Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

Our books of reference are full of duplications and omissions. Search the commoner dictionaries and cyclopedias on the library shelves and you will find countless instances of items of information given twice or thrice and others left out altogether—of words entered under more than one form and completely defined under each, while cross-references lead the seeker to nothing at all. After working a good many years on books of this kind I am convinced that the art of making a perfect dictionary or cyclopedia is the art of avoiding duplication and omission. This can not be done until publishers are willing to allow sufficient time to elaborate a plan before beginning work on one of these books. This, so far, has never been done, and the two sins continue to be committed, here as elsewhere.

It is doubtless time for our application of these principles to the library. We have not to look far to begin.

Take any city of average size and inquire how many libraries it supports. Is there any necessity in a town for more than one library? I am open to conviction, but I doubt. There are excellent reasons for the duplication in each case, I know, just as there were for the two golf clubs in our little town. The duplication in buildings, staff and books is very costly, and the service, no matter how good it may be, is not bettered by this duplication. The trouble may be minimized by co-operation, but it still exists. Take, if you please, the one item of book-purchase. I shall not speak here of private owners, though they must bear their share of blame and of punishment for our two sins; but add together the book funds of the two or three large libraries—public or subscription—and of the dozen small ones—special, denominational, associational—in a community, and see to what a considerable sum it amounts. If it could be administered and expended as a unit, is there any one who will maintain that the precise books would be bought that actually are bought? We find all these libraries buying copies of the same book when one copy is all that the community needs, each ignoring the others and each lamenting the insufficiency of its funds. I have not forgotten such conspicuous instances of co-operation in book-purchase as that of the three large libraries in Chicago, but I also do not forget that it is rare, and that even in Chicago it has been found difficult to carry it out in the perfection in which it is to be found on paper. If we add private purchasers to the libraries I have little hesitation in saying that the money spent on books in any community is quite enough to buy all that the community needs. The lacks are due to the fact that the sum needed to supply them is spent on useless duplicates.

I am not proposing plans, here or elsewhere, to perform the addition of plus and minus quantities that is so easy in pure algebra; I am merely pointing out their existence. From my point of view the ideal situation in a community is the administration by a single body of all its library activities, even private owners co-operating to a certain extent. Let us refresh our memories with a bit of library history. There are at present a great many separate libraries in greater New York. That is, from my point of view, a bad thing. But there were once a great many more. New York and Brooklyn were full of small circulating libraries—denominational, charitable and associational; and many of them had succeeded in obtaining small subsidies from the city. The sum of these was considerable—or would have been considerable had it been administered as a sum, instead of in separate driblets. All the considerations noted above applied in this case, but the Board of Equalization for which we have been sighing actually existed here. It was the city government, which bestowed and controlled a large part of these institutional incomes. A city comptroller with a business-like mind saw all this and proceeded to act upon it. The small libraries became branches of the public libraries of New York and Brooklyn. The city subsidy, in a lump sum went to those institutions. If there is any one who now wishes to return to the old system of separate control and duplication of effort, I am unacquainted with him; notwithstanding the fact that I know many trustees of the consolidated institutions who were filled with rage at the summary action of the city. That action was in the nature of both a threat and a bribe—a threat to discontinue the appropriation of city funds for a library that should refuse to consolidate and a bribe in the shape of a hint of additional favors to come if it should not refuse. Mr. Andrew Carnegie’s offer to build branch libraries, coming at about this time, made it possible to reinforce this hint very effectively.

Our federal government is being held up as the model for a future world federation, and its successful operation confutes the fears of those who doubt the workability of any such plan. In like manner I beg to point to the library consolidations in New York and Brooklyn as an evidence that such removal of duplication elsewhere would enable us to supply omissions in library service. All we need is a motive—if not the threats and bribes that forced the New York consolidation, then something of equal effect. But as I have said I am not proposing plans.

The abolition of this kind of duplication requires pressure from an outside body or agreement among those concerned; no one of us, acting alone, can do away with it. But there are duplications and omissions in the work of every library that it is in the power of the librarian to remedy. Many of these are the result of growth. I know of no profession whose members are more continually and consistently looking for more work to do than that of librarianship. This quest is rarely carried on cooperatively in a library. The head of each department grasps every opportunity to enlarge her sphere of influence, with the result that her sphere first touches that of another department and then intersects it, so that they possess certain parts of the field of service in common. The departments concerned may not know of this duplication, or they may realize that it is going on and be unwilling to stop it for various reasons. Each department-head, like the golf-clubs mentioned above, may be willing to abolish duplication by driving her fellow-worker out of the field, but not otherwise; and her fear lest she herself may have to be the one to retire may induce her to keep silence. Sometimes the librarian himself, observing the interference, contents himself with seeing that individual items of service are not duplicated, leaving the two departments to do, in part, the same kind of work, though not in precisely the same items. This is but a partial atonement for our two sins. Although there is, perhaps, no longer actual duplication of work, there is duplication of administration, duplication of thought and planning. All this is waste of effort that should be devoted to doing some of the things that every library leaves undone. I have elsewhere treated of what I call “conflicts of jurisdiction” in libraries. This comes under the same head, though there may be no actual clash of authorities.

Sometimes we have cases resembling those of the applicants for charitable aid from various sources. Members of the public entitled to library service, the amount of which has been limited by the rules to ensure proper distribution and to prevent monopoly, manage to get two or three times as much as they should get, by applying to different departments, or to the same department under different names. There has been much removal of restrictions of late, in libraries, with the intent to give fuller and freer service to the public. There should be no restriction that interferes with such service. But many restrictions are intended merely to check those whose tendency is to hamper service; and removal of these will evidently injure the public, not benefit it. Traffic regulations are a great bother, but their removal would not be in the public interest. Neither would the removal of necessary regulation of library traffic—the free distribution of books through the appointed public agencies. I sympathize with our modern desire to let Mr. A have as many books as he wants and to keep them as long as he wants; but this sympathy changes to indignation when Mr. A proves to be a library hog, taking advantage of his privileges simply to keep away from Mr. B and Miss C the books that they want. Now and again we find a reader who understands increase of library privileges to mean taking a book away from someone else and giving it to him. There could be no more flagrant example of the double sin of duplication and omission—giving A more than he can use and thereby depriving B of what he needs.

The expenditure of time is a domain in which our two sins become especially noticeable. If one has plenty of money he may waste a good deal without serious effects; but waste of time is different. The total extent of time is doubtless infinite, but not its extent as available to the individual. He has only his three-score years and ten, and astronomical happenings have chopped this up for him into years, months, weeks and days, any one of which is largely a repetition of those that have gone before. So many of our duties, for instance, are daily that the average man has only a few hours out of the twenty-four to deal with emergency work, “hurry calls” and all sorts of exceptional demands on his time. If he gives ten minutes to something that requires but five, he must often neglect a duty, and this constitutes duplication and omission of time, to be remedied by taking the unnecessary five minutes from one task and bestowing it on another. Here again, however, our algebraic addition is simple only on paper. We are hindered not only by our own propensity to waste time but by those whose own is of no value and who therefore insist on wasting ours for us.

This is a subject on which most executive officers can speak feelingly. Such officers are troubled with two kinds of lieutenants—those who keep them in ignorance of what is going on and those who insist on putting them in continual possession of trivial details—more omission and duplication, you see. One special kind of time-waster is the assistant who comes to her chief with a request. Foreseeing refusal she has primed herself with all sorts of arguments and is ready to smash all opposition in a logical presentation of the subject calculated to occupy thirty minutes or so. But the request, as stated, appeals to her chief as reasonable, and he grants it at once without hearing the argument. Do you think the petitioner is going to waste all that valuable logic? Not she! She stands her ground and pours it all out, the whole half hour of it; and when the victim has granted a second time what he had already granted without argument, she retires flushed with triumph at her success. And while this duplicator was duplicating, the other sinner, the “omittor”, was performing some innocent and valuable administrative act without her chief’s knowledge, causing him to give wrong information to a caller and convict himself of ignorance of what is going on in his own institution.

Time-wasting, of course, is by no means confined to the library staff. Much of every one’s time, in a library, is consumed in fruitless conversations with the public—the answering of trivial questions, the search for data that can do no one any good, efforts to appease the wrath of someone who ought never to have been angry at all, attempts to explain things verbally when adequate explanations in print are at hand. All these things consume valuable time and thereby force the omission of public services that would otherwise be performed. Some of them are unavoidable. We must always change up a little time to the account of courtesy, the avoidance of brusqueness, the maintenance in the community of that tradition of library helpfulness that is perhaps the library’s chief asset. This we can not afford to lose. But without sacrificing it, can we not eliminate some of the bores, cut down our useless services for the sake of performing a few more useful ones, and increase the amount of library energy usefully employed without enlarging the total sum expended? This is one of our most vital problems, did we but realize it.