As soon as branch libraries recognized these facts, and it was very soon, the application for dances became fewer and of better quality. Leavings from other club rooms no longer apply, and disgruntled alumni associations in schools have ceased to contemplate a move to the nearest branch library.
No effort has been made to advertise the club rooms, beyond these statements of the branch librarians in passing, except the exhibiting of the rooms themselves to visitors who “stop in to show our library to cousin Sarah, from Davenport,” or Illinois, or Oklahoma, as the case may be. Word-of-mouth publicity accounts for the gradual steady growth in the use of the rooms. One of the many examples began with a stenographer who sewed, “in secret,” as she said, at noon in the club room. She was embroidering an engagement present for one of the girls in her office. Needless to say, she scattered information about the rooms, and the rules governing them, wherever any one would listen. Eventually a Sunday School class, to which her cousin belonged, gave a St. Patrick's Day party in the library. As an indirect result, a School Patron's Association now holds five or six meetings each Spring, to make preparations for its annual picnic. So the ball of publicity rolls along of its own momentum.
At branch libraries, the auditorium and study rooms are as a rule closely connected architecturally with the reading rooms, and club members usually pass through the main part of the library to reach the meetings. One or two at least from each group stop to chat with the workers, or to read. At Crunden the assistants say that whenever a Yiddish meeting is to begin at nine, the men come at eight and read. Then there are the isolated individuals from the club who stumble on the resources of the library quite by accident, and later grow communicative. Occasionally some one rushes up stairs to borrow the telephone book, and when, after an unsuccessful quest, he is offered the city directory by the librarian, he finds it hard to realize that any library can contain a book as useful as that. One man who saw a magazine lying on the desk while he was asking to be directed to the auditorium, said, “I had no idea the library handled magazines.”
Libraries try as faithfully to reach every one as if they were commercial enterprises, but there will always be a certain number of persons who have never been in a library building, not to speak of knowing the location of the nearest branch and realizing its resources. A Harvard graduate said he had walked past a branch every day for a year and had thought it was a branch post-office. If there were no other arguments in favor of adding auditoriums to the library's list of activities, there is this: that they introduce to the library large groups of people who have had no connection with it before. The horse at least has been led to the water.
If clubs meet regularly, there is always a small proportion who make meeting-night their library night. They consequently read and want to calculate all fines with reference to the night of the last meeting. I once heard one young woman telling another how she finally had her reading “doped out into a system,” by beginning on her seven-day book just as soon as she reached home after the meeting, and using the fourteen-day book only on the street cars.
With the establishment of libraries in small towns and rural communities, there is at present a tendency to make social centers out of library buildings, even at the sacrifice of the books, rather than to establish libraries in connection with social activities. This is also true in those cities where “field-houses” in parks are well developed. Without holding a brief for either school, we may properly emphasize three principles. The first is that a librarian holds her position by virtue of being a librarian, and that her duty and training require her full time for the purpose for which she is employed—the fitting of the proper book to the individual. The second is that if the community needs to have the social center stressed more than the books, a social worker must direct the center and the librarian must contribute in a subordinate capacity to make the center a success. For example, the St. Louis Public Library has equipped a room with books and is furnishing an attendant at a colored social center in a church building at Garrison and Lucas Avenues, but it does not thereby put forward any claim to control and stimulate the social activities of the neighborhood. The third principle is that if the library plant is already in operation, it is a waste to exclude neighborhood groups from rooms not being used directly for the reading and circulation of books, inasmuch as overhead expenses continue.
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