With all good wishes to the librarians of the United States and Canada.
Sincerely yours,
WILLIAM ELIOT GRIFFIS.
P. S. Every library should have a lecture hall and not be afraid even of the "fit audience though few."
Clark University,
Worcester, Mass.,
May 17, 1913.
My experience is a long one with university libraries, but I have had far less to do with public libraries.
The greatest need of the specialist and expert is help in finding all, and especially the latest, often very scattered, literature on the special point on which he is conducting his research, and I believe that in the future every academic library will have a few specialists with a good knowledge of languages, of Ph. D. rank, who can do just this. We have one such here, to whom my work owes more than to anybody else. If I ask her to find me, e. g., all the recent references on a topic, be it ever so special, including perhaps a score of archives and special journals, back for three or five years as I may specify, up to the latest arrival, I get this list, which always includes many things our library does not have, then take it to the librarian, who can generally get about everything by borrowing far and near. These, together with the resources here, are placed upon a table in an alcove where I can work or take the books home. This makes a perfectly ideal condition, and it is at the same time indispensable for advanced special work, and everything in a university library should be plastic to this end.
A public librarian, it seems to me, should study all the changing interests in a community or in special parts of it, and be able to print in the daily press whenever any topic is prominent a little article telling in a few lines the point of a few books or articles; e. g. a manual training high school is opened. The daily paper should state that the library has a good collection of literature up to date on that subject (if it has), and give a few points from a few of the best books, naming them. A few titles are not enough.
Another point that interests me greatly is the library story telling. I think more should be done, not less, in this line for children, and that books illustrating topics in geography, history, etc., should be not only laid before teachers but that the classes should meet there and have the things shown to them. Why does not the public library go into some of the wonderful illustrative material in the above and other topics, which is so characteristic of German schools, and of which American schools know almost nothing? Our educational Museum here has lately spent thousands of dollars and collected thousands of these illustrations all the way from wall pictures to bound pictures, illustrating material from primary grades up into college, which we loan as we do books to teachers, parents and others. There is a very great new departure possible here. Why does not your Association look into this? It has been a great find for us. And about everything in our large collection and its use, to my mind, might be done by public libraries although none of them that I know of has done much of anything along that line. I am