We were in hope that Mr. Henry R. Tedder, who is the chairman of the Council of the Library Association and its honorary treasurer and an ex-president,—and otherwise the secretary of the Athenaeum Club,—would have come as our delegate, because Mr. Tedder's importance is intrinsic and not like mine purely adventitious and depending wholly upon the office which I at the moment have the privilege to hold; but it was impossible for Mr. Tedder to come on this occasion and, ladies and gentlemen, I am the best that we can do for you at this time.
But I am happy to say that it is the general feeling of the Council that in future we should not let many meetings of the A. L. A.—at all events in the eastern states—go by without sending one or more members of our Association to be present at them. I do not think that there is anything from which our Association is likely to get a more valuable return than by the visits of some of its more prominent members to America in order that they may see for themselves and not merely read about what you are doing, and how you are doing it and get some knowledge of the conditions under which you are working, of your achievements and of your difficulties, and so bring to library work in Great Britain that added power which must inevitably come from a wider knowledge. So that I trust that the imperfections of the present delegate will be overlooked, in the hope not only of more but of better to come.
I am also requested by my Council to extend a very hearty invitation to the members of the American Library Association to attend the annual meeting of the Library Association to be held in 1914. That meeting will almost certainly be held at Oxford, by invitation of the University and of the city. I need not of course point out the extreme suitability of the city of Oxford for a meeting of librarians, nor the attractions which Oxford must possess for everyone who likes an atmosphere of ancient learning and who revels in the architectural glories of a bygone day. So we hope that as many of you as possible will come over there for that meeting in order that we may make of it a sort of Americo-Anglican conference. Observe the order, please, in which I mention those words. I draw special attention to that because I believe I have somewhat of a reputation for an absence of tact on these occasions—at any rate among our own members.
When I informed Mr. Utley that I was coming he was good enough to write me a letter, which I received just before I sailed, and he asked—not knowing me very well of course, or he might not have been so liberal in his invitation—that I should talk to you on any subject I liked. I thought that it would be best perhaps if I should say something about the present conditions of library work in Great Britain. Of course it is impossible, in an address lasting only a few minutes, to cover anything like the whole field, and if I did attempt it I should only bore you. But you may be interested in one or two of the outstanding features of our recent work, because they throw light upon conditions which are in many respects very different from yours. First of all, there are two features in what I may perhaps call the domestic situation, which to us are of considerable significance. The most important step which the Library Association as an association has ever taken has been the recent reorganization of its membership along the lines of the professional qualifications of the members. In our old grouping we took no account whatever of whether a member of the Association was a professional librarian or merely a member of a library committee or just a person interested in library work. The honorary fellows of the Association and the fellows were any persons, whether librarians or not, whose names would add dignity and importance to the Association, or who had distinguished themselves by some special service rendered to the Association or the movement as a whole. Then in addition Mr. Tedder himself had a small group of what he called very honorary fellows who were the honorary fellows who insisted on paying their annual dues. That was an entirely private group of Mr. Tedder's. Now we have changed all that. Fellows and members of the Association are now professional librarians only, and non-professional librarians are known as associate members. The privileges of membership including the power to vote and to serve on the Council are shared equally by all members of the Association. The fellows consist in the main of librarians only, but there is a small sprinkling of deputy and sub-librarians. The by-law referring to fellows who do not hold chief positions states that "they must be librarians of approved status," but we interpret that phrase "approved status" in the widest possible way. The members consist of assistant librarians—all those assistant librarians who are not in the small group of fellows; they must be twenty-five years of age and have had six years' experience. That is so at the moment. But after the 31st day of December, 1914, only librarians who possess the diploma of the Association will be entitled to fellowship, and in order to receive the diploma you must have taken in addition to possessing practical experience in an approved library, the six examinations held by the Association, have obtained the six certificates, have gone through if necessary a vive voce examination and have submitted a thesis. Then professional librarians who possess four out of the six certificates will be entitled to membership. A good deal of criticism has been leveled at the scheme owing to the fact that the librarian of some pettifogging little library, with perhaps a total rate income of a couple of hundred a year or even less, because he is a chief in a small way, is entitled to fellowship, while an assistant in a big library system, who may have infinitely more responsibility, is only entitled to membership. But we had to begin somewhere and we had to draw the line somewhere and we drew the line at the sub-librarian, because when we got below the sub-librarian we should not know where on earth we were, because there is no accepted nomenclature of library positions in our country. I do not know whether there is in yours. "Sub-librarian" does not always mean the same thing. The term "chief assistant" is used in a very different way in different libraries. Moreover, the Privy Council would not have approved these by-laws unless we had opened the door as widely as possible to the holders of all existing chief positions.
There is one weak point so far which we have discovered in our scheme. We have no provision for non-professional members corresponding to professional fellowship among the professional members, but we have a new by-law now before the Privy Council creating a group of associate fellows and the associate fellowship will be conferred upon chairmen of library committees and upon non-professional members of the Association who have served the Association in some definite capacity as members of the Council or in some other way.
That, I think, then is the most important domestic thing that we have ever done because we have now made the beginnings at all events of a definite organization of the profession.
The other important thing will not have the same interest for you, but I mention it because it throws light upon our own conditions. We have settled, by a new by-law, the relations of branch associations to the parent body. Until recently we had a by-law which merely provided that branches in any particular district may be formed but it did not state what the powers of the branches were, and owing to that absence of definition we have suffered for a great many years past from a considerable amount of trouble. One or two of the branches grew considerably in recent years, in numbers and in importance; and they began to resent the fact, the inevitable fact of course, that for the most part the actual work of running the Association fell upon the members of the Council who were resident in London or near it. It may seem absurd to you to speak of the distance of London from the great provincial centers in Great Britain, but it is not absurd, because every country measures distance on its own scale, and to all intents and purposes Manchester is just as far from London as Chicago is from New York—because we think it is. As Hamlet says, you will remember—anticipating Mrs. Eddy by several centuries—
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
And as an illustration of the result of this friction I may mention that in London, at the library school—which is hardly a library school because it has not the organization that your schools have, so I ought not to use that term really, but a department of library lectures at the London School of Economics and Political Science, which is a department of the University of London; at these lectures all persons are admissible whether they are librarians or not, but at similar lectures in the provinces everybody was excluded who was not already engaged in library work. So that you had the absurd situation that while the parent body was running one policy at headquarters you had branch associations running an entirely different policy in their own centers. The question of the "open door," as it was termed, was a very hotly debated one at one time in our Association. Well, the general effect of the stress between the branches and the Council was of course bad, each branch being a more or less permanent storm center. While no absolute harm was done perhaps, and while the fireworks let off at the annual meetings were of a more or less harmless character, at the same time we had a general condition of irritation which affected injuriously the work of the Association as a whole. Now we have done away with that, very largely at all events, at least, we hope, by a new by-law, the main points of which are these: First of all, membership of a branch association includes membership of the parent body; the parent body receiving the subscription to the branch association returns to the branch association a rebate of so much a head for the expenses of the branch and, most important of all, the constitution and by-laws of a branch must be approved by the headquarters council and must in no case conflict with the by-laws and constitution of the parent body.
The Council meets monthly, I may say, and one of the quarterly meetings is held on the occasion of the annual meeting. So that means that the expenses of the provincial members are paid to three of the quarterly meetings held during the year; and all the important business—especially contentious business—is relegated to those quarterly meetings.