Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

The world would never move on without records of the progress that had already been made. Just as surely, it would never move on by reliance on those records alone. What we have accomplished brings us merely to a mile stone in the path of progress. To reach a given point, one must pass the mile stones on the way; but they must be passed and left behind. We shall never get anywhere merely by sitting down upon any of them. To make a personal application to yourselves, you will never make good librarians unless you master what good librarians before you have learned and taught. But just as certainly, you will never be good librarians if you regard this as a definite stopping point. The trouble with most of our education is that it is static and not dynamic; it looks backward, not forward; it teaches what has already been accomplished and fails to equip the student for devising and accomplishing something further, on his own account.

I am warning you in the midst of a course intended to fit you for librarianship that the course alone will not so fit you. But it will start you—and a start in the right direction is of great value—nay, it is indispensable. When the fielder throws the ball directly into the baseman’s hands there is a preliminary motion of his arm. At the end of that motion the ball begins its flight; its start has enabled it to go straight. Your library course will be the throw that enables you to go straight to the mark, but you must not forget that the whole flight remains to be made. My metaphor is a bad one. The ball has no power to adjust or alter its course. You have that power; you can better a good start, or you can nullify it. You may even hit the mark after you have been started in the wrong direction; but to say this is by no means to recommend a wrong start.

All this is a series of platitudes; but to insist on the obvious is often useful. There are so many obvious things that we are apt to neglect some of the most necessary, just as we may fail to see a sign on a building because it is all plastered with signs. Nothing is more common than to assume that a period of formal education, general or special, makes its subject “fit”, either for life or for a vocation. Some never get over this idea and fail in consequence; some discover their mistake and blame their training because it does not do what it can not do and was not intended to do. Formal training trains one to start; it makes one fit to run the race. The race is not won when the training has ended; it has not even begun. The man with a B.A. degree is not ready to tackle the problems of life and vanquish them. The graduate in law or medicine is not a trained lawyer or physician, and when you have completed your library course you will not be trained librarians. You will have been started right, the rest of your training will depend on your reaction to the forces, the stimuli, that surround you on all sides.

What the executive officer is looking for all over the world is initiative, guided by common sense; but it is rare. Possibly our education fails to develop it; possibly no system of education could develop it. But it exists; and we are all happy when we find it. Throwing out of consideration the really lazy, ignorant or incompetent assistant, competent subordinates may be of three kinds—first, he who has been trained to do certain things in certain ways and continues to do only those things in only those ways, not realizing the possibility of change or improvement; secondly, he who does realize this possibility but has been taught, or at any rate believes, that it is not his place, but only his superior’s, to take active steps toward something more or better; and thirdly he who both realizes and acts, who does what he can to see that such steps as he can properly take to improve matters are taken and that such as he can not take of his own accord are suggested, in a proper manner, to his superior. If I were asked to sum up, in a few words, the things that differentiate a well run from a poorly run institution I should say, first, the existence of a staff composed of persons of this third variety, and secondly a chief executive who appreciates and uses them. A progressive executive with a staff of assistants who faithfully obey orders and do nothing more will not go far. His institution may make no mistakes; it may run like a machine, but it will have the faults of a machine—its product will be machine made. With a live staff and a poor executive there will be a maximum of mistakes, absurd and ill-judged plans—a failure to co-ordinate effort in different lines. With plenty of initiative in the staff, and with an executive to select, restrain, encourage and control, we have an approach to the work of a single living organism, the most perfect tool of evolution.

While this means the encouragement of suggestion it also means rejection and selection. It means that while the staff will have to bear disappointment with good nature and without diminution of initiative, the executive, on his part, must realize that a hundred impractical suggestions do not disprove the possibility, or even the probability, that the assistant who makes them may ultimately offer some plan, method, or device of great value. Some of the greatest improvements in library service are due to persons with an imagination and an initiative especially prone to run wild in impractical suggestions.

I realize that I may be regarded as tossing a firebrand among you when I tell you to develop your initiative. An unwise or uncontrolled initiative may do harm, but I fervently believe that greater harm is done every day by the lack of all initiative. Better than any stagnant pool is a running stream, though it break bounds and waste itself in foam and spray. There may be those who will say: Let the student first learn to obey without question; when he has done this it will be time to talk to him about initiative. Alas! that will also be the time when he has lost the chance to develop it intelligently. No, the accepted standards and the ways of progress must be assimilated at one time. Rather than unquestioning obedience to an order, a rule or a formula, let us have appreciation of the reason for it and disobedience whenever a breaking of the letter may keep us more closely to the spirit.

I can assure you that you will make better assistants if this is your temperament, that librarians are looking earnestly for more of this kind, rejoicing when they see the spark of life among the dead wheels and cogs of the library machinery, determined to give any one who shows it an opportunity to show more of it, by promoting him to a place of greater effort and of higher responsibility and service. When such a promotion comes, perhaps over the heads of others with better training and longer experience, there is often wonder and a disposition to explain it all by “favoritism”. And viewed from the proper angle, this is correct; every chief librarian has his favorites; they are those on whom he has learned that he can depend, not only for solid and accurate knowledge of facts and methods but also for quick and ready response to the slightest change of conditions—for appreciation of what is needed in a given set of unusual circumstances and resourcefulness in devising new methods or modifying old ones to meet the emergency—what I have already summed up in the one word initiative.

Every teacher, and every student knows that a good arithmetician may fail utterly when he comes to state and solve problems in algebra. His success has been due to the memorizing of rules and their application. When he is confronted with the necessity of putting into mathematical symbols the fact that A, B and C can do a piece of work in 3, 4 and 5 days, respectively, he is stumped because an entirely different sort of demand is made on his intelligence. And when his teacher explains how the statement may be made, although he has learned how to state that particular class of problems, he is just as much at sea when he is confronted with the question of how soon after 12 o’clock the hands of a watch will again be together on the dial.

In other words, he has left the land of rules and entered the region of common sense. If he is bright, he very soon realizes that all mathematics is common sense; that rules are very useful indeed, but only as short cuts to mechanical processes.

So, at least so I trust, all the methods and tools of library work are based on common sense—catalogues and charging systems and classifications are very useful indeed, but only as short cuts to certain results that would otherwise not be achieved or would be arrived at too late or too confusedly. We must learn all about these, but the time will come when we shall leave the library school and enter the library. Here no sort of rule, formula, method or process will suffice for us, essential though they all are; if we are to make good we must add common sense, adaptability, resourcefulness, initiative.