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The work of the Free Library Commission may be briefly summarized as follows:
Supervision. Works for the establishment of public libraries in localities able to support them.
Visits libraries for the purpose of giving advice and instruction.
Collects and publishes statistics of libraries for the guidance and information of trustees.
Prints a bi-monthly bulletin, news notes and suggestions to keep librarians and trustees informed in regard to library progress throughout the state.
Gives advice and assistance in planning library buildings and collects material on this subject for the use of library boards.
Instruction. Aids in organizing new libraries.
Assists in reorganizing old libraries according to modern methods which insure the best results and greatest efficiency of the library.
Conducts a school for library training for the purpose of improving the service in small libraries.
Holds institutes for librarians to instruct those who cannot attend summer school.
Traveling Libraries. Maintains a system of traveling libraries which furnishes books to rural communities and villages too small to support local libraries, and to larger villages and towns as an inducement to establish free public libraries.
Aids in organization and administration of county traveling library systems.
Clearing House. Operates a clearing house for magazines to build up reference collections of bound periodicals in the public libraries of the state.
Document Department. Maintains a document department for the use of state officers, members of the legislature and others interested in the growth and development of affairs in the state, and catalogues and exchanges state documents for the benefit of public libraries.
Book Lists. Distributes a suggestive list of books for small libraries to insure purchase of the books in the best editions.
Issues frequent buying lists of current books to aid committees in securing the best investment of book funds.
Compiles buying lists on special subjects or for special libraries upon request.
V
It must not be supposed, because the great library growth has been manifested in the last decade, that there were wanting prior to that period interested men and women hopeful and active to give impulse for like conditions. Away back in 1840, when Wisconsin was a frontier territory ambitious to advance to statehood, the council and assembly enacted a law to encourage subscription libraries. A public library supported by taxation was not then dreamed of, for there was then none in the entire United States, nor for ten years thereafter. It is interesting to note that in these territorial days, the little hamlet of log houses known as Madison enjoyed the advantages of a library open to all who cared to use it. It was the private library of the governor, James Duane Doty, which he threw open to the public. Col. Geo. W. Bird, in his account of it, says that it contained about five hundred volumes of a general historical, educational and literary character and a number of the best maps known at that time. It was housed in the governor's private office, which was a small one-story frame building of one room situated among the trees in the little backwoods town. The books were arranged in low shelving around the sides of the room, and the scanty furniture, consisting of a small desk, a deal-board table, three or four chairs, a pine bench, and a register in which to enter the taking and returning of books, completed the equipment.
Over the shelving on the westerly side of the room, was this direction, painted in black on a white field: "Take, Read and Return." There were only two regulations as to the use of the library and they were displayed conspicuously in red ink about the room, and they were as follows:
1. Any white resident between the lakes, the Catfish and the westerly hills, his wife and children, may have the privileges of this library so long as they do not soil or injure the books, and properly return them.
2. Any such resident, his wife or children, may take from the library one book at a time and retain it not to exceed two weeks, and then return it, and on failure to return promptly, he or she shall be considered, and published, as an outcast in the community.
"I do not remember of there ever having been occasion for inflicting this penalty. I do remember my father sending me one day when the time-limit of a book was about to expire, with a note to a family, requiring the return of a book that day, and calling attention pointedly to the above penalty of failure; and I remember how concerned the mother was, and how quickly she got the book and dragging me along after her, speedily returned it to the library, and thus escaped the sentence of outlawry," concludes Col. Bird.
VI