Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson recently stated that a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, told him that he spent a considerable part of his time in refusing gifts offered to the museum. This trustee is probably wise in declining gifts. There are many books and pamphlets offered to libraries which they would not find useful. These should be accepted only on condition that they may be placed wherever they will be most valuable.
Differentiation is specially desirable in the smallest libraries. When but little money is available for buying books the small amount should be spent with closest regard to actual needs of the constituency. Not infrequently intelligent entertainment and elementary instruction will be the principles that should guide in selecting books for small libraries. With intelligent cooperation several small neighboring towns might adopt to advantage the suggestion that each of them spend a few dollars a year on a specialty, such as botany, geology, zoology; every town taking a different specialty and all lending to one another.
This paper favors in the main the selection of books with special reference to the actual existing needs of the users of the library. Such an institution as the flourishing public library of Providence, R.I., might properly, if allowable for any library in cities of moderate size, add to its general work some specialty of limited interest. Mr. Foster, its librarian, has recently stated, however, that he thinks that notwithstanding the reputation which the famous Harris collection of poetry gives to the library throughout the country, it is the best for that library to devote itself almost exclusively to supplying the general needs of Providence.
In conclusion, it may be stated that Mr. Adams does not claim that the plan of weeding out libraries adopted at Quincy has never been thought of before. He was not indebted to any book for the idea, but it had occurred to other persons before. Action upon it had always been recommended. Mr. Adams has taken the bull by the horns. He has put the plan in execution and to a considerable extent has systematized it. He has also called attention to it and made it a living subject for discussion.
RELATION OF FREE PUBLIC LIBRARIES TO THE COMMUNITY
Presentations of Library questions to the general reading public from authoritative sources are exceptionally hard to find, even at the present day. The one reprinted below was contributed to The North American Review for June, 1898, by Herbert Putnam, then librarian of the Boston Public Library.
Herbert Putnam was born in New York, Sept. 20, 1861, the youngest son of the founder of the publishing house. He graduated at Harvard in 1883 and studied law. He served as librarian in Minneapolis, first of the Atheneum and then of the Public Library in 1884-91, meanwhile being admitted to the bar in 1886. He practised law in Boston in 1892-95, but in the latter year became librarian of the Boston Public Library, serving until appointed in 1899 Librarian of Congress. His administration has been marked by the development of this institution along the line of service of a national library. During the great war he was Director of Library War Service.
Free libraries have existed for less than a half a century. Their establishment assumed that books are beneficial: but it involved also the assertion that it is the proper function of government to supply books to such of its citizens as may require them at the expense of the community as a whole.
Libraries of this special type do not yet form the major portion of the institutions supplying books on a large scale to groups of persons. Under the head of “Public, Society and School Libraries,” these institutions in the United States aggregate 8,000 in number, with 35,000,000 volumes, with $34,000,000 invested in buildings, with $17,000,000 of endowments, and with over $6,000,000 of annual income. Of these the free public libraries supported by general taxation number less than 2,000, with 10,000,00 volumes, and with less than $3,500,000 of annual income. They are, however, increasing with disproportionate and amazing rapidity. In Massachusetts, but 10 of the 353 cities and towns, but three-fourths of one per cent. of the inhabitants now lack them. One hundred and ten library buildings there have been the gift of individuals. No form of private memorial is now more popular; no form of municipal expenditure meets with readier assent. Nor are the initiative and the expenditure left wholly to local enterprises. The Commonwealth itself takes part: extending, through a State Commission, State aid in the form of books and continuing counsel. And Massachusetts is but one of eight States maintaining such commissions. New York State, in its system of traveling libraries, has gone further still in supplementing initial aid with a continuing supply of books, and even photographs and lantern slides, purchased by the State and distributed through the Regents of the State University from Albany to the remotest hamlet.