundation interested in the conservation of national resources and human energy would investigate what it is now costing this country to fill out the innumerable blanks from college boys wishing help on their commission government debate; college students writing theses; national organizations compiling reports, etc. Niagara unharnessed was wasting much less power than are we officials, school superintendents, mayors, and engineers who are answering such questionnaires. It would be lamentable enough if we always answered right; but most of us answer quite inadequately, and many of us answer wrong. Last year, a certain national society wrote me, asking certain questions about civil service reform. I had had more or less to do for some years with that line of public service. My instinct was to take time from pressing duties to answer these questions; but a neighbor who had received a similar set of questions was thoughtful enough to write to this national body and suggest that before he answered he would like to know how many other New York officials and private agencies had received the same set of questions. It appeared then that twenty different people, including a dozen officials, had been asked to fill out that blank. Whereupon it was suggested that instead of drawing upon twenty people who did not possess the facts, the investigator might turn directly to the Civil Service Commission that did possess the facts, and there, no doubt, he readily found what he wanted.
Now, if a municipal reference library could have served as a clearing house, it would have been brought to light at once that one answer would have served the purpose of twenty, or that one answer, at least, would have served the purpose of the dozen official answers. Moreover, just as the official reports give fresher material than published books, such correspondence, manuscript reports of investigating committees, etc., give fresher material than published reports.
Such data should be kept properly classified, available upon call or when the librarian sees its time for usefulness.
Another practical suggestion I make from my experience as an official. While it seems to apply especially to administrative departments or to private agencies specializing in certain fields, I really do not see much prospect of getting it unless from a municipal reference library or from the municipal reference activity of a general library. I refer to an up-to-date "Poole's" or cumulative index of the passing subject matter of city government. You get, the library gets, once a month a list of all the articles in the principal books. Why should we not have a list of the advance steps taken in public affairs? Just as soon as a few librarians call for such information, it will become commercially possible to reduce it. The individual library can then add to the material the particular points that are of interest to its own community.
Similarly, it would be of the greatest assistance to every city official if the matters under his jurisdiction were listed and material grouped under proper heads. For example, the president of the Borough of Manhattan has jurisdiction over the streets and sidewalks; encroachments and encumbrances; street vaults and street signs; the sewer system; the public buildings; the baths and markets; and the control of private buildings through the enforcement of the buildings laws. If information in regard to what other cities were doing in all these matters were listed, plus suggestions and advance steps taken in these same matters at home, the reference librarian would be of incalculable help to that office.
Finally, just a word about the expense of the municipal reference library. The amount which it is justified in demanding will depend naturally upon the service it renders. The merit of our new segregated and classified budget is that it calls for the work needing to be done, as well as the cost of not having the work done, and that it shifts attention from the personality that requests the budget allowance. A circumscribed program means circumscribed budget. Frankly, I believe that extension of program should and must precede extension of budget. But this new kind of social work which serves a community at those points where it is now least equipped to serve itself, will not want for financial support when it talks about the work that should be done—and not about itself.
No municipal activity will, in my judgment, find it easier in the next twenty-five years to secure adequate financial support than the municipal reference library which is not a compendium of knowledge but a forecaster of service needed and an ever-present help in time of trouble.
The PRESIDENT: May I express to you, Mr. McAneny, the thanks of the American Library Association for your coming and the assurance that we have profited greatly from it.
Adjourned.