Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

As our libraries are growing larger, our organizations more complex, it is, I know, growing harder to take a live personal interest in the work, so much of it is specialized routine; one feels like a mere cogwheel in a great machine. The assistant who pastes labels or addresses postal cards in a big library, finds it harder to realize that she is doing something interesting and useful than the librarian of a small library who not only performs these tasks but all the others—meets her public, selects and buys her books, plans in one way and another for the extension and betterment of her work. Yet the rapid, accurate and efficient performance of the lesser task is as important as that of the greater. A label pasted awry may ruin the library’s reputation in the eye of a casual user; a mis-sent card may cause trouble to dozens of one’s fellow assistants. Routine work is dull only when one does not understand its purport. Dullness is in the worker, not in the work.

Are libraries, indeed, introducing too much organization into the work—is it becoming too machine-like? Now, it should not be forgotten that there is in a machine something akin to personality—individuality, at any rate, is not too strong a word. Every locomotive has tricks and characteristics that its engineer knows and sometimes loves. He pats its back affectionately and speaks of it as “she.” The idea that to be part of a machine excludes personality and individual work is all wrong. One can not go careering about eccentrically and unsystematically; the very purpose of organization is to stop all that; but within the limits of motion and action assigned to a person as his part in the larger motion and action of the machine, there is still room for moving well or ill, for helping on the greater work or antagonizing it and throwing it out of order. If a cog-wheel thinks that it is manifesting its originality in some meritorious way by making the whole machine creak and wobble and turn out an inferior product, that cog-wheel has power to do just this; but it should not complain if the machinist throws it into the scrap heap.

Now, in the library, the parts of our machine are workers of all kinds; their connection and relationship are conditioned and limited by customs, rules and orders. To test the desirability of these or of any change in them there is just one question to be asked; first, last and all the time, namely—is this for ourselves or for our work? Is it merely to make things easier for the assistants or will it improve the work and benefit the public?

The asking of this question and its thoughtful consideration will puncture many a bubble. We will take, if you please, the question of vacations. Any one who has tried to make out a vacation schedule in a large library knows that, next to making out a recitation schedule in a large school or college, it is the most vexatious task of the kind that is given to man to do. Everyone must have a vacation, and everyone wants to have it at some time when the efficiency of the library will be impaired by it. Everyone wants to go away at once, and there are times when no one wants to be absent. Any possible arrangement means dissatisfaction, heartburnings, a feeling that favoritism or prejudice has been at work. Into the mind of most librarians has, I am sure, crept the suggestion: What is the use of all this? Why not close the library for a month? Is not that done by the schools: and are not we, too, an educational institution?

The fact that librarians do not yield, in this case, to the suggestion of a change that would benefit them and all their assistants, is, of course, due to the obviousness of the other fact that it would be bad for the public.

This test of the public advantage may be applied to the whole question of system in the library—of how much system is good, and what kind and how it shall be determined and applied. When a man comes in contact with a library rule that incommodes him personally, he is apt to deride it impatiently as “red tape.” When he finds absence of a rule where he would have benefited by it, he concludes that the library is in “chaos” or “confusion.” Now, there should evidently be neither one nor the other of these, although we cannot allow the personal convenience of a single user to be the test—our system should not exist for itself alone, nor should we try to get along without system altogether. There should be just so much and of just such a kind as will result in the maximum degree of service rendered to the public.

The individual user is quite wrong, of course, in condemning a regulation that annoys him personally, for this reason alone; but if we should find that it annoyed all other users as well without other advantage than the saving of some trouble to the library assistant, he would, I conceive, be quite right in calling it “red tape.” This term is applied primarily to annoying official restrictions that have no use whatever, but we may well extend it to restrictions that benefit the administrator without improving the administration. Rules, customs and manners of procedure in a library, whether they say “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not” are of two kinds—those addressed to the library staff and those addressed to the public. Both, however, are intended to enable the public to get more good out of the library. The members of the staff are told to do certain things and not to do others, because this will make it easier for the users of the library to get what they want. The latter in turn are bidden to do this and forbidden to do that—not, as some of them seem to think, to make the librarian’s work easier or to save him trouble—but to throw the library open wider to their fellows. System of this kind may bear very hard on the individual user; he may chafe, for instance, at any restriction in the number of books that he is allowed to borrow—but if no such restriction existed, the privileges of his fellow borrowers would be curtailed thereby. He may grumble because the time limit on his book has expired before he has finished reading it, unmindful of the fact that some of his fellow readers are anxiously waiting for it. But if the book in his possession is not wanted by anybody; if there are other such unused books in the library that he wants, should he not have and keep them? Assuredly. Every library should make arrangements whereby none of its books should be kept from use to stand idly on the shelves. Our test of public usefulness declares as decisively for this as it does for the partition of privilege in the case of more than one anxious borrower.

To return to that part of the library machine that affects the library staff, I have many times heard assistants complain of incidents of organization and systematization that seemed to them too much like those in vogue in commercial institutions. Now it may be freely admitted that there is a difference between the library and the store or the factory, or more generally between any institution for the public good and one for private gain. In the former the public advantage is the prime object, and to attain it we must often consult the comfort or convenience of the administrators. In the latter, the advantage of the administrators is the prime object, and to gain it they are generally forced to consult the comfort and convenience of the public. The primary and secondary elements are reversed, but they exist in each. Both the department store and the library must look out for the public. It is the library’s business to do so, and it is in the store’s business advantage to do the same.

It is hard to see, therefore, why any kind of system that will make a store work better is not worth looking into by a librarian. The systematization in the staff of an up-to-date, modern business organization, and in its work, is a continual surprise to him who has not looked into such things for a score of years. The stores and the factories are ahead of librarians in this respect, and we may as well admit it. After all, this is natural. What is to one’s business advantage is always done better than what is merely one’s business. But there is no reason why we should not study these better methods and imitate those that are worth copying.

Take one little example. In a factory the raw material is followed statistically from its purchase to its sale as a finished product; and even after its sale its performances are watched. The owner can find out, when he wants to do so, whether that particular article made or lost money for the firm, and how much, and why; whether it gave satisfaction to the purchaser, and if not, why not; to what its excellence or deficiencies were due, whether to the qualities of the raw material or the methods of manufacture. How many librarians can similarly ascertain whether the purchase of a given invoice of books was profitable to the library or not, taking into account the number and duration of their issues, the time lost and the money spent in mending and re-binding them, and so on? How many can tell you whether those books gave satisfaction to the users, in their bindery, typography, and paper; whether the reader found them hard on his eyes, easily soiled, difficult to hold open—and whose fault it was, the publisher’s, the binder’s or the mender’s? This, too, is merely the material and physical side of the question—all that the manufacturer or the merchant needs to consider. We librarians say we are on a loftier plane; we purvey ideas. So we do. How many of us then can say what was the mental and moral effect on our community of the books added last year, as compared with those added the year before? How many of us know even whether the readers liked the books of one year better than those of another? Again; the individual worker in a good factory, the travelling salesman in a good mercantile house, is watched statistically. His employers can tell just how profitable his work is to them. If the failure of an operation, or the loss of custom in a town, is due to him, they know it, and if his service continues unprofitable, he is replaced. How many librarians watch the work of individual members of the staff with such detail? Suppose at the end of six months’ service, an assistant were confronted with statistical evidence that she had mischarged ten books, made eight bad mistakes in accessioning, written twenty catalog cards that had to be replaced and caused four complaints by her bearing at the desk? Suppose she were thereupon given notice that she must do better or go; what would she say? I think I know. She would say that the library was run just like a department store. And she would be quite right; only, instead of being derogatory to the library as it would be intended, her remark would be a compliment. It is time that we should carefully discriminate between what is commercial, in commercial institutions, and what simply makes for orderliness and efficiency.