THE BEGINNINGS OF LIBRARIES
§ 1. Introduction
This talk is addressed to those beginning library work as a life work. This connects “library work” with two significant phrases, “those beginning” and “as a life work”.
This phrase “as a life work” suggests what is perhaps the chief value of a library school training. The distinction of and main justification for all kinds of higher education is that such education aims to put the student in position to view his work to be done as a whole, and life as a thing to be wrought out as a whole, not to be lived from hand to mouth. Presence at a library school means that the student has had foresight enough to be willing to spend energy, money, and a good bit of that most precious capital time, in sitting down to draw plans for his life building as a whole instead of starting in to build by rule of thumb.
There are however in this matter two factors—one’s self and the library. In order to sketch out one’s life work as librarian and live it, one must needs first know what libraries are, what they are capable of becoming and how one can best apply such knowledge and energy as one may have to making these libraries accomplish what they were intended to do for human society. This involves looking at libraries as a whole as well as at one’s life work as a whole, and the task of the library school is to give this view of the situation. In the last analysis this is the most important thing which any technical school does for one, this giving the vision of the whole of experience in one’s chosen field in order that one may draw his life plan in view of it. And for that matter, the task of technical education does not differ in this regard from the task of general education, which is simply the vision of the whole of human experience, as a whole, with reference to one’s own life among all kinds and conditions of men.
As therefore the field of science and general activities is the Universe, so the field of library science and education is libraries—libraries top and bottom, inside and out, beginning, middle and end and looked on as a whole.
On the other hand the phrase “those beginning” suggests the facts that you are yourselves at the beginning of a course of study, that the school year is at its beginning, that this New York Public Library school itself is still in its beginnings and that library schools in general are only in their beginnings. This in turn suggests as the topic of this talk three aspects of the matter of library beginnings: the beginnings of libraries themselves, the beginnings of library science and the beginnings of schools for library science. This talk will touch briefly, towards the end, on the two latter topics, but will have chiefly to do with the beginnings of libraries.
§ 2. The study of beginnings
At the outset it should be said that the importance of this study of beginnings is in every science quite out of proportion to the importance of the objects studied. Beginnings are by nature small. The highest and best things are by nature the most complex and latest, but the study of the earliest and simplest libraries, like the study of the simplest cell life, is not only useful from several points of view but vital to a right understanding of the more complex. The great vice of technical education of all sorts is its tendency to fix attention on the latest and best only. It is true of course that man’s ideas and methods are an evolution—just as his body is. The fact of the accumulation of human experience is the central significant fact of human civilization. It is the glory of libraries that by reason of this fact they are an indispensable tool of progress in civilization. On the whole, by and large, the latest ideas are in fact best, for they tend to sum up in themselves the total of the useful variations of all preceding ideas, and the main time and attention of a course of education must of necessity therefore be given to the latest and best experience, because it does sum up all that has gone before. This does not, however, lessen the value of the study of earlier ideas on any subject back to the very beginnings, for at any given time and place, the latest idea or method in any field is not necessarily the best. It might be the best: it is in position to build on all previous experience and so become best. We all know, however, that the latest book on a subject is not always the best book. So it is, too, of individual ideas or methods.
This frequent failure of the latest to be best comes chiefly from lack of knowledge of previous experience. Every year sees library methods put in operation which were tried and found wholly wanting in the last century or it may be, two, three or even five thousand years ago. On the other hand again, every now and then we find that some method or idea, discovered long ago but neglected meantime, is far better than those in common use. This has often been true of great scientific ideas and we have in Mendelism a striking recent example. One must needs therefore study earlier ideas in any field, both in order to be sure that so-called new ideas are not exploded old ones and in order to find whether common practice in any field at a given time is not really the development of an inferior line of evolution.