The PRESIDENT: Ladies and Gentlemen, my introduction to-night is to be very short indeed, that you may the sooner reach the treat in store. Our honored speaker of the evening has his own message for us. He also bears a message from the National Education Association. He is the honored son of his great and beloved father Bishop Vincent, he has been dean of the University of Chicago, he is still president of the Chautauqua Institution, he is the president of the University of Minnesota, more than all, he is himself, Dr. GEORGE EDGAR VINCENT.
ADDRESS BY DR. VINCENT
Dr. VINCENT said, in opening his address, that he brought the greetings of the National Education Association, being an "uninstructed delegate," and he firmly believed "that with your tact, with your boundless energy, with your irresistible enthusiasm, you will ultimately sweep away into the vortex of your aggressive enterprise even the school teachers of the United States and Canada."
Continuing Dr. Vincent said:
I find some difficulty in deciding just what analogy I shall use this evening. This is a subject which has exhausted almost all the forms of metaphor, simile and analogy. Librarians have been likened to almost everything under the sun. There are three metaphors which have survived from the old days. You are all familiar with these. You use them ironically, to describe that condition of affairs which prevailed in libraries before you supplanted those archaic people who used so thoroughly to misinterpret the functions of the librarian.
One is the analogy of the museum, the library as a museum of books, a museum carefully guarded, a museum to which the public is not to be admitted except under conditions which make resort to the place so irksome that only a few persist. You remember the old story of the man in Philadelphia who had committed a crime. To escape detection and go where nobody would look for him, he resorted to the reading room of the Philadelphia library.
Then there is the other analogy—I do not know that this has been, so far, insisted upon, but it is a very good one, it seems to me—the analogy of the penitentiary of books, with the librarian as a jailer. Just why these people should have been put in prison as they were in the old days, just why their friends should not be permitted to visit them, it is hard to say. This is akin to another analogy, the library as a mausoleum of books, a place where books are buried, and the librarian is a bibliotaph.
These old analogies, these figures of another day, serve pleasantly to flatter a little your complacency over things as they are. But we have no time to devote to the dead past. Let us consider some of the analogies which are still living. I have been a little bewildered by that analogy this morning, the maple leaf and the gavel. I have not been quite able to work it out. It seems to me, with all deference to the delightfully poetic figure, which took everybody by storm, including myself, it is a mistake to try to analyze these sentiments. There was something about preserving the light in the maple leaves and the leaves of the book. Now, as a matter of fact, leaves are put away in a library very much as they are in an herbarium. There is no botanical relation to the trunk of a tree after they have been folded and put away. So I don't see how that works out—but that doesn't make any difference. An analogy never goes on four legs. This one just happened to have about two and a half feet upon the ground. But that is Mrs. Elmendorf's analogy; I propose to leave it alone. There may be an explosive possibility about it which she will explain some time when she has a chance to work it out. She had very short notice and she did it beautifully, and I know so little about botany that it gave me practically no intellectual difficulty.
Then there is the analogy that we are all very fond of, the analogy of the library as a department store. There you have your efficient business manager. The library is a place where it is no trouble to show goods, where you have your various departments and the goods are up to date; where you have all sorts of advertising methods, where you advertise in the daily papers, send out bulletins, get up circulars and posters and attract attention by illustrations, where you have an elevator and all that sort of thing. Just think of the sacrifice that librarians are making, the mere pittances they are receiving, when they might be running these great emporia in our large cities. The department store offers a good analogy if you do not press it too far. There is not very much money in the business. It doesn't pay very well in dollars and cents, but think of the intellectual advantages it offers, the psychic dividends that a business of that sort pays!
Then there is a figure I worked out myself a while ago, the library as a social memory. That seems to me capital. I think, so far as I know, I have a copyright on that figure. It was a good address, by the way, in which I used this trope. I wish I had remembered it; I should have brought it along and read it to-night instead of making this carefully set address. Yes, the social memory idea is a good analogy. It reduces the librarian to a medulla oblongata, so far as I am able to understand the psychology of the situation. Yet that is an honorable function, although largely automatic. It is a good thing to control the resources of the social memory, to be able to put these at the service of the public mind—decidedly a fruitful analogy, but I do not care to elaborate it this evening.