Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

For books, the essential tools of every form of acquisition, we spend, outside of textbooks, a few paltry thousands. The things a child makes we can see, and we are impressed by them; the knowledge he gains, the power of thought he acquires—these cannot be made visible and are not appreciated by the ignorant; they can only be certified to by the teacher and demonstrated by the student’s words and deeds as he goes through life.

Mastery of print is mastery of world-knowledge. Our young people do not have it. Surely they should be led to acquire it, and where better than in the high schools? To aid them in this acquisition the high schools, should have ample collections of books, and these collections of books should become active teaching organisms through the ministrations of competent librarians.

Of all teaching laboratories, there is one which is plainly of supreme importance—that of books.

I trust that you are with me so far; for I am about to make a further advance that experience teaches me is very difficult, except for librarians. I am going to urge that your collection of books, when you have made it, be put in charge of one who has studied the methods of making the contents of books available to the reader—their shelving, physical preparation, classification, cataloguing; the ways in which to fit them to their users, to record their use, and to prevent their abuse. This means a trained librarian.

In all departments where expert knowledge and skill are necessary it is difficult to explain to a non-expert the reasons for this necessity and exactly in what the expert knowledge consists. We are so accustomed to accept the fact in certain departments that it passes there without question. Unfortunately that is not the case with the selection and administration of a library. Most persons understand quite well that special training is necessary before one can practice law, or medicine, or engineering. No one would undertake to drive a motor car or even ride a bicycle without some previous experience; but it is quite usual to believe that a collection of books may be administered and its use controlled by totally untrained and inexperienced persons—a retired clergyman, a broken-down clerk, a janitor, perhaps. I once asked a young woman who came for advice about taking up library work what had inclined her toward that particular occupation. She was quite frank with me; she said: “Why, my father and mother didn’t think I was good for anything else.” This estimate of the library is by no means confined to the parents of would-be library workers. And even where it is recognized that some training and experience are necessary in administering a large public institution, there is a lingering feeling that a comparatively small collection, like that in a school, needs no expert supervision. The fact that there are in a school plenty of experts in other lines seems to have been not without its effect on this attitude. “Why, Professor Smith is one of the best chemists in the state; Miss Jones is an acknowledged authority on oriental history; do you mean to tell me that either of them would not make a perfectly satisfactory librarian?” Which is something like saying, “Mr. Robinson is our foremost banker; should he not be able to superintend the dyeing department in a textile mill?” Or, “Rev. Mr. Jenkins is our most eloquent pulpit orator; he can surely run the 2:15 express!”

Are my metaphors too violent? I think not. We are dealing here with imponderables, as I have said, but the most imponderable thing of all, and the most potent, is the human mind. To wield, concentrate, and control our battery of energies we want a correlated energy—one whose relations to them all are close and one who knows how to pull all the throttles, turn all the valves, and operate all the mechanism that brings them into play. It takes two years of hard work, nowadays, for a college graduate to get through a library school, and it should not be necessary to argue that during these two years he is working hard on essentials and is assimilating material that the untrained man however able, cannot possibly acquire in a few month’s casual association with a library or from mere association with books, no matter how long or how intimate. You will pardon me, I am sure, some further quotation from Mr. Hicks’s illuminating article. After calling our attention to the fact that the effort to meet changing conditions in instruction is purely technical, he goes on:

The librarian stands in the position of an engineer to whom is presented a task which by the methods of his profession he must perform. Numerical growth, expansion, addition of new schools and new subjects, and the introduction of the laboratory method by which books are made actual tools for use, all mean to the librarian more books, larger reading-rooms and more of them, a large staff specialized and grouped into departments, the supervision of a complicated system, and capable business administration. These are all technical matters and are of sufficient magnitude to require all of the time and strength of those to whom they are entrusted....

In a reference library, open shelves, whether in department libraries or in the general library, require much high-grade library service. The reference librarian becomes a direct teacher in the use of books and gives constant assistance not merely in finding separate books but in dealing with the whole literature of a subject....

The whole development from the few-book method to the many-book method presupposes a system of reserve books. By this expression is meant the placing of a collection of books behind an enclosure of some kind from which they are given out by a library assistant for use in the room. The reserve collections, continually changing in accordance with the directions of instructors, are in reality composite textbooks....

The mere clerical work of maintaining an efficient reserve system is large, its success being dependent upon intelligent co-operation between the teaching faculty and the library, but it involves also a technical problem to be solved by the librarian. What relation does the number of copies of a given reserve book bear to its use? To put the question concretely, how many copies of a book are required to supply a class of 200 students, all of whom must read thirty pages of the book within two weeks?