Some definitions again try to limit the library to printed books or bound books or literary works as distinguished from official or business documents, and these definitions have, as before said, sometimes led to a good deal of misunderstanding. Even if “archive” is assumed to be the right name for a collection of business documents, still such a collection is simply one kind of a library. Every one recognizes this when the collection of business documents is one of printed and bound public documents (U. S. public documents e.g.), and if the documents are tablets, rolls or folded documents, the case does not differ. If books are kept for use it makes no difference whether they are of wood, stone, metal, clay, vellum, or paper, whether they are folded documents, rolls or codexes, whether they are literary works, government or business documents: if intended for use they form a something for which some word must be found which will apply equally to all kinds of records for use and to a one-book-for-use library as well as to the New York Public Library. The right word in the English language seems to be this word “library”. The “business documents” in active current use in the registry or the counting house are perhaps the farthest away from the “library” of common speech but they are equally far from “archives” in the scientific sense, and curiously these have retained one of the very simplest and oldest names of the true library, “the books”, and of librarianship “book keeping”.
But the definition of a library as a book or books kept for use only brings us up against the farther question, What is a book? To this it may be answered that a book is any record of thought in words. Here again neither size, form, nor material matters; even a one word record may be a book and that book a library. This leads again however to still another question: What is a word? Without stopping to elaborate or to discuss definitions in detail, we may take the next step and define a word as “any sign for any thing”, and again explain the sign as anything which points to something other than itself. This is not an arbitrary definition but one founded in modern psychology and philology and to be found in sundry stout volumes by Marty, Leroy, Wundt, Dittrich, van Ginneken, Gabelentz, and others. The sign may be a sound, a color, a gesture, a mark or an object. In some stenographic systems a single dot stands for a whole word.
The most insignificant object, therefore, kept to suggest something not itself may be a library. A single word book is of course a very insignificant book indeed, and the single letter, single word, single book library a still more insignificant library, but, unless you invent other words for them, they are truly book and library, and there is no more reason to invent another word for book or library in this case, than another word for animal when it is intended to include both the amoeba and man. The very simplest library consists therefore of a single recorded sign kept for use. It is the feeble faint beginning of a library but just as much a library as the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the British Museum, or the Bibliothèque Nationale—and the beginning of library wisdom is to seek out diligently the nature of these rudimentary libraries.
§ 4. Method
So far for definition. Now a word or two as to method. In this search for the earliest history of the making and keeping of records, library science, like all the human sciences, has at least three ways of approach or sources. The first source is history. This includes the evidence from written documents (which is direct and is history proper) and the evidence from monuments (which is circumstantial and is archaeology proper).
The second source is the custom of primitive or uncivilized nations of recent times: this is comparative library science. The modern idea of evolution implies that these primitive peoples are simply cases of arrested or retarded development—they, having branched off from a common stock at an early stage of development or else having only slowly developed in parallel natural lines. Their customs therefore, it is alleged, truly represent early mankind when it was at a like stage of development. With this evidence belongs also the rich source of survivals in popular customs among civilized peoples and folklore generally; these are things which have kept on side by side with the things which have outgrown them.
The third source is the acts of children while they are developing from the speechless to the speaking stage and from the speaking to the writing stage;—the modern theory being, as has been said, that the child in developing repeats the experience of its ancestors, or, as it is said, “recapitulates the history of the race” in this regard. This is in the same sense perhaps that children’s games are supposed by some to reflect the hunting, the wars and the domestic life of their savage ancestors.
These three sources are supposed to cross-check one another and supply gaps in one another, and each might be followed out separately in detail, but for purposes of this talk it will be convenient rather to treat as one historical progress, illustrated from the customs and habits of modern savages, folk customs, and the psychology of children.
That part of methodology which has to do with the bibliography of the subject in its various aspects will be reserved for the end of the talk.