It has been suggested that the schools specialize among themselves, and to some extent that has come about naturally; for the school with especially good resources and unusual facilities for teaching a given subject, such as legislative reference or work with children, if it makes known its advantages, is very likely to attract the student who wishes to follow that line of work. Other reasons, however, often weigh more heavily—the location of a school, the personnel of the faculty, a smaller tuition fee, the general reputation and advancement of its graduates, etc.; so that any school may be called upon to give some special work of which perhaps it is not the best exponent. It cannot send the student elsewhere willy-nilly, and it does its best to give him what is wanted. As schools increase in number, a classification of them according to curricula is likely to follow, and this difficulty may be lessened. Even so, there is always the danger to be guarded against that students trained along one line may, through force of circumstances, take positions requiring a kind of training which they have not had. It would be impossible for a mining engineer to do the work of a mechanical engineer and vice versa, but in the work of an average library the cataloger and reference assistant and children's librarian must often change places, and any one of them, rather than be without a position, would as a rule try to do the work of the others. If all have had general training, this would not matter so much, but without that there would be considerable loss of efficiency.
In bringing this heterogeneous paper to an end—a paper which claims to be nothing more than a sort of thinking aloud on some of the problems confronting the schools, I wish to state some conclusions that I feel myself coming to: 1. That we need more good schools. 2. That they need to send out a larger number of trained people. 3. That we need longer, more thorough, and more systematic courses. 4. That with the larger schools some effort at grading is desirable. 5. That the schools would do well to get together and make a comparative study of their curricula, and their resources and facilities for special subjects, and map out tentatively a division of the field. This, while not binding upon any school, might serve for guidance, but no school should monopolize any one subject unless it is the only school having proper facilities for giving it.
Miss CORINNE BACON read a paper entitled
CO-OPERATION OF LIBRARIES WITH LIBRARY SCHOOLS
Before beginning to talk of the ways in which libraries might co-operate to better advantage with library schools, it is but fair to acknowledge gratefully that many libraries are already co-operating with us in a way that often must tax severely their time and patience. In behalf of the Drexel Institute library school, I thank most heartily those libraries that, regardless of the inconvenience to themselves, allow our students to go to them for the practice work that is so valuable to half-fledged librarians. And in voicing the gratitude of Drexel, I feel that I am giving utterance to the feelings of every other school that sends out its students in the same way.
We can give our students but two weeks practice work outside of Philadelphia, because our school year is so short. Perhaps it would be well to lengthen the year by two weeks, in order that the term of work might be lengthened.
There are three things that it seems to me the schools may properly ask of the libraries: advance practice work; direct criticism; a living wage for assistants.
(1) Advance practice work—I mean by this work done in libraries prior to any study of library science. As a rule, the student with a little practical experience gets far more from a library course than one not so equipped. Directors of schools often advise work in advance, but, as far as I know, few schools require it. Pratt Institute begins with practical work in the Pratt library. The difficulties in the way of requiring this work are many. It would bear heavily upon the libraries; it would be an added expense to students living at a distance from good libraries; it would not necessarily prove the applicant's fitness or unfitness for library work, as she might fail at the kind of work she was set to do, and yet be capable of success on some other line.
Yet, on the whole, this would be a better test of fitness than all the questions we directors hurl at kindly and well-meaning friends or former instructors of our would-be students. Don't we ask too many questions as to personality from those whose answers often carry little weight? Why should we not accept all who measure up to a certain physical and mental standard, without troubling our heads so much as to whether they are ideally fit for library work? It would bring us more in line with the professional schools. Moreover, there are almost as many kinds of library work as there are of people!