COMMUNITY CENTER SERVICE
This is the newest phase of library work and the most convincing evidence of its socialization. There is little in print about its early stages; its classics are still in the making. We quote only three papers here.
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THE LIBRARY AS A SOCIAL CENTRE
The opening address at the Red Wing meeting of the Minnesota Library Association, Oct. 12, 1905, by Miss Countryman, librarian of the Minneapolis Public Library. The “public,” Miss Countryman thinks, “is no indefinite, intangible somebody; it is just ‘we‘”—the statement of library socialization in a nutshell.
Gratia Alta Countryman was born at Hastings, Minn., in November, 1866, and graduated, with the B.S. degree, at the University of Minnesota in 1889. In that same year she entered the service of the Minneapolis Public Library, and she was assistant librarian at the resignation of Dr. James K. Hosmer in 1904, succeeding him as librarian.