It is not necessary to discuss recreation in the library, as the subject relates to the catalog department no differently than it does to the others. The same may be said about vacations, but in passing I should like to say that I agree entirely with Dr. Bostwick's idea of them as assignments to special work. It seems to me that assistants should be required to obtain the approval of the executive to the plans for their vacations. I have taken vacations myself which were certain to do me no good, and consequently do my work harm, and it does seem that I ought not to expect pay for such a misuse of the library's time. The change in the hours of service in the circulation department of the New York public library from 42½ hours a week to 40 hours has caused widespread approval. I wonder if anyone has called attention to the fact that slight changes in climate affect the ability of the individual to work a certain number of hours. For instance, I know from experience that it is possible to work longer without discomfort in an even climate, not subject to extremes of either heat or cold, than it is in the climate of New York. There are certain parts of the country where it takes less energy to work 42 hours per week throughout the year than it does to work 40 hours correspondingly in New York.
With more attention to light, air, attractive appearance and convenient arrangement of room, avoidance of fatigue in spite of rapid work or monotony, sensible hours, some degree of variety in work, sane vacations, some outdoor exercise during each day, decent pay on a graded basis, the efficiency record of the cataloging staff in many a library should be raised, their organization held intact, and their humor and good-humor have some chance to appear.
The subject was continued by Dr. ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK, of the St. Louis public library, who spoke as follows:
From the administrative standpoint the library life of a book is divided very distinctly into two periods, that before it is placed on the shelves and that after it is so placed. The first period, embracing selection, order, receipt, classification, cataloging and mechanical preparation, is strictly preliminary to the second and would have no reason for being except for the second. The public recognizes the second chiefly and knows of the first vaguely and inadequately. To the library, and especially to that part of the staff engaged in the operations proper to it, it bulks large.
The librarian of a large library often finds himself obliged to act, in a measure, as the public's representative, taking the point of view of the thousands of readers, rather than of those who operate the machinery directly under his own control. To one who is actually handling the levers and pulleys, the machine often seems to be the thing. The general administrator, somewhat removed from this direct contact, is better able to see it as it is—a means to an end.
Hence to the chief librarian, this period of preparation must always be a cause of anxiety. Its cost and its duration especially worry him. While his training and experience do not permit him to minimize its importance, he would like to make it as cheap and as short as possible. The reader wants his book, and he wants it now—as soon as he sees the notice of it in the paper. The departments of the library that have to do with its preparation are anxious only that this preparation shall be thorough, realizing that on it depends the usefulness of the book in the second, or public, period of its life. The impatient reader sees no reason for any delay. The co-operating departments see every reason. The librarian sees the reasons, too, but it is his business, to a certain extent, to take the reader's part, and insist that the book's preparation shall not be so thorough that by the time of its completion two-thirds of the necessity for any preparation at all shall have passed, never to return.
It therefore becomes an important part of his duty to hurry up the work of preparation, and it is my experience that this duty becomes difficult of performance, wellnigh impossible, when the work and responsibility of preparation devolves upon two or more departments. It has sometimes seemed to me that a majority of my working hours were occupied in settling disputes between the order and catalog departments, in futile endeavors to fit the responsibility for delays upon one or the other and to decide which of them, and when, was telling the truth about the other. It was thus with a feeling of relief, although somewhat of surprise, that I found myself four years ago at the head of a library where the preparatory stage of the book's life is entirely in charge of one department, a plan involving of course the consolidation of the order and catalog work.
My four years' experience has convinced me that in many cases this plan may be the solution of some of the librarian's problems. It does not do away with delay: it does not make the library staff assume the reader's point of view, or even the librarian's; but it does reduce the number of department heads with whom the librarian has to deal in his "hurry-up" campaign, and it does unify a responsibility whose division continually causes him trouble and vexation. That we so seldom see the combination of this work arises from the fact that the various stages of the book's preparation are rarely looked upon as parts of a whole. The ordering of books is regarded as a business in itself, requiring its own kind of expert knowledge and completed when the book has been delivered and the bills checked off. The cataloger, again, is proud of the degree of technical perfection to which he has brought the multiplicity of detail in his work. He has a high sense of its necessity in the library's scheme. Few see that both these processes, together with mechanical operations of pasting, labelling and lettering on which everyone looks down, are simply stages in the work of preparation, through which a book must pass before it becomes an integral part of a modern library. These are not separate departments of work, one completed before the next is begun; they are interwoven and interdependent in all sorts of ways. Books can not be ordered properly without a catalog. Books can not be cataloged properly without information necessary in the operation of ordering. It becomes a question of library policy, then, whether these operations may not be combined, and the considerations adduced above form at least a strong argument for such combination.
I have purposely dwelt on this matter from the standpoint of a general administrator and have therefore not gone into details, which it will be easy for you to obtain if you desire them.
In closing, let me say that I believe catalogers to have in a high degree that devotion to their task and that skill and interest in working out its details, that have made the American public library what it is. What they need to guard against is the aloofness arising from the separate and technical character of that work. Many of them realize, and all of them should do so, the fact that the catalog is made for the reader; not the reader for the catalog. We may try to train our readers to use our catalogs, but to the end of time we shall still have to deal with the unintelligent, the careless and the captious, and we must try to adapt our catalogs more or less to them. The cataloger may have to break cherished rules, to throw tradition overboard, to act in many ways that will scandalize his profession. Contact with as many other departments of the library as possible—realization of his position as a cog wheel in contact with other cogs, will help on the good work.