6. Publicity given in and by the Church to the library and its work.
As a basis on which cooperation of these and other kinds is to rest there must be personal acquaintance and confidence between the clergy and the librarian. This is something of which increase will bring further increase, as in the accretions to a rolling snowball. For instance, the pastor of a church must have a certain degree of confidence in the librarian’s good-will and ability to venture to recommend the purchase of a book; the librarian must have the same to be willing to entertain and act upon such a recommendation. But the contact once made, the book once bought, there is ground for increased confidence and acquaintance and for additional advice, and so it goes.
It will be noted that this counsel lays a greater burden on the librarian than on the clergy. It is no great task for any clergyman to make the acquaintance of the librarian; it is quite another thing for the librarian to do the same by each and every clergyman in his city. If the city is large and the clergy of various denominations are numbered by thousands, it is practically impossible. Recognizing this fact, the clergy should take some steps toward making collective take the place of individual acquaintance. They should invite the librarian to their meetings and he on his part should be ready to attend and to address them if requested to do so.
It should hardly be necessary to warn both parties to such cooperation as this, that the obtrusion of considerations of personal advantage, where this conflicts with public service, will be fatal to its success. For instance, a clergyman who is preparing an address on some rather unusual subject must not expect the librarian of a small city to expend public money for books which will aid him, and him alone, in his work. Fortunately, this particular issue can generally be avoided, owing to the growth of facilities for inter-library loans. Altho the librarian might properly refuse to buy these particular books, he would doubtless offer to attempt to borrow them from some larger library, and this attempt would have a good chance of success. Interlibrary service of this kind is bound to increase largely in the future and offers a most promising field for the rendering of aid by the smaller libraries to the scholar, literary worker, and investigator, including, of course, the clergyman.
The getting-together of public library and church has possibly been hampered in the past by an idea, common to both librarian and clergyman, that religious bodies and their work ought to be ignored by all public bodies, and that this is in some way a part of our American system of government and public administration. It is, of course, a feature of that administration to treat all religious bodies with absolute impartiality; but that does not involve ignoring their existence any more than treating all citizens with impartiality involves the ignoring of the individual. One way of being impartial, of course, is to turn one’s back equally upon all, but that is not the only way. One may treat one’s children alike by starving all of them equally, but our idea of impartial treatment would be better satisfied by an equality of adequate supplies.
It is time that the public library and the Church stopt the starvation treatment and began to mete out to each other a supply of the aid and good-will that each has at its disposal. Each has its fight to make against the forces of darkness; neither is in a position to neglect an ally.
THE FUTURE OF LIBRARY WORK
When a railroad train is on its way, its future history depends on which way it is heading, on its speed, and on whether its direction and its speed will remain unchanged. With these premises, one may confidently predict that a train which left Chicago at a given hour on one day will reach New York at a given hour on the next. Of course, something may happen to slow the train, or to wreck it, or even to send it back to Chicago, in which cases our predictions will come to naught. This is what the weather man finds. His predictions are based on very similar data. Our weather conditions travel usually across the continent from west to east at a fairly uniform rate. If that rate is maintained, and the direction does not change, and nothing happens to dissipate or alter the conditions, we can predict their arrival at a given place with a fair degree of accuracy. Those who rail at the weather man’s mistakes are simply finding fault with our present inability to ascertain the causes that slow up storm centers, or swerve them in their course, or dissipate them. When we know these things, and know in addition what starts them, we can give up making forecasts and write out a pretty definite weather time-table—as definite and as little subject to change, at any rate, as those issued by the railroads.
My business at this moment is that of a forecaster. We know just where and what the library situation is at present, and some of us think we know where it is headed. If it should keep on in the same direction and at the same rate, we ought to be able to describe it as it will be, say, in 1950. Of course, it may get headed in some other direction. It may slow down or speed up; it may melt away or strike a rock and be irrecoverably wrecked. If I see any chances of any of these things, it is my business to mention them. If my forecast should turn out a failure no one can prove it until 1950 arrives, and then I shall not care.
To begin with the necessary preliminaries of our forecast—what and where are we now? I have said that I know; probably you think that you do; but as a matter of fact our knowledge is neither comprehensive nor accurate. We need a general library survey. We have, as a sort of statistical framework, the figures now printed annually in tabular form in the A.L.A. Proceedings, but probably no one would maintain that these do, or possibly could, give an adequate idea of the character or extent of the work that our libraries are doing. Those of us who think we know something of it have gained our knowledge by experience and observation and neither is extensive enough in most cases to take the place of a well-considered and properly-managed survey of existing conditions and methods.