In many searches for names of persons, it becomes highly important to know before-hand where to look, and equally important where not to look, for certain biographies. Thus, if you seek for the name of any living character, it is necessary to know that it would be useless to look in the Encyclopædia Britannica, because the rule of compilation of that work purposely confined its sketches of notable persons to those who were already deceased when its volumes appeared. So you save the time of hunting in at least one conspicuous work of reference, before you begin, by simply knowing its plan.
In like manner, you should know that it is useless to search for two classes of names in the "Dictionary of National Biography," the most copious biographical dictionary of British personages ever published, begun in 1885, under Leslie Stephen, and reaching its sixty-first volume, and letter W in 1899, under the editorship of Sidney Lee. These two classes of names are first, all persons not British, that is, not either English, Scottish or Irish; and secondly, names of British persons now living. This is because this great work, like the Britannica, purposely confines itself to the names of notables deceased; and, unlike the Britannica, it further limits its biographies to persons connected by birth or long residence with the British kingdom. Knowing this fact before-hand, will save any time wasted in searching the Dictionary of National Biography for any persons now living, or for any American or European names.
Another caveat may properly be interposed as regards searches for information in that most widely advertised and circulated of all works of reference,—the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The plan of that work was to furnish the reading public with the very best treatises upon leading topics in science, history, and literature, by eminent scholars and specialists in various fields. Pursuant to this general scheme, each great subject has a most elaborate, and sometimes almost exhaustive article—as, for example, chemistry, geology, etc., while the minor divisions of each topic do not appear in the alphabet at all, or appear only by cross-reference to the generic name under which they are treated. It results, that while you find, for example, a most extensive article upon "Anatomy", filling a large part of a volume of the Britannica, you look in vain in the alphabet for such subjects as "blood, brain, cartilage, sinew, tissue," etc., which are described only in the article "Anatomy." This method has to be well comprehended in order for any reader to make use of this great Cyclopaedia understandingly. Even by the aid of the English index to the work, issued by its foreign publishers, the reader who is in hasty quest of information in the Britannica, will most frequently be baffled by not finding any minor subject in the index. The English nation, judged by most of the productions of its literary and scientific men in that field, has small genius for indexing. It was reserved to an American to prepare and print a thorough index, at once alphabetical and analytical, to this great English thesaurus of information—an index ten times more copious, and therefore more useful to the student, than the meagre one issued in England. This index fills 3,900 closely printed columns, forming the whole of volume 25 of the Philadelphia edition of the work. By its aid, every name and every topic, treated anywhere in this vast repository of human knowledge can be traced out and appropriated; while without it, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with all its great merits, must remain very much in the nature of a sealed book to the reader who stands in need of immediate use and reference. We have to take it for what it is—a collection of masterly treatises, rather than a handy dictionary of knowledge.
The usefulness and success of any library will depend very largely upon the sympathy, so to speak, between the readers and the librarian. When this is well established, the rest is very easy. The librarian should not seclude himself so as to be practically inaccessible to readers, nor trust wholly to assistants to answer their inquiries. This may be necessary in some large libraries, where great and diversified interests connected with the building up of the collection, the catalogue system, and the library management and administration are all concerned. In the British Museum Library, no one ever sees the Principal Librarian; even the next officer, who is called the keeper of the printed books, is not usually visible in the reading-room at all.
A librarian who is really desirous of doing the greatest good to the greatest number of people, will be not only willing, but anxious to answer inquiries, even though they may appear to him trivial and unimportant. Still, he should also economise time by cultivating the habit of putting his answers into the fewest and plainest words.
How far the librarian should place himself in direct communication with readers, must depend largely upon the extent of the library, the labor required in managing its various departments, the amount and value of assistance at his command, and upon various other circumstances, depending upon the different conditions with different librarians. But it may be laid down as a safe general rule, that the librarian should hold himself perpetually as a public servant, ready and anxious to answer in some way, all inquiries that may come to him. Thus, and thus only, can he make himself, and the collection of books under his charge, useful in the highest degree to the public. He will not indeed, in any extensive library, find it convenient, or even possible, to answer all inquiries in person; but he should always be ready to enable his assistants to answer them, by his superior knowledge as to the best sources of information, whenever they fail to trace out what is wanted. In any small library, he should be always accessible, at or near the place where people are accustomed to have their wants for books or information supplied: and the public resorting to the library will thus come not only to rely upon him for aid in their intellectual researches, but to appreciate and respect him for the wide extent of his knowledge, and to consider him, in time, an indispensable guide, if not leader, in the community. His reputation, in fact, will depend upon the extent to which he has been able to help others, as well as upon the number of people whom he has thus aided.
In a very high sense, the true librarian is an educator; his school is as large as the town in which his library is situated. Very few people in that town know what he is always presumed to know,—namely—to what books to go to get answers to the questions they want answered. In supplying continually the means of answering these countless questions, the library becomes actually a popular university, in which the librarian is the professor, the tuition is free, and the course is optional, both as to study and as to time.
Most persons who come to make any investigation in a public library require a good deal of assistance. For example, a reader is in need of the latest information as to the amount of steel and iron made in this country, and what State produces these important manufactures. He has not the faintest idea where to look for the information, except that it may be in the census, but the census is nine years old, and he wants recent facts. It is vain to turn him over to the cyclopaedias, for there is not one whose information upon such statistics comes anywhere near up to date. You have to put before him a pamphlet annual, published by the American Iron and Steel Association, which contains exactly what he wants; and no other source of information does contain it.
Another inquirer seeks to know how to treat some disease. In such cases, of course, the librarian should not go farther than to put before the reader a work on domestic medicine, for it is not his function to deal in recommendations of this, that, or the other method of treatment, any more than it is to give legal opinions, if asked—although he may have studied law. So, if the reader wants to know about the religious tenets of the Presbyterians, or the Mormons, or the Buddhists, or the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and asks the librarian's opinion about any controverted question of belief, he is to be answered only by the statement that the library is there to supply information, not opinions, and then pointed to the religious cyclopaedias, which give full summaries of all the sects.
He may frequently be asked for information on a subject which he knows nothing about; and I have heard a librarian declare, that he often found himself able to give fuller and better information on a subject of which he was previously ignorant, than upon one he had long been familiar with. The reason was that in the one case he had freshly looked up all the authorities, and put them before the reader, while in the other, giving the references from a memory, more or less imperfect, he had overlooked some of the most important means of information.
