Although it is twenty-five years since library schools began, one may say that in a sense they are still in the experimental stage. And to say this is really praise, for when schools cease to experiment they are running along safely in ruts and have lost much of their vitality. The same period has been one of great expansion in library affairs,—not only has the country been covered with library buildings where before, to use a Western expression, "there was nothing but sagebrush," but forms of library work and extension have sprung up that were undreamed of twenty-five years ago, new methods have had to be found to meet emergencies and new conditions, social, industrial, and educational, and the library or library commission without several new ideas and aspirations per month is not thought to be doing its full duty. Add to all this progress the reactions that are going on, in library practice, in library architecture, etc., each a faithful reflection of some new light or of some old light looked at a second time, and the scene is one of activity paralleled, so far as the present writer knows, in no other field of endeavor, unless it be that of general education.
Several of the schools carry on an exercise called "survey of the field," merely to keep their classes in sight of this movement, and once a fortnight is not too often for such a class to meet—there is always fresh material for discussion.
A school, however, must experiment within reason and along its own lines. Because some small libraries and new branches are taking down their partitions or building without them is not sufficient cause for the advocacy of the practice in the schools; the much mooted question of the use of the accessions-book must remain for some time a mooted question in the schools—as long, in fact, as the conservative and radical libraries so evenly balance each other on the subject. It is not for the schools to practice or to teach library innovations—their business is to watch innovations and their results and report to their students.
It is open to the school, however, not only to watch but to forecast, to some extent. By dint of observing and listening, one who is not in the actual game often sees what is really happening or going to happen before some, at least, of the participants are entirely aware of it. An instance lies at hand in the subject of cataloging. Up to the present, this has been one of the backbone courses in every school-schedule, though the schools report regularly to their students the progress making in co-operative cataloging and the use of printed cards. As this use extends, it becomes more and more evident that cataloging is to be concentrated in a few expert hands and that most librarians are not going to have to be catalogers any more than the head of a commercial concern has to know by heart the price of every article in his stock, or than a manufacturer has to be able to do at a moment's notice what his expert subordinates are doing.
For the present, libraries still exist which make their own cards, and they still call on the schools regularly for librarians who can catalog, and hope rather than expect to get them. For, in spite of the fact that the schools still teach every student to catalog, as far as the student material will admit, students of their own volition seldom choose to be catalogers. Whether they too have sensed the fact that a change is coming and that the librarianship of the future will have more to do with the inside of the book and its application to the individual, with the handling rather than the making of tools, or whether they simply do not like what seems to them the probable monotony of cataloging, I do not know; but I think the schools will bear me out in the statement that cataloging as a specialty is not the first choice of many students. In view of these facts, I am ready to hazard the prediction that within ten years cataloging will be given in the schools as an elective; and that instead of making catalogs the majority of students will be led to consider the few main principles of cataloging and then taught better how to use and how to criticise catalogs.
Every instructor in cataloging knows that there are students whom it is a waste of time and vitality to try to make into catalogers, and every year good people go out from the schools who should never be engaged as catalogers and whom the schools recommend only for their qualifications for other work. Suppose we concentrated our teaching ability in this line on the students who would make good catalogers and who would elect the study—we should be working with the grain and not across it, the cataloging of the whole country would be uniformly well done instead of open to well-founded criticism in places, as it is now, and the time and strength of the instructor would be saved as well as those of the student whose forte lies in another direction. Another result would probably follow very quickly—more men would go into the library schools. I am told that the detail of cataloging seems to a man too much like making tatting, and one can easily understand that a person competent and eager to handle large matters or to fill an active administrative post would fret over anything involving as much minutiæ as the making of catalog cards.
However, while libraries in general are making their own cards, and while the smaller libraries have to have librarians who can turn their hands to anything, cataloging as well as the rest, it is unsafe for the schools to send out students without this part of the training. It is only as library conditions point overwhelmingly toward cataloging as a specializing study that the schools can change.
Librarians can help very greatly in the matter of specialization by encouraging it and employing specialists for special work wherever possible. Without depreciating in the least the value of an attractive face and an agreeable manner and of taste in dress, in library work as elsewhere, I may perhaps be allowed to put forward the opinion that the librarian who is choosing a cataloger should not be unduly swayed by these to the exclusion of the other requirements. Accuracy, legibility, knowledge of books, ability in research and a taste for it, all go to the making of a good cataloger, and it is discouraging for a school to see the graduate who possesses these qualifications passed over in favor of one who may have a pleasanter address but who can not do the work half so well. And women librarians are swayed by these considerations almost as much as men. The school can hardly be said to blame in such cases—it can only sorrowfully shake its head, knowing that if there is any discredit to be cast upon any one later, a great part of it will probably fall upon the school.
Setting aside cataloging as a specialty in the days to come, to what shall we devote the large place it has occupied in all the general curricula?
It is easy to see that with printed cards and expert service, catalog cards can be fuller in information, can be critically annotated, perhaps, can be made more often for analyticals, subject and author, and that the use of the catalog by the library assistant can be much more constant and more discriminating. Some time can be given in the curriculum to selecting from the catalog, securing from the shelves, examining and comparing the books on a given subject, with the result that the student can get a more thorough knowledge of its literature, greater facility in the use of a valuable tool, and may become more generally intelligent for the purpose of the selection and buying of books, and for recommending or the contrary.