The Library and Society: Reprints of Papers and Addresses

by Unknown

It is plain that the adjustment of the library to this movement of men's minds towards books is the most important practical question for all of us. Questions of management, of administration, of methods are all of secondary importance beside this one—if, indeed they may be called even secondary. For this change of base is a revolutionary affair, not a mere matter of readjustment of detail, and it is no easy task for the library to find itself in such a movement. Libraries are so small a part of the national intellectual life, so small, in the mass, for example, in comparison to the great universities, that their proper influence and work are easily overlooked. There is sometimes danger that they may be swept into currents guided by other forces rather than find opportunity freely to contribute their own share to the movement.

Let us turn then to the more practical side of the question, and ask how the library is adjusting itself, in this changed relation of men, where it has best succeeded, and where it still has most to do. Let us ask where experience seems to promise successful solution of problems, and where the problems are in that stage in which only doubtful success can be expected from experiments, and final solution still lies far before us.

The library began as a place to keep books, permitting their use by the public, but often under such restrictions as seem to indicate that this service was granted “grudgingly and of necessity.” Books and the high life were in some obscure way correlated in the mind of the librarian, and he too often seemed to feel that these were treasures not to be shared by the many. The first change which came, therefore, as the library was swept into the general intellectual current of time, was the removal of restrictions on the use of books and their replacement by devices intended to encourage and extend that use. A second step, and a much more revolutionary one, has been to teach the community directly the uses of books, and thus not merely to afford easy conditions for the use of books on the part of those who want them, but to add a positive force which will compel the books to go out in the community, there to perform their present service and to create a demand for an increased service in the future.

This change marks a fundamental departure of the library from its old basis, and one which will affect it greatly, for good and perhaps for ill. The movement toward freedom of administration was really concerned with small matters, and left unaltered the central plan and purpose of the library. But with the assumption of direct educational work for children, for women, for men, the library has entered upon a new epoch in its evolution. It has taken up duties whose performance will demand greatly enlarged resources—of space and of money, of books and of working staff. And what is of even greater importance, the purpose, the point of view, of those who control the library, and the temper of the administration, will change, and ought to change, under the pressure of these new duties.

This positive and educational library work falls into two main types—that for children, and that for adults—both men and women. It is still in a tentative condition, in a formative and experimental period. The results are still so few and recent that they do not admit any exact formulation. They permit only general and suggestive statement.

Work for children is, in some ways, the easiest educational attempt of the library, since it runs parallel to the work of the schools, and those for whom the work is done are easily reached and easily guided. Its function is, of course, in part to supplement the school. It would be, however, a great misfortune if it were looked upon merely as a supplement to the school, as a means of providing reading which the school ought to buy, but cannot afford. Its purpose is rather to begin in childhood, both for pleasure and for profit, a voluntary association with books which lie wholly outside of the school program. It aims to begin the early formation of the habit of reading as distinguished from study—a habit which will be permanent, instead of ending with the period of formal instruction. It recognizes the fact that school life must soon end, and that when the end comes, the important feature of the child's intellectual condition is not so much the amount he has learned as the temper and habit of his mind toward books. Has he merely learned certain truths from books or are books open to him? It is of fundamental importance to the community that the second alternative be secured. The school libraries and children's librarians are, therefore, not to feel that their duty is to supplement the school. That duty lies on a different, and, in a way, a higher plane, in a more spiritual region. It is their part to make the child a citizen of the world of books, and to naturalize him so thoroughly that he will always remain a citizen. Thus only can he share fully, not only in the high and permanent pleasures that books afford, but also in that great movement of life toward books which marks our time.

From remarks which I have heard on various occasions, I believe this extension of library service and library duties to youth has often been misunderstood. Work with school children, whether done by the library force as part of their duties, or by assistants especially engaged, has seemed to many to be a somewhat unnecessary extension of the library—something of a luxury. These added duties have often been assumed by the libraries under special pleas, and for reasons temporary in character. But in that wider view which I am trying to present, the truth is recognized that the library is a permanent storehouse of books for the community, to which the citizen of every class and age must repair for knowledge not only interesting and useful but necessary to the conduct of life. We recognize also that while the training of the schools soon ceases for every individual, the service of the library extends throughout life. We assert also that the possibilities of this service must be taught to the members of the community from childhood, and that the efficiency of the books will largely depend on the efficiency with which this teaching is done.

Especial care must be taken with children and youth toward the end of the ordinary school periods—in the upper grades and in the high school. Here it is that the transition to independent reading must come. The children's room must not be merely an appendage to the kindergarten and primary school, but the library must supply to youth of all ages not only books, but inspiration in reading. The questions which arise in work for children are many and often perplexing, but if these general principles are accepted, they are, after all, questions of detail rather than of principle.

The library's influence over women has been the greatest in extent and productive of the largest results; so much so that, in the opinion of many critics of the public library, that institution is in danger of becoming “feminized.” I shall not attempt to discuss so large a subject as that indicated by this fearful word, but it may not be unprofitable to touch upon the causes which have given the work of the library for women at once so great an extension and so great a success, as well as some obvious limitations. I should place first among the causes, both for the success and the limitation of this influence, the recent acquisition by women of large opportunities for the intellectual life, their natural conservatism, and their greatly increased leisure as compared with men. That women read books, and read them in enormous numbers, is granted, indeed asserted. That they read seriously I have heard questioned and have always wondered at the doubt. It seems to me rather that they never read in any way except seriously. How many women—reading women, I mean—can put away an unfinished book without a sense of guilt? How many can “browse about” in a library and enjoy doing so? How many really like to read a dictionary or encyclopaedia without ulterior designs upon an article for the women's club, or, at least, without wanting to know something? These are all tests—unconscious, but none the less excellent—of the real readers, of those to whom books are alive and intimate friends. While I have no statistics at hand, I fear that many women most devoted to libraries would fail to reach this standard. The field of the intellectual life has been widely opened to women so recently that they still feel a certain sense of duty along with the privilege which is granted them in entering it, rather than a complete sense of being at home there. The conservatism of women helps this tendency to read seriously and for general purposes. The traditional use of books as a means of culture appeals to their more conservative mind as it does not to men. They are more easily induced to read for reading's sake—they are willing to read the books one ought to read. They are moved by considerations of mental improvement independent of any result beyond the improvement itself. The library as a library attracts them. Then, too, the amount of their reading and its character is modified by the fact that women are so much more limited than men in means to pass their leisure. Jerome K. Jerome (if correctly reported by newspapers) recently pointed out that much so-called reading is no more an intellectual process than is smoking a cigar, and that often we go to books just as to the cigar, to pass the time and to prevent the intrusion of disagreeable thoughts. Of course this is, and ought to be, wholly true, and since with us the cigar is a masculine privilege, the woman must take to books as the man takes to smoking, and even to drinking. Speaking seriously, the library is to many women a relief from care—the only distraction from the monotony of routine. It is a cheap and easy thing to sneer at this use of books, but we who believe in the friendship of books know that here lies one of the greatest blessings they can give, as it is one of the greatest blessings of true friendship. Nor do we wonder that the uncultivated, or the half-cultivated, often choose their book friends from a class not greatly above their own.

On the other hand, women have hardly begun to use books on lines along which we are seeking to get men to read—in directions connected with their trade or profession. Domestic industries, so far as they are in the hands of women, are still most wholly dependent upon tradition. They are not exposed to competition. Failure or inefficiency does not put the proprietor out of business. Their results are not measured in dollars and cents. In a word, the whole line of motives which is forcing masculine industries over to the basis of books is lacking in the chief feminine occupations. We are now seeing only the feeble beginnings of the attempt thus to transfer them from tradition to science. A long time must pass, and social conditions greatly change, before the transfer is made. Thus women are not forced from general to special lines of reading, while they have greater motive for general reading than have men.