The personality and attainments of the librarian (and his staff) are of prime importance in making the state library a dominating influence in the commonwealth. He is the man behind the gun. I put him first. From the negative side,—his position should not be subject to partisan or personal influence. That is a blight to start with and will ruin any institution. We are still afflicted with that curse in places, not only in the state libraries but in official positions generally.
Affirmatively, the head of the state library ought to be a person of scholarly acquirements or at least in deep and appreciative sympathy with scholarship and knowledge. If he is a scholar in a limited field he should be in accord with all who are trained in other departments. He should be able to represent the state in its educational and scientific undertakings, by papers and addresses, whenever called upon. It goes without saying that he should be a trained man in educational or library or literary work and of course an executive officer. His library is a laboratory of all for all in the state and he must be in touch with the work of that laboratory. His library is the distributer of blessings to a great commonwealth, and according to the motto of the "Library Company" of Philadelphia, that is divine (Communiter bona profundere deum est). I'll not quote the Latin—it would be classic, and to be classic is against the regulations of the Zeitgeist. I want him to be an inspirer for all to love art and poetry, and study and history and politics (real); and not merely skilled in the knowledge of card indexes and catalog rules. A certain famous general in the Confederate Army spent so much of his time on details of drill and quartermaster's regulations that he forgot how to fight his army.
I have put the librarian first in this broadening influence of the state library. All the volumes and equipment and staff will be comparatively a failure without this scholarly, well-trained, wide-awake executive officer.
As to the various ways in which the state library can extend its influence and make itself useful, permit me to suggest a few. This institution can well be the bibliographical center of the state. Every club, school, library, society, and all citizens can be made to know that here information can be obtained about books.
Our own demand is quite large and ought to be larger. There are libraries with meagre equipment, schools with none, people with none, colleges with little—all these may be taught to turn to the central institution for bibliographical information. I consider this a source of wide-spreading influence, valuable and helpful to the whole state. I have placed it second more because I deem it important, not because I think all of these points can be listed accurately as to their relative positions.
Our states heretofore have been very slow in preserving their history, both of the commonwealth and municipalities. This has led, perchance, to the unspeakable commercial county histories with their unspeakable portraits and unspeakable cost, which we are compelled to purchase in order to have something.
The state library's influence should extend over the entire state in an attempt to teach the preservation of history. The library is the natural place for the collection and organization of the history of the state. The archives may well be kept here for reference and use, though some states have a separate archives and history department.
I wish we knew how to preserve history. We don't keep or build memorials, we tear down and throw away. What we want is the new, the fresh, the raw. The old, the seasoned, the ripe, we think is effete (how we like that word in referring to the old advanced civilization of Europe). The state library has a great, unploughed field to cultivate. Personally, I find people ready to burn up newspapers or manuscripts, or sell volumes for junk rather than give them to an institution where they may be preserved. I am trying to teach them otherwise, but succeeding very slowly indeed. I trust some of you are doing better.
The women's clubs are a source of help in extending the influence of the library. They are asking for information of all kinds at all times. We laugh at them, I know. They have papers on Shakespeare, Goethe or Homer at one sitting and dispose of them all. But what shall we do? They are the conservers of culture and reading. Men don't want them, i. e. culture and reading. They are bourgeois, "practical," (à bas with that word and up with refinement and culture which is just as meaningful in books as in a field where we know culture is everything). I know many prosperous country towns without a men's reading organization or club in them, but many women's. If the state library in its state-wide influence, could convert men to reading, it would do a great work. Send your bulletin to the clubs, suggest topics for discussion, and thus distribute the leaven.
So much of our reading and study is done through periodicals of every description that it is made necessary for one central institution to be well supplied with these publications. The periodicals not taken in the average library, college or club, the foreign, like Revue de Deux Mondes, and Dublin Review, for example, and particularly the learned periodicals used only occasionally, should be found in the state library.