But the beginnings of library schools may be found farther back still in the schools of the Scriptoria of the middle ages, where librarians made as well as kept their books, and in the temple schools of Greece and Egypt, where men were trained to all sorts of professions, including the keeping of books. Such schools are alleged in Babylonia as early as 3200 B.C., and more primitive still must be counted the schools for the training in memorizing of ancient India. That some analogies to this training in the keeping of books existed in the collections of mnemonic books is not merely inferred in general but found in the alleged training of keepers of quipus in the use and publication of these records. The same is possibly true in some of the initiation ceremonies of primitive tribes where the young men are presumably taught the use of message sticks, secret languages, and the like. It may fairly be said that these are remote in nature as well as in time, and yet they are as truly the predecessors of the library schools of to-day, as these of to-day are of the library schools of to-morrow, which are likely to differ very considerably from those of to-day.
It does not take much of a prophet to foresee a radical development in some of our American library schools within a very few years. When for example, the Columbia Library school was starting, manuscripts were so few in this country that their science and economy was a negligible element in instruction—and as for archives, we had plenty of documents but the very name archive, with what it connotes, was foreign and almost unknown in America. Now there are many well recognized archives and some of our collections of ancient manuscripts are numbered by the thousands. Many of you will probably live to see more than one library school equipped with full departments for instruction in palaeography and archival science, with special curricula for each distinguished from the general course in library economy. Possibly by that time there will also be departments of cartography, engraving and numismatics, each with its corps of instructors. In these respects it was something of a pity that the library school went out of the university, but on the whole it may be doubted if it would have ever had the great expansion or ever have done the great work that it has done for popular education if it had stayed in the university. In several very fundamental respects certainly this New York Public Library is a far better environment for developing a university of librarianship than any university of general studies.
§ 21. The beginnings of library research
What we have been saying to-day is only the rough blocking out of a subject for which anthropology and the excavations in the eastern Mediterranean region have furnished and are furnishing an enormous amount of source material, as yet wholly unexplored for library matters. A small part of the material has indeed been roughly explored and has yielded rich results in fields where there was absolutely nothing known before, but the unexplored matter is large and increasing rapidly every day. Library research it may fairly be said is itself in its beginnings, and American research in libraries for the older periods hardly yet begun. Of course, as we know Aristotle had some faint notion of anthropological methods and all the mythologizing people were, as is very thoroughly recognized now, pursuing a sort of scientific research and expressing and thinking in these figures of speech. In this point of view the myths as to Hermes and Thoth, Seshait and Minerva were, if not research, at least speculation on the origins.
Research, however, as now understood, is the product of modern natural science and goes hand in hand with the doctrine of evolution. In this sense there has already been much good research work in palaeography and other branches of the book sciences in European countries. In America a little real scientific work has been done in palaeography, more in the history of printing and a trifle in some other branches of library science, but the total is small and little or none of it directly connected with the library school. It is likely, however, that in the near future many of the library schools will be teaching methods of research and giving diplomas which require some real contribution. Possibly they will even have recognized departments for research. Of this movement you will be a part and the character of the development will be in part, possibly in large part, through what you think and do and become during your course here. Probably we have as little notion of what record keeping will be a few thousands of years hence, as the inventor of the knotted cord had of this library school—and yet what we do may perhaps affect the state of things then as the inventor of the quipu, the alphabet, papyrus, vellum, printing, the photograph, phonograph, or any of the great inventions in the evolution of books and their keeping, has affected the present state of things.
§ 22. Bibliography
The best first source for a general idea of primitive libraries is the readable and well illustrated little book of Edward Clodd called The story of the alphabet, (N. Y., Appleton, 1912).
With this may be put the still briefer first part of Dr. Fritz Specht’s Die schrift (Berlin, 1909. 3rd ed.).
More extensive general treatments are found in Berger’s Histoire (Paris, 1892), and quite exhaustively in Wuttke’s Die entstehung der schrift (Leipzig, 1872), also in W. J. Hoffmann’s The beginnings of writing (N. Y., 1895), a sketchy but comprehensive survey.
For the definition of the library see Graesse Schmidt and the other treatises on library science, especially the older ones.