"This books can do;—nor this alone; they give
New views to life, and teach us how to live;
They sooth the grieved, the stubborn they chastise,
Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise;
Their aid they yield to all: They never shun
The man of sorrows, nor the wretch undone;
Unlike the hard, the selfish and the proud,
They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd;
Nor tell to various people various things.
But show to subjects what they show to kings."
The PRESIDENT: I am very glad to be able to announce that Miss Rathbone has kindly consented to exhibit some extremely interesting charts which have been prepared and exhibited in connection with the work of the library school at Pratt and I am sure that all of you will miss something if you do not avail yourselves of the opportunity which is here presented to see them and to hear the explanation concerning them.
Miss RATHBONE: I am very glad indeed to tell you a little about our exhibition because we found it an interesting thing to do and the people who saw it were interested in it. The genesis of the matter was this: When Miss Alice Tyler was at the school this spring we were speaking about budget and other exhibitions and she said, "I do wish librarians could find some way of graphically presenting library work so that people could understand it as the child welfare work has been presented." That remark of hers, coupled with the fact the library school has never taken part in the exhibition that Pratt Institute has held for a great many years, at the end of the third term, suggested to me the idea of putting the problem to the class of devising an exhibition that should be a visual presentation of the school course and also of library work in general in a form that would be interesting and intelligible to the general public. After a visit to the Bureau of Municipal Research, where Dr. Allen gave them a talk on the value of graphic presentation of facts, I told the students that they were to have the entire responsibility of the planning and execution of this exhibition as a problem in the library administration seminar. It was, of course, an experiment but I was sufficiently convinced of its success after the class made their first and only report of progress, to invite the staffs of the neighboring public libraries to the exhibition. When the material was assembled and installed it created a good deal of interest both in the Institute among the librarians who saw it, and, best of all, on the part of the public at large. We had about five hundred visitors in the four days it was open and it seemed to awaken in the minds of the people who saw it some conception of what library work means. We heard many comments of this kind, "Well, now that I understand the work the library does, I am going to use it more intelligently." One high school boy said, "Gee! I've had an awful time trying to use this library before, but I think I know what it is about now." That sort of a thing made me realize that the exhibition might be of value to some of you as showing one way by which people could be interested in the actual work done in a library, so I wrote to see if space could be had to install it here. It was too late, however, so I simply brought up a few of the charts as examples.
The exhibition began with the technical work of the library—the progress of a book through the various steps was illustrated by a ladder the rungs of which were labeled, Book Selection, Ordering, Receiving, Accessioning, Classification, etc. Books were shown running toward this "Library Ladder," nimbly climbing the rungs, while at the top they acquire wings and fly "off to the public." This chart hung over a table on which the successive operations were shown in detail the same book being used as an illustration throughout. The successive steps were numbered to correspond to the rungs of the ladder. For example, Book Selection was shown by a group including the A. L. A. Booklist, the Book Review Digest and two or three of the reviews. The descriptive card read "No. 1. These are a few of the aids in book selection."
Following that was a chart (exhibiting it) to illustrate the utility of classification, on which was presented a group of ten scientific books unclassified, followed by the same ten in D. C. order, with the question, "In which group would it be easier to find the books on insects." That was followed by another exhibit to prove the utility of subject cataloging. Two copies of the same book were obtained, one new and the other quite worn, the book being Gleason White's "Practical designing," which is made up of a number of papers on minor arts, by different authorities. The new book with a single author card lay on the table surrounded by radiating interrogation points, questions unanswered, and over the book hung this inscription: "This book looks new. Why? Because nobody knows what is in it. It is poorly cataloged." The worn copy lay on the next table and radiating from that were a number of questions with the catalog cards that answer them attached. Over that was the screed: "This book shows wear. Why? Because it can be reached from twenty-four sources. It is well cataloged." People who had not known before what a catalog meant studied that thing out and the change of expression which came to their faces when they saw the new book and the worn book side by side and understood what it signified was delightful. It struck home.
The work of the reference department was tellingly illustrated by an arch in which the reference library was the keystone, all intellectual activities depending on it.
(Miss Rathbone then exhibited various other charts and described them in detail.)
In addition to this, children's work, the field work, the courses in binding and printing, the making of reading lists, the course in fiction were represented.
Altogether we felt that graphic illustration of library work was not only possible but distinctly worth while and that the exhibition had done a good work in educating the library's public, as well as the class, and we expect to make it a permanent feature of the year's work.