Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

Possibly library standardization has affected buildings more than anything else about a library. There was a time where its absence was doing a great deal of harm, especially in the case of small or medium-sized libraries put up under the Carnegie gift. Every board and every local architect had a different idea, but all seemed to agree that the building, no matter how small, was to be a monument, with a rotunda and a dome; and a good deal of waste resulted. There was a loud call for some kind of a standard plan, and small library buildings, whether for branches or independent libraries, are now a good deal alike, so much so that we can often pick out a library building by its outward guise, and that we will sometimes say of a post-office or an art gallery, “That looks exactly like a library”. This ease of identification is of course good as far as it goes; but it should not interfere with a certain degree of adaptation to local conditions. This is obvious in the case of sites offering local peculiarities. For instance, the High Bridge Branch of the New York Public Library is built on a steep hillside. The architect has taken advantage of this fact to arrange an entrance on the ground level on each of the three floors. The lowest is a service entrance, the next above leads to the children’s room and the upper-most to the adult department. Each door opens on a different street and the three facades are respectively three, two and one story high. Evidently no standard plan would have been of use here. The building, inside and out, had to be planned for this site and this alone. And although not many sites require such special treatment as this there are many that do not lend themselves to the erection of a rigid standard building. In Detroit the Carnegie Committee, I am told, were inclined to insist on a basement assembly room in branches to be built on ground where any basement at all would involve wasteful expense of construction. The proposed contents of a building should often affect its plan. Some architects have not yet learned the difference between an independent library and a branch of the same size and probable circulation. An independent library may have to house treasures, and should be of fire-proof construction. A branch rarely houses anything that can not easily be replaced and it may be waste of money to make it fire-proof.

The architectural style of a library building is often properly made to conform with some style peculiar to the locality or regarded as suitable for it. The Riverside Public Library in California is properly in the Spanish colonial or Mission style; that of New Haven, Conn., is a modified New England Colonial, the Jackson Square Branch in New York is Dutch, the Chestnut Hill Branch in Philadelphia and the Public Library in Harrisburg are of the irregular stone masonry so familiar in many parts of Pennsylvania. Some of the branches in Portland, Ore., used to be and perhaps still are of wood, built of the Douglas fir of the surrounding region.

The power of the purse is an important thing in libraries as elsewhere, and possibly we should have taken up earlier the variations of library income with locality. Not only are some communities better able to support a library than others, but of two with equal ability one will excel in interest and willingness to give. An attempt to regulate income by rule is the requirement of the Carnegie Committee that a municipality shall appropriate for the support of a library in a Carnegie Building, not less than ten per cent. of its cost. I know that the condition is primarily stated the other way around. The town is supposed to decide what it can give to support a library and then the Carnegie Committee is willing to capitalize this at ten per cent. But the library once built, its cost becomes the fixed item and the appropriation the variable one, and in many cases it has varied so far downward as to constitute a violation of the town’s library contract. Of late the Committee is making an effort to detect and tabulate these violations and to use them as a basis for withholding donations in neighborhoods where they have been frequent. A man is known by the company he keeps, and it may be just to regard with some suspicion one who lives in a neighborhood where dishonest persons congregate. Still, towns are unlike men, since their locations are fairly permanent, and it scarcely seems right to turn down Jonesville’s request for a Carnegie library because Smithtown, 35 miles away, has been unable to appropriate the ten per cent. that it promised. The Committee has also made what I regard as the mistake of finding fault with the library that suffers from an unduly reduced appropriation, instead of with the city or town government that is responsible for the reduction. To throw blame on the head of an institution that has just been robbed of its birthright would seem to be adding insult to injury. But despite the failure of this particular effort at standardization, there seems to be a feeling that library incomes should be so far standardized as to be calculable from the particular set of circumstances under which the library is working. The State of New York once attempted to regulate its library appropriation by home-use alone—so many cents per volume circulated. This was a very crude attempt, but possibly we ought to be able to say just how many dollars ought to support a library in a building of specified size with so many books, and a circulation of so many per year. This matter was the subject of earnest discussion for a year or more in the American Library Institute, but no definite conclusion was reached. It has always been my belief that some sort of formula could be deduced by mathematical methods from a large number of observed data, that is, the statistics of a series of normally-conducted libraries. Observe that this is not so much standardization as an attempt to systematize the recognition of differences.

With the average librarian the practical question is not so much what sum he ought to have to run his library, as how he can and shall run it with what he has. Limitation of income invariably limits service, and unfortunately the kind of service on which it bears most sharply is that which is the library’s specialty—namely the provision of books. The purchase of books should be the last thing in which the library ought to economize but in practice it is generally the first. The building must be cared for—lighted and heated; the public must be served. But it is easy to stop buying books, and it is in book-purchase that the library with small income differs from its neighbor with plenty of money. There are some curious exceptions where the library can not wholly control the expenditure of its money, which is regulated by the dead hand of a testator. Thus the Forbes Library of Northampton, Mass., now sensibly consolidated with the Public Library of that city, was obliged for years to expend most of its income for the purchase of books, leaving practically nothing for keeping up its building or paying its staff. It was thus rich where a library is usually poor and vice versa.

The earliest efforts at standardization among librarians were directed toward cataloguing; and probably cataloguers are our greatest sticklers for a rigid adherence to rules. Those who read Mr. E. L. Pearson’s column in The Boston Transcript realize that there are some librarians who consider this fact a legitimate target for ridicule. And it is clear, I think, that both the methods and results of cataloguing ought not to be immune from modification to adopt them to local peculiarities. Some public libraries are used so much for scholarly or antiquarian research that their catalogues need to approximate that of a university library; others are of so popular a nature that they hardly need a catalogue at all. The needs of a certain community may require the very full analysis of certain books, whereas elsewhere these could do very well with less analysis, or possibly none at all. The selection of subject headings may have to be made with due regard to the use that a catalogue is likely to receive. Books on open shelves do not need precisely the same kind of cataloguing as those to which access is not allowed. A library’s public, too, sometimes gets into habits, and if these are unobjectionable, it may be better to humor them than to try to change them. Some bodies of readers like as many printed lists as possible; others rarely use them. In some places there is great demand for a monthly bulletin; elsewhere it is little used. Any librarian who does not stand ready to adapt his catalogue in some respects to the character and needs of his readers runs the risk of limiting his field of service.

Methods of distribution may require selection or modification to suit local peculiarities. Take, for instance, the choice of a charging system. “Which is the best charging system?” is a question frequently asked of experienced librarians or library school instructors. This query is on a par with “What is the best material for clothes?”, or “Is paregoric or ipecac the best medicine?” A librarian who finds in her new job a charging-system that she dislikes, which has been used without complaint for years, should investigate before changing. Acceptance of the system may be simply due to habit. Even then, as we have seen, there may be reason for retaining it. And there is a fair chance that it may have held its ground because it is in some way better adapted to the community. Of course the adaptation may be to something else—size, for example. A rapid rise in the circulation may take a library out of the small-library class and necessitate changes not only in charging system but in many other things.

Some day an industrious student of library economy will tabulate these things that are independent of local conditions, or so nearly so that it is better to standardize them, and tell how the others should be varied with local topography, climate and population. There is no time for that in a single lecture; and if I can leave firmly fixed in your minds the idea that some things are better standardized, while others should be functions of variable local conditions, I shall have accomplished all that I set out to do.

I have already noted some of the differences between a branch library and a central library. Possibly these deserve further mention as an instance of the adaptation of methods of distribution to locality. I have frequently had occasion to deal with complaints which on investigation proved to be due to the fact that the complaining reader expected to find at a branch library all the facilities of a central library. He had lived near the central library in one city, and had moved to another where it was more convenient for him to use a branch. The first thing that strikes him is that the reference collection is inadequate. He does not realize that the central reference collection can not possibly be duplicated at branch libraries. Such complaints, however, may often give the librarian a hint. He may have equipped all his branches with the same small, good reference collection, forgetting that reference work varies with locality. Several complaints of this sort from the same branch may indicate the necessity of enlarging the reference collection there or perhaps of adopting some such scheme as we are trying in St Louis of a central reference collection of duplicates for supplying temporary branch needs.

It is not always realized that the character of the book-collection in a branch library is influenced by the mere fact that it is a branch, apart from considerations of size, circulation and character of readers. There are many standard books, in small demand, that no library should be without. One copy will serve the needs of the whole town. If there is but one library there the book must form part of that library’s collection, whereas if there are a central building and branches, it should be in the central library—not in the branches. It is for this reason that the A.L.A. catalogue should not be used for stocking a branch. I know of cases where numbers of books lie idle on the shelves of every branch in a city system, because they are not branch books at all. One or two copies at Central would have been sufficient, and to place them in branches has been waste of money.

When the New York Public Library took in a considerable number of small independent libraries as branches I had the opportunity, a year or so after the event, of ascertaining from the librarians, what difference to them and to their readers the change of status had made. They were unanimous in saying that although they, as librarians, felt less independent, the service to readers was vastly improved, owing to the fact that the library now formed part of a large system. This is always the result of any kind of union of effort, whether by consolidation or co-operation. The individual is somewhat hampered but the community is benefited. This, of course, is something of a departure from our subject.