Let me put this a little more concretely. The library building in which I work is better located and arranged than the average library building of the country. And yet the total distance walked to and from the sidewalk by all those who enter that building daily is nearly 35 miles to the point where the library begins to serve them. Furthermore each one of the thousand and more persons who daily enter this building, in addition to the energy he uses in walking 180 feet to and from the sidewalk must lift his own weight and the weight of the books he carries seven feet above the level of the sidewalk. In other words the location and arrangement of this building with reference to the sidewalk requires the people who use it daily to take an extra walk of almost the distance from Baltimore to Washington and at the same time carry a weight equal to that of a ton of coal 350 feet to the top of a skyscraper and down again. And all this is in addition to the walk of 450 feet from the nearest car line, which few people use, 800 feet from the car lines which are generally used, and over 400 feet from the nearest thoroughfare. The library to be a friend to man, and to serve him, must "live in a house by the side of the road where the race of men go by."
The business man who studies usually buys his own printed matter that deals directly with his work, and in this respect he is usually far ahead of the library both in knowledge and in material at hand; and the bigger his business the more is this likely to be the case. The librarian will almost invariably find such a man a most helpful person in the selection of things to be purchased and in the relative value of both authors and books. It should be the business of every librarian to know intimately, as far as possible, all such men in the community.
Our public libraries must largely increase on their shelves the number of things in print that are of real service to the business man in his work. First of all we must know what these things are, and next we need to have the nerve to spend money for them much more freely than we have ever done before. This is expensive and most such expenditures will not show in the statistics of circulation. As an illustration of this let me refer again to the institution I have the honor to serve. For a number of years we have been spending $400 a year for books in only one line of business. Besides the books, we take some two dozen current periodicals on the same subject. All are used to a considerable extent and the use made of them by only a dozen men is of the greatest commercial and financial importance to our city. And yet so far as the figures of circulation are concerned the expenditure of $450 of our annual book fund for this one business is practically nothing.
We must get away from the idea of measuring the usefulness or the efficiency of the library by the number of books issued for home use. So long as this idea dominates our public library work we can never do our best for the community, and especially the business part of it.
We need of course many books for the business man in our circulating departments, but these by no means meet the need. Many of these books are out of date in a few years at the best. To keep up to date there is necessary a liberal purchase of yearbooks, transactions and publications of industrial, technical and commercial associations which bring down to date annually, and in convenient form, the latest knowledge in their respective fields. For progressive business men such works are vastly more important than encyclopedias, important as encyclopedias of all kinds are.
Then too we must pay greater respect to the material published in pamphlet form. On a multitude of subjects some of the latest and best things have appeared in this form. Most of us do not handle this material properly, if at all. In many libraries pamphlets are regarded and cared for with about the same degree of disrespect as were public documents in most libraries twenty years ago, and I regret to say, in many libraries today. And as for the public use made of pamphlets, it is practically nothing.
But more important for the wide-awake business man than books, documents and pamphlets, is a large collection of current periodicals relating to every kind of business activity in your city, with clipping files on many subjects, for it is only through these that it is possible to keep up with the latest information or for the library to supply the thing that is most needed at the minute. As an illustration of such use I recall several recent instances of business men getting up briefs in connection with the proposed Underwood tariff bill. The latest information, even when compiled sometimes by government authorities, was secured from technical or trade journals before it could be received from the Government Printing Office.
In short the best work the library can do for the business men personally is in the building itself, supplemented by extensive use of the telephone and the mails (reference or information work if you please), and not by issuing to them for home use books whose information at the best is rarely less than a year old, but in reality is more likely to be five, ten, or even twenty years old. The circulating book has a most important place and I would not for one moment take from it the importance that is its due. My plea is that we recognize more fully for our business man, and especially the so-called small business man—the man of small business, or the young man who hopes to establish a business of his own, the great importance of library assistants who know the contents and the relative value of books, pamphlets and periodicals, and who understand the art of library salesmanship whereby the business man gets the things he really needs.
And then when we have done all this—have librarians who know, and the things in print the business man needs, this one thing more we must do, we must let the business man know what we have for his particular problem and how we can serve him. The library must advertise the utility of ideas and of knowledge in the every day work of the world as well as advertise its resources and its service.
The best advertising is that which comes from a well served patron. But our libraries have thrown away one of the best means of publicity by locating their buildings where people must go out of their way to find them and by so arranging them that the passerby sees nothing but stone, brick and glass—things that suggest nothing of the joy and usefulness of books. Seeing great crowds enjoying and using books, as well as seeing attractive things in print through properly arranged show windows, would appeal to the average library user in a way that would simply compel his interest and attention in the things we have for him.