Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Library Association / Held at Ottawa, Canada, June 26-July 2, 1912

by Unknown

The VICE-PRESIDENT: You have brought up a very important point, and that is what we might call the committee system. The system has often failed by being limited to three members. The chairman does the work and sends around to the other members to sign up; or they live at various points of the country and the chairman forgets to do the work or for various reasons fails to report. The way to get the best results is to appoint a committee of one and get the work done by that committee, and if he does not do the work, discharge him and get another person in his place who will do the work. We are suggesting now a re-arrangement of that method by which we can get, I think, better results, in answer to your remarks.

Mr. MARION: I wonder if Mr. Handy would develop a little the idea that was brought out in a conversation that he held with me some little time ago in Boston, in which he pointed out the sort of large opportunities that come to the special librarian, that do not come to the public librarian, and cannot from the very nature of things.

Mr. HANDY: I had in mind especially when I was talking with Mr. Marion a man who at present holds the position of assistant manager in New York of the Fire Insurance Exchange. I think his salary is between six and seven thousand a year. It happens that he is a very bright fellow, and he is taking charge also of evening classes in the New York University school of commerce and accounts, which adds another thousand dollars a year to his salary. I am speaking, in this, simply from the standpoint of salary. He started in as a special librarian. He came into opportunities solely through the close personal contact with superiors who were looking for exactly this kind of advisory and expert service that I tried to emphasize in my paper. Of course, he made good in the smaller position, and through making good there got the opportunity to go to New York in the first place, in a position, which while not particularly better than the one he had occupied as librarian, was better in opportunities and much beyond anything that any special library would be likely to offer; and he has so far made good in New York that he has come into the opportunity that I spoke of, and he has the present salary, which of course carries with it responsibilities; but it seems to me it will be a great many years before in general library work one would find an opportunity like that for advancement, because it was all done in about seven or eight years. It is that possibility of getting in close contact with the heads of great industrial organizations and great enterprises, and by making one's self extremely serviceable and valuable there, that makes the special library a particularly promising field either for bright men or bright women. It is not the library service in itself but it is the opportunity of getting into close contact with men who have made great successes in business, and that opportunity, I think, does not come to the general librarian. The person entering the general library must expect that the top of the work is simply the library opportunities themselves, and, of course, they are somewhat limited. A person entering special library work feels that the top is the whole vast industrial or commercial enterprise in which he is engaged, and if he has the adaptability—and that is precisely the thing which we have been trying to emphasize as necessary in library work,—he naturally, as time goes on, sees the field of opportunity broadening, and the opportunity comes for him to step out of the more restricted into the larger, more active field.

I know another person who received a very interesting offer, with a considerably larger salary and greater executive responsibilities, due entirely to the fact that he had made good in special library work; to the fact that that work brought him into contact with superiors who were able to help him into a broader opportunity. I think that is well worth emphasizing for either men or women interested in this meeting.

Mr. LAPP: Just that fact is the reason why we should have some means of training special librarians. The good men are being drawn off so rapidly that it is impossible for the demand to be supplied, and I am glad that the question of training librarians is coming up, and I hope that when it does come up we shall have some provision made for a committee that will work out a complete scheme in co-operation with the American Library Association and the library schools for the training of special librarians. But right there we should also emphasize the fact that it is not merely the librarians that should be trained, but we should train the directors of the establishments, and it ought to be emphasized in all special library work that there is a difference. I would agree with many who have spoken before, that the director of an establishment need not necessarily be a person trained in library work, although a person trained in library wok could make a good success of it if he also had an insight into the business. But I would emphasize the fact that we need a training for directors of establishments and we also need a special training for librarians and assistants. It is a great deal in the library world as it is in the college world, that the men who become really worth while as college professors, in the commercial departments at least, and in the engineering departments, unless they have a taste for the teaching work which would prevent their leaving it, do not stay very long in the business of teaching, and the college must continually recruit new men, and that is a difficulty that is going to confront the Special Libraries Association and people who are establishing special libraries, more and more. I believe that if the number of concerns today that ought to have special libraries and would profit wonderfully by them, were to attempt to get special librarians or directors of departments, they would fail completely and the whole movement would go to the bad, simply because you could not supply the people who would be competent for the work. The same thing is true of municipal reference departments. It is unfortunate if they are established and men who are not qualified are put in charge. The same thing is true of legislative reference departments. We might better wait for years rather than establish them before we can put them in charge of people who appreciate the work to be done, and who have the ability to do it. So that I think our big problem is to keep the special library movement from growing too fast for us to supply the men and women who can do the work; and I would emphasize again that we need two or three different kinds of training; one for those who are to have general direction of the work, for those who are to do the actual work on the library side, and also for the assistant side.

Mr. LEE: One difference is that in the public library you are being asked questions all the time, and in the special library you are being asked questions two-thirds of the time, and the other third you ask questions yourselves, so you get the benefit of variety; part of the time you are a student, and the rest of the time you are a librarian, and there is that stimulating, broadening effect, and to me it has been a very uplifting effect.

Mr. MORTON: Mr. Marion spoke of the training of the librarian, also Mr. Lapp and one or two others. I do not know whether our position is particularly unique, but some months ago I lost my assistant, and instead of going to a library man I considered myself extremely fortunate to get a man who was a graduate chemist, a civil engineer, a mining engineer and a man who had had wide experience in all of those branches. It seems to me that for technical business the practical training in the particular line of business is of far greater value than training in any library system, simply on account of the nature of the information that they are called upon to produce.

Miss LINDHOLM: I wish to add a word to what Mr. Lapp has said, to point out the fact that even if we should try to give courses in special library work in the library school, there would not be any teachers in the library school qualified to give these courses, because they would not have the special library experience, and we ourselves are too busy running our special libraries to give the courses, so that it is really a matter quite far in the future, I should think. Last spring I read in the Library Journal a very good article on a course for legislative reference librarians, but that is the first article of the kind I have ever seen, although I had often thought about it myself.

Another thing that would help out in trying to give some idea of special library methods to new people, would be for those of us who have gotten our libraries well in hand, our systems, etc., to get up a series of little handbooks on how to organize a financial library, a public utilities library, a legislative reference library and so on, those who are perhaps library school students could use these pamphlets as text-books. This would necessitate our starting in the publishing business and having a publishing board, like the American Library Association.

Miss HOAGLAND: I think we should fail in our whole duty toward the library profession, and especially to the profession of the special librarian, if we did not take some account of this growing demand for training in special library work. I think that we appreciate the great difficulty of combination of the technical work that is necessary in library training and the special library field that each might wish to occupy. It has seemed to me that it was possible to make a combination by giving a minimum of library training, and then for students to specialize in some business lines and learn the bibliography of that trade. Of course, that is a very difficult operation in the ordinary library school, but I believe there are places in the country where that might be acquired, where many businesses are present, capable of furnishing the libraries, and where students can take, say, three months of technical training, which would include typewriting of records, and then can be sent into the field to learn that field, the school to furnish them the special bibliography for that special work. In that way I believe we could develop a series of libraries that would train for special librarianship.