Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

Possibly you think that I have been applying the principle of conflict between progression and stagnation somewhat carelessly—now to your own training as librarians and again to the service rendered by the library itself. In truth these are intimately connected. Progressive assistants make a progressive library. A staff that does its work mechanically will operate a library without initiative. If your habit of mind has grown to be a habit of regarding all the technical detail of library work as part of nature’s law, you will be shocked at a suggestion that the library of which you are a part should undertake some public service that a library never undertook before.

You may know already—you certainly will know soon—that this question of the extension or limitation of library service is still a burning one in many minds. Libraries to-day are doing a thousand things that no one of them would have thought of doing fifty years ago. That some of these things are foolish or ill advised I have no doubt. We now occasionally hear it said that there should be some authoritative statement or agreement on what public libraries, at any rate, ought to do and what they ought not to do. But we Americans do not take kindly to limitations of this sort, although they are familiar in countries where service of all kinds is more standardized. We read in a recent magazine article of the trials of Mrs. James Russell Lowell with English servants, when her husband was American minister in London. Wishing to have a loose corner of carpet nailed down, she called on one after another of her domestic staff, only to be told that the clearly-defined duties of each did not admit of that particular item of service. She finally lined them up on one side of the room, tacked down the carpet herself and then discharged every one of them. This sort of thing does not seem to Americans like efficiency. If some needed bit of service in an American town remains undone, and church and school and library all look the other way because it does not fall within a carefully-limited sphere of duty which each has assigned to itself, we shall count them all blameworthy, especially if it shall appear that one of them is equipped to perform that particular service easily, cheaply and well. The church and the school have both taken this view, and the modern extension of the library’s functions shows that it has been doing likewise. It has gone further than either of the others, probably, because it finds itself in many ways better equipped for the doing of civic odd jobs. It is related of a railway manager that an employee whose work was over once asked him for a free ticket home. The manager refused, saying: “If you had been working for a farmer you would hardly expect him to hitch up and drive you home, would you?” “No”, said the man, “but if he had a rig already hitched up and ready to start, and he was going my way, I should call him darned mean if he didn’t take me along.”

In many cases the library has been hitched up and standing at the door when the necessity has arisen, and it has been “going the same way”—in other words, the need of the community is nearly related to the work that the community’s support has already enabled it to do. Under these circumstances it is in the position of Coleridge’s Wedding Guest—it “can not chuse but hear”.

When we look at the library’s recent history, we shall see that it is in precisely this way that it has taken on all its additional functions. The old libraries lent no books. But home use of books seemed presently desirable. After experimenting with separate institutions for this kind of service, we have all come around to considering it a legitimate function of the Public Library. Libraries gave no attention to children. When this became necessary, another function was added. These and other duties were very closely related to the library’s older functions. Soon there was a further step, in making which the library took over services whose connection with its primary business was not so clear. To draw an example from what is most familiar to me at present, in the St. Louis Public Library you will find a room for art exhibits, collections of post-cards and textile fabrics, a card index to current lectures, exhibitions and concerts, a public writing-room with free note-paper and envelopes, a class of young women, studying, like yourselves, to be librarians; meeting-places for all sorts of clubs and groups, civic, educational, social, political and religious; a photographic copying machine, placed at public disposal at the cost of operation; lunch-rooms and rest-rooms for the staff; a garage, with automobiles in it, not to speak of an extensive telephone switchboard, a paint-shop, a carpenter shop, and a power-plant. Not one of these things, I believe, would you have found in a large library fifty years ago, and yet they are probably all, in one shape or another, to be found in all large modern American libraries. They are extensions of function; in many cases it would be hard to justify them on general principles. Why should a library allow young people to dance, or men to hold a political meeting or the neighbors to exhibit local products, in its building? Our English friends hold that it is the height of absurdity to do so. Doubtless we should be absurd if we should attempt to formulate a principle about what cognate activities might properly be admitted to the library and should include such things as these. But that is not the way in which it all came about. There was some group of citizens, anxious to engage in some activity, beneficial to themselves and to the community. They wanted a place to meet. Church and school, for one reason or another, real or imaginary, were out of the question, and they came to the library. The Library had an unoccupied room, heated and lighted. It had the choice of locking out citizens of the community that were supporting it out of the public funds, or of admitting them. Put in this way the library’s duty seems clear enough. But there is a step further still. Some demands for help are so old that the knocking at the door has passed out of the consciousness of both those who knock and those who hear. In this case it becomes necessary for the library to undertake what a recent scientific writer calls the “re-education of its attentive control”. When an institution reaches the conclusion that it is doing all that it can, or all that the community can properly ask of it, the chances are that it is losing its ability to concentrate. Its duty is to fix its attention on one element of community life after another and ask itself whether it is not overlooking some really insistent demand for help.

I well remember when, in the New York Public Library we used complacently to explain our failure to purchase Hungarian books for circulation by saying that there was no demand for them. But the time came when we put in a few hundred books in that tongue. At once it became evident that we needed not hundreds but thousands. Hungarians came to us from far distant parts of the city only to find empty shelves. This overwhelming demand had been present all the time; only it was latent. It lacked active expression, simply because our lack of Hungarian books was a well known fact. Since then when librarians tell me that their libraries have no books in Ruthenian, or on sanitary plumbing, no out-of-town directories or no prints for circulation, because “there is no demand for them”, I am inclined to smile. No matter how near you may be to dying of thirst, you will not be likely to visit an obviously dry sand-bank in search of water.

The intelligent search for these latent demands requires the kind of interested ability that I have already spoken of as one of the library’s chief needs. The library must keep on growing if it is to live. It must take on new functions, and when it assumes some new duty, some group in the community must exclaim “Of course! that is just what we have been wanting all the time”. And at the same time there will always be some outworn function that may be dropped off quietly to make room for the new.

Only the librarian must not mistake unintelligent imitation for initiative. Imitation in itself is unobjectionable. If what someone else has devised is obviously the very thing you have been looking for to solve your problem, you would only waste energy in trying to devise something else. But if you think you can create in your community a library as good, we will say, as Mr. Dana’s in Newark, or Mr. Brett’s in Cleveland or Mr. Jennings’ in Seattle, simply by copying every detail of those institutions, you are as foolish as if you thought you could make yourself look like your well-dressed friend simply by borrowing his clothes. The library must fit the community; also, in some respects, the librarian. I have recently visited Miss Hewins’ office in the Hartford Public Library. I think it is the most fascinating office a librarian ever occupied. But I certainly shall not go home to St. Louis and try to make mine look like it.

This warning applies particularly to the added functions of which we have been speaking above. They should be assumed in response to a demand—expressed or latent. The demand may be obvious and insistent in one library and non-existent in another. If you suspect a latent demand, experiment will generally reveal or disprove its existence, just as those few hundreds of Hungarian books brought out the demand for the present thousands. We have on the east side of our library a broad terrace, balustraded, elevated above the street, paved with brick and stone. It is shady on summer afternoons, and swept by the south breeze. What an ideal place to read in the open air, instead of in the stuffy building! We equipped it with tables and chairs, relaxed the rules to make it easy to take books and magazines there, did everything in our power to encourage terrace readers. The public press saw and approved. Everything worked well, except that nobody came! A failure, do you say? Not at all. We had tried our experiment, tested for our possible latent demand and found that there was none. We had asked our question and received our answer. There are no tables and chairs on that terrace to-day, but we are not discouraged: why should we be? A real experiment never fails: you always get your answer—yes or no. Of course if your experiment is a sham, and you have assumed that the answer is to be the one that you want, you may be disappointed.

It is always a pleasure to watch things grow, to be able to keep them on and guide their growth in useful directions. A library is no exception to the rule. Even growth in size—the simplest kind—has its satisfactions, but extension of service is still more interesting. It is well that there should be a little mystery between the librarian and his public—a consciousness of problems yet to solve, of service yet to be rendered. It is well that he should be on the lookout for latent demands—those hungers and thirsts that he knows must exist somewhere and that he is eager to satisfy; it is well that his community should regard the library as a place with opportunity and willingness for service yet unrevealed as a reservoir of favors yet unbestowed. This is a living relation, not one of mere juxtaposition. I never envied the kind of service that old Atlas did the world, in standing eternally with it on his shoulders. That was an image of dull, burdensome despair. How much better our modern vision of a spinning globe, circling through space, with all its brother and sister globes dancing around it! And however miraculous it seems, we know that whenever we get up and walk across the room there is a tiny adjustment of balance throughout the whole vast system. There are social balances, too, as well as celestial, and when the library puts out its foot to take a forward step, I believe that they all respond.

These things that libraries are doing have their part in the vast social adjustments in the midst of which we live. Some day a social historian will arise to describe them and set them in their place. I am frequently disappointed when I take up some book describing a movement or an application of energy in which I know that the library has borne a part, to find that its share has been absolutely without recognition; that the word “library” is not even in the copious index. We have been busy doing things—here in the seclusion of the library family we may say that they have been things worth the doing. Some day we, too, shall have our Homer or our Milton.