It ought not to be requisite to insist upon good health as a condition precedent for any one aspiring to be a librarian. So very much depends upon this, that it should form a part of the conscientious duty of every one to acquire and maintain a sound condition of physical health, as a most important adjunct of a thoroughly sound and healthy condition of the mind. This is easier than most persons are aware. If we except inherited constitutional weaknesses, or maladies of a serious character, there is almost no one who is not able by proper diet, regimen, and daily exercise, to maintain a degree of health which will enable him to use his brain to its full working capacity. It demands an intelligent and watchful care of the daily regimen, so that only simple and wholesome food and drink may be taken into the system, and what is equally important, adequate sleep, and habitual moderate exercise. No one can maintain perfect health without breathing good unadulterated air, and exercising in it with great frequency. One's walks to and from the library may be sufficient to give this, and it is well to have the motive of such a walk, since exercise taken for the mere purpose of it is of far less value. The habit of taking drugs, or going to a doctor for every little malady, is most pernicious. Every one, and especially a librarian, who is supposed (however erroneously) to know everything, should know more of his own constitution than any physician. With a few judicious experiments in daily regimen, and a little abstinence now and then, he can subdue head-aches, catarrhs and digestive troubles, and by exercising an intelligent will, can generally prevent their recurrence. If one finds himself in the morning in a state of languor and lassitude, be sure he has abused some physical function, and apply a remedy. An invalid will make a poorly equipped librarian. How can a dyspeptic who dwells in the darkness of a disease, be a guiding light to the multitudes who beset him every hour? There are few callings demanding as much mental and physical soundness and alertness as the care of a public library.
Sound common sense is as essential to the librarian as sound health. He should always take the practical straightforward view of every item of library business and management, remembering that the straight road is always the shortest way between two points. While he may be full of ideas, he should be neither an idealist nor a dreamer. In library methods, the cardinal requisites to be aimed at, are utility and convenience. A person of the most perfect education, and the highest literary attainments, but destitute of common sense, will not succeed in the conduct of a library. That intuitive judgment, which sees the reason of everything at a glance, and applies the proper agencies to the case in hand, is wanting in his composition. Multitudes of emergencies arise in library service, where the prompt and practical sense of the librarian is required to settle a dispute, adjust a difficulty, or to direct what is to be done in some arrangement or re-arrangement of books, or some library appliance or repair. In such cases, the unpractical or impracticable man will be very likely to decide wrongly, choosing the inconvenient method instead of the convenient, the more costly instead of the more economical, the laborious in place of the obvious and easy; in short, some way of doing the work or settling the difficulty which will not permit it to stay settled, or will require the work to be done over again. The man of common-sense methods, on the other hand, will at once see the end from the beginning, anticipate every difficulty, and decide upon the proper course without trouble or hesitation, finding his judgment fully vindicated by the result.
The librarian in whom the quality of common sense is well developed will be ever ready to devise or to accept improvements in library methods. Never a slave to "red tape," he will promptly cut it wherever and whenever it stands in the way of the readiest service of books and information to all comers.
Another quality which every librarian or assistant in a library should possess is a thorough love of his work. He should cherish a noble enthusiasm for the success and usefulness of the institution with which he has chosen to be associated. Nor should this spirit be by any means limited to the literary and scientific aid which he is enabled to extend to others, nor to the acquisition of the knowledge requisite to meet the endless inquiries that are made of him. He should take as much interest in restoring a broken binding, or in seeing that a torn leaf is repaired, as in informing a great scholar what the library contains upon any subject.
No one who is listless or indifferent in the discharge of daily duties is fit for a place in a public library. There should be an esprit de corps, a zeal for his profession, which will lead him to make almost any sacrifice of outside interests to become proficient in it. Thus only will he render himself indispensable in his place, and do the greatest amount of service to the greatest number of readers. I have seen employees in libraries so utterly careless of what belongs to their vocation, as to let books, totally unfit for use, ragged or broken, or with plates loosened, ready to drop out and disappear, go back to the shelves unrepaired, to pursue the downward road toward destruction. And I have been in many libraries in which the books upon the shelves exhibited such utter want of care, such disarrangement, such tumbling about and upside-down chaos, and such want of cleanliness, as fairly to make one's heart ache. In some cases this may have been due in great part to unwise free admission of the public to the shelves, and consequent inevitable disorder; in others, it may be partially excused by the librarian's absolute want of the needful help or time, to keep the library in order; but in others, it was too apparent that the librarian in charge took no interest in the condition of the books. Too many librarians (at least of the past, however it may now be) have been of the class described by Dr. Poole, the Chicago librarian. He said that library trustees too often appeared to think that anybody almost would do for a librarian; men who have failed in everything else, broken-down clergymen, or unsuccessful teachers, and the like.
Passing now to other needful qualifications of librarians and library assistants, let me say that one of the foremost is accuracy. Perhaps I have before this remarked that exact accuracy is one of the rarest of human qualities. Even an approximation to it is rare, and absolute accuracy is still rarer. Beware of the person who is sure of every thing—who retails to you a conversation he has heard, affecting to give the exact words of a third person, or who quotes passages in verse or in prose, with glib assurance, as the production of some well-known writer. The chances are ten to one that the conversation is mainly manufactured in the brain of the narrator, and that the quotation is either not written by the author to whom it is attributed, or else is a travesty of his real language. It is Lord Byron who tells of that numerous class of sciolists whom one finds everywhere—
"With just enough of learning to misquote."
The books one reads abound in erroneous dates, mistaken names, garbled extracts, and blundering quotations. So much the more important is it to the librarian, who is so continually drawn upon for correct information upon every subject, to make sure of his facts, before communicating them. When (as frequently happens) he has no way of verifying them, he should report them, not as his own conclusions, but on the authority of the book or periodical where found. This will relieve him of all responsibility, if they turn out to be erroneous. Whenever I find a wrong date or name in a printed book, or an erroneous reference in the index, or a mis-spelled word, I always pencil the correct date, or name, or page of reference in the margin. This I do as a matter of instinct, as well as of duty, for the benefit of future inquirers, so that they may not be misled. I speak here of errors which are palpable, or of the inaccuracy of which I have positive knowledge; if in doubt, I either let the matter go entirely, or write a query in pencil at the place, with the presumed correct substitute appended.
Never be too sure of what you find in books; but prove all things and hold fast to those only which you find to be beyond dispute. Thus will you save yourself from falling into many errors, and from recanting many opinions. It is the method of ordinary education to take everything for granted; it is the method of science to take nothing for granted.
I may refer here to another rule always to be observed, and pertaining to the theme of strict accuracy in your daily work. That is, the necessity of carefully examining every piece of work you may have done, before it leaves your hands, for the purpose of correcting errors. All of us are not only liable to make mistakes, but all of us do make them; and if any one has a conceit of his own accuracy, the surest way to take it out of him is to let him serve an apprenticeship in some library, where there is competent revision of all the labor performed. There are multitudes of assistants in libraries who cannot write a letter, even, without making one or more errors. How often do you leave out a word in your writing experience, which may change the meaning of a whole sentence? So, in writing titles, whether for the catalogue, or for a library order, or for the information of some inquirer, you are liable to make errors of date, or edition, or place of publication, or size, or to misplace or omit or substitute some word in the description of the book. There is nothing in the world quite so easy as to be mistaken: and the only remedy (and it is an all-essential one) is to go over every line and every word of what you have written, before it leaves your hands. As second thoughts are proverbially best, so a second careful glance over a piece of writing will almost always reveal some error or omission to be corrected. Think of the mortification you must feel at finding an unverified piece of work returned upon your hands, with several glaring mistakes marked by the reviser! Think, on the other hand, of the inward satisfaction experienced when you have done your best, written and revised your own work, and found it always passed as perfect. I have tried many persons by many tests, and while I have found a great number who were industrious, intelligent, zealous, conscientious, good-tempered, and expeditious, I have found scarcely one who was always accurate. One of the rarest things in a library is to find an assistant who has an unerring sense of the French accents. This knowledge, to one expert in that language, even if he does not speak it, should be as intuitive as the art of spelling correctly, either in English or French. He should write the proper accent over a letter just as infallibly as he writes the proper letters in a word. But, strange to say, it is very common, even with good French scholars (in the book-sense or literary sense of scholarship) to find them putting the acute accent for the grave over a vowel, or the grave instead of the acute, or omitting the circumflex accent entirely, and so on.
