The same is true of lantern-slides to an even greater degree, for slides are practically never used except in groups. As a collection of slides may be grouped in scores of ways, it is better to file them in some order that will admit of quick selection, than to form groups arbitrarily at the outset and keep these together. A slide in such a group is practically withdrawn from the possibility of assemblage in some other group. For instance, a view of Michael Angelo’s “Moses” might find a place in a group to illustrate a talk on Michael Angelo, or Renaissance Sculpture, or The Art Treasures of Rome, or Old Testament Worthies, or any one of a dozen others. If we place it arbitrarily in any one of these and keep the group together, we shall of course spare ourselves a little trouble if anyone wants that particular assemblage of slides, but we shall not only make it more difficult to assemble the other groups, but practically put them out of the running. Several years ago we had a valuable gift of a collection of slides illustrating phases of city-planning, given by the Civic League of our city. They included many foreign views now difficult or impossible to obtain. The donors had assembled them in groups to go with lectures prepared in advance and we maintained this arrangement for a time, although it was not in accord with our general plan. But we soon found that persons who asked for slides on London or Munich or Milan were missing some of our best material, simply because we could not always remember to look through the city-planning groups for something that might be there. Consequently we broke up these groups and distributed their slides to the proper places in our file, which is in trays arranged precisely as if the slides were catalogue cards, with proper guides and cross-references on cardboard slips. We have memoranda of the slides that belong in each lecture group and these can be quickly assembled if wanted. Of course we allow the public to go directly to the trays if they desire and assemble for themselves any group that they choose.
This is all borderland material between library and museum. There is much of it analogous to the lantern slide that libraries have not taken up yet, but that they might handle to good advantage. I do not see why we should not, for instance, circulate microscope slides or photographic negatives. Stereoscopic pictures are now commonly handled by libraries owing to skilful and perfectly legitimate exploitation.
There is perhaps some doubt whether we should include in this sort of material musical records, either for the mechanical organ and piano or for the phonograph. These should possibly be considered as books containing music written in a kind of notation that admits of sound-reproduction. The fact that there is this doubt should perhaps suffice to throw these records into the borderland of which we are speaking. They are to some extent capable of the group arrangement spoken of above, as where a library patron asks to take out half a dozen records from one opera or eight old French dances. They are also capable of a kind of correlation with other library material that is quite unique. Thus a reader may take out at the same time Chopin’s military polonaise in ordinary notation and in music-roll form. The pianola reproduction serves as a guide to his own reading of the piece, or he may simply follow the musical notation as he operates the mechanical player. Similarly, he may take out the miniature orchestral score of a selection and the phonograph record of the same as played by an actual orchestra. Here he can not play the piece himself but he can follow the reproduction with score in hand, much to his own musical pleasure and profit.
An exactly similar correspondence exists between an ordinary book and a phonograph record of it read aloud. Such records are not often available, but I see no reason why they should not become so, at any rate in the case of poetical and oratorical selections. Our means of popular instruction in spoken language are deficient and these might prove useful. At present we teach children in the schools to read and write, but not to speak. If they do not learn good colloquial spoken English at home, they are apt to remain uneducated in this respect. This plan has worked well in the teaching of foreign languages and it is now possible to buy small phonographs with cylinder records in French, German or Italian corresponding to printed passages in the accompanying manuals. I certainly think it legitimate of libraries to purchase these, and they would be “border-land” material, I suppose, in the same sense as the musical records.
I may say before closing, in regard to this sort of museum material, that the largest circulation of music rolls that I know of is that of the Cincinnati Public Library, which distributes them at the rate of 60,000 per year. We have 3681 rolls and circulated 16,814 in the year 1917. Neither the Cincinnati library nor our own pays out money for this material. It is all donated.
The status of phonograph records of all kinds as museum material is hardly as high in this country as abroad. In the Sorbonne, in Paris, records of French dialect speech have long been acquired and stored. Records of this kind and moving-picture films, made of permanent material and carefully prepared to show existing conditions would have very high future value. I do not know of any systematic effort to collect them in the United States. Possibly it might be difficult to find permanent films. A moving picture man told me that only perishable ones were being made, as it was not for the interests of the trade that they should last long. There is too much of this spirit in modern industry and trade, and it is responsible for poor materials of all sorts—paint, textiles, dyes and furniture. Permanent carbon photo-prints on paper can be made and doubtless the process can be applied to transparent films if desired.
This is really museum material, but if no museum takes it up, I should like to see the Public Library begin the work. We already have the films of our great St Louis Pageant of 1915, which may serve as a beginning.
It has been said above that museum material adaptable to library use is so for physical reasons. We may go further and say that the whole difference between a library and a museum is a physical difference rather than one of either object or method. The difference is one of material and of the manner of its display, and these are conditioned by physical facts. The difference between an object and a picture of it is physical. It should not astonish us, then, that when this physical difference is abolished, as it is when the object itself is a picture, or is minimized, as when the object is flat like the picture and resembles it closely, like a textile specimen, the boundary between the museum and the library practically disappears.
THE LIBRARY AND THE LOCALITY
There is nothing more important than standardization, unless it is a knowledge of its proper limits. Probably no more important step has ever been taken than the introduction of standardization into the industries; the making of nails, screws, nuts and bolts of standard sizes, the manufacture of watches, firearms and machines of all sorts, with standard interchangeable parts. If you take apart a thousand Ford automobiles and mix up the parts a thousand automobiles may be at once assembled from those parts, without any effort at selecting the particular ones associated with each other at first. You know that this principle is now being applied to what are known as “fabricated” ships where certain types of freight-carriers are made standard and then twenty or thirty of a kind are built at once in the same yard, being assembled from steel parts cut out and punched in what are called “fabricating ships”.