WISCONSIN FREE LIBRARY COMMISSION.
USE OF LIBRARIES FOR REFERENCE
An ability to glean information quickly and accurately from books and periodicals, to catch a fact when it is needed and useful, is an indispensable factor in that self-education which all citizens should add to the education obtained in the schools. The schools cannot give a wide range of knowledge, but they can give the desire for knowledge, and the library can give the opportunity to gain it.
Nearly every branch taught in the schools may be lightened and made more interesting by supplementary information gained from a good library. The pupil who is studying the life of Washington should find many interesting facts concerning him and his time and associates, not given in any of the formal biographies. He will find an article on Washington in the "Young Folks' Cyclopedia of Persons and Places," but if he knows how to use the index he can find fourteen other articles in the same volume in which Washington is mentioned. A large encyclopedia will give scores of facts wanted, under various articles treating of important events in the latter colonial and earlier national history of our country, in articles on places, customs, epochs, battles, and soldiers and statesmen who were Washington's contemporaries.
A teacher cannot train a large number of young people to habits of thorough investigation in a brief time, but she can easily train a few, one or two at a time, and they will help to train others.
F. A. HUTCHINS.
THE MODERN LIBRARY MOVEMENT
The modern library movement is a movement to increase by every possible means the accessibility of books, to stimulate their reading and to create a demand for the best. Its motive is helpfulness; its scope, instruction and recreation; its purpose, the enlightenment of all; its aspirations, still greater usefulness. It is a distinctive movement, because it recognizes, as never before, the infinite possibilities of the public library, and because it has done everything within its power to develop those possibilities.
Among the peculiar relations that a library sustains to a community, which the movement has made clear and greatly advanced, are its relations to the school and university extension. The education of an individual is coincident with the life of that individual. It is carried on by the influences and appliances of the family, vocation, government, the church, the press, the school and the library. The library is unsectarian, and hence occupies a field independent of the church. It furnishes a foundation for an intelligent reading of paper and magazine. It is the complement and supplement of the school, co-operating with the teacher in the work of educating the child, and furnishing the means for continuing that education after the child has gone out from the school. These are important relations. From the beginning the child is taught the value of books. In the kindergarten period he learns that they contain beautiful pictures; in the grammar grades they do much to make history and geography attractive; in the high school they are indispensable as works of reference.