They have a profound duty—not generally appreciated—to help render homogeneous the very heterogeneous elements of our population. Thirty per cent. of it has come to us from an alien life and alien institutions. One-third of the people in our six leading cities are of foreign birth; seventy-one per cent. were either born abroad or born of foreign parentage. In the assimilation of this foreign element no single agency is perhaps so potent as our public libraries.
The public libraries deem themselves the allies of formal educational processes; but also the direct educators of that part of the community not subject to the formal processes. It is this latter responsibility which has led them to attempt a broader service than the mere supply of books. A book is not the only nor necessarily the most effective vehicle for conveying knowledge. There are illustrations which more directly convey an impression, and often as fully state a fact. And photographs and process reproductions are now part of the equipment of a public library almost as conventional as books. Within the past year 10,000 such have been added to the collections of the Boston Public Library; not as works of art (they are for the most part cheap silver prints and the Art Museum is but a hundred feet distant); nor merely as aids to the study of the fine arts and the useful arts, but also as convenient auxiliaries to the study of history, of literature and institutions. And they are used by individuals and by classes not as a substitute for the text, but as helping to render vivid the lesson of the text.
With these go lectures in exposition. Every building of importance recently designed for the uses of a public library includes an art gallery and a lecture hall. What an immense augmentation of function this implies! It implies that the library is no longer merely an aggregate of books, each passive within rigid limits; but that it is an active agent having under its control material which is kept plastic and which it moulds into incredibly varied shapes to suit incredibly varied needs.
The experience of the Boston Public Library shows that in the case of books each increase of facilities creates an increased demand. The trustees of 1852 boasted that they were providing for as many as fifty readers at a time; the trustees of 1887 thought themselves venturesome in providing for 500 readers at a time; and within a month after the new building was opened it was forced to accommodate over 700 at a time. Every week over 30,000 persons enter the Central Library building, and every year 1,200,000 volumes are drawn for home use by the 65,000 card-holders. Yet these figures represent still but a portion of the persons reached and the work to be done. Nor can facilities for distribution keep pace with the need. For a city of a half million people spread over an area of forty square miles adequate library facilities cannot ever be provided. A municipality which even approximates the adequate in providing buildings, equipment, administration and general literature at the public expense must still look to private gift for the specialized material necessary to a great reference collection. That the Boston Public Library is next to the British Museum in Shakespeariana is, to be sure, the result of a special expenditure by the city. But the larger part of its special collections which have given it distinction as a great scholars' library, has come from private gift; the Ticknor collection of Spanish literature, the Bowditch collection of mathematics, the Chamberlain collection of autographs, the Brown collection of music and many others. And a city which erects for its public library a building which is monumental is putting forward the most attractive invitation to private gift. The gifts which have come to Boston as the direct result of the new building have already reached a twelfth of its cost.
With proper organization and a liberal co-operation between municipal and private effort the opportunities for service are almost limitless. The risk is the greater of attempts at service either legally inappropriate or practically inexpedient, and the risk is not lessened by a popular appreciation which is more enthusiastic than it is apt to be discriminating. There is, therefore, the greater need of discrimination on the part of the library itself and of an authority which will protect its exercise. This authority can be conferred only by intelligent public opinion on the part of those who are capable of appreciating constitutional limitations.
THE PUBLIC LIBRARY: ITS USES TO THE MUNICIPALITY
Written for the National Municipal League and printed in The Library Journal for June, 1903, eight years after the author, Dr. John S. Billings, had begun his service as director of the New York Public Library; largely a defence of libraries against certain objections. The statement of the part played by “sentiment” in popular institutions, and its justification, are striking and true.
John Shaw Billings was born in Switzerland County, Ind., in 1839, graduated from Miami University in 1857, studied medicine and after serving as a surgeon in the Civil War, was assigned to the Surgeon General's Office in Washington, of whose library he compiled the 16-volume Index Catalogue. After service in Johns Hopkins and Pennsylvania Universities he was chosen in 1895 director of the newly established New York Public Library, where he served until his death in 1913, planning and supervising the construction of its central building.
The great majority of cities of 25,000 inhabitants and upward in the United States have public libraries of some sort, and the same is true of many of the smaller cities. Many of these libraries have been founded on gifts of individuals, some have developed from subscription libraries, but the majority are now supported mainly or entirely by funds appropriated by the city government. A considerable number are still in the formative stage, this being true of those for which buildings are being erected from funds provided by Mr. Carnegie and for several hundred others for which he will probably provide buildings in the near future.