Part 14

Now, we may consider three things, belonging to a given institution, that every employee of that institution has in his care. If they are properly conserved the institution will be efficiently administered, and the visible machinery for conserving them constitutes system. They are time, property and reputation. A large part of the system under which any institution is conducted has for its object the utilization of every bit of time. We Americans, with all our hustling are great wasters of time. Workers do nothing, not so much in periods of actually shirking or laziness as in getting started, in passing from one task to another, in fruitless pottering about, in endeavoring to decide some unimportant question of detail and in one or another of a thousand different ways when they seem to themselves to be at work, while they really are doing nothing useful. As for talking, it is the bane of many different kinds of work. I am inclined to think that all work should be done in silence. Possibly, however, this would be a mistake, for an occasional word keeps workers alive and in good humor where absolute silence is not necessary. It is, however, difficult to stop with a word. Words group themselves into phrases, phrases into sentences and sentences into conversation, and the workers who assert convincingly that they get on exactly as well while they are talking, succeed in cutting in half, not only their own sum total of useful achievement, but that of the annoyed toilers anywhere within earshot. System surely requires close conservation of valuable time; by promptness, by quickness, by keeping the cobwebs from one’s brain, and above all, by silence, relative if not absolute.

The property that the librarian is expected to conserve consists of books--the material in which he works and with which he is expected to produce his effects, and of money and objects--buildings, furniture and utensils--intended to aid him in handling the books properly and in getting them and the users together. The Philadelphia alderman who proposed to do away with the buildings, furniture and staff of the library altogether, spend the money for books, dump these on the city-hall floor, and let the public choose, may have been somewhat crude in his ideas; but he at least understood that books are the basis of a library and that librarians and buildings are but subsidiary. His attitude was vastly more intelligent than that of some persons who appear to think that a good librarian in a fine building ought to produce satisfactory results without any books at all. The librarian, then, must provide above all for the care and preservation of the books. If his library is on open shelves it must assure careful watch against thievery; it must insure, by an adequate charging system, the due return of borrowed volumes; it must see that the physical structure of the book is protected, and repaired when needful; it must watch and count the books at intervals to see that they are all on the shelves. This last means the taking of a regular and careful inventory--the bane of the average librarian. Yet how can he shirk it? Books are valuable property entrusted to his care. If he were custodian of money or funds he would not be let off year after year with the statement that the labor of ascertaining how much remained in his possession was greater than it was worth. One may omit to inventory his private collection, just as he may omit to count the money in his purse, if he chooses, not that of others. And if it is his duty to see that the quantity of his collection remains unimpaired, it is equally so to see to the quality. A library system that counts the books carefully, but esteems a torn and filthy volume as good a unit as one in proper condition, will no longer pass muster.

There are dirty books on too many library shelves. Such libraries are deficient in the kind of system that preserves property efficiently. As for the mechanical plant of the library, the building that houses it, with its fittings and furniture, a proper system, of course, requires that these be kept constantly in good condition. Now, we Americans are impatient of detail: we like to do things in a large way and then let them take care of themselves. While the Frenchman or the Englishman watches his roads or pavements day by day and never allows them to get out of repair, we build expensive roadways and leave them alone until they are in disgraceful condition--whereupon we tear them up and rebuild them. While the foreigner builds his cities, stone by stone and street by street, so that they are picturesque and beautiful, we let ours spring up as they will, slum jostling palace, and factory elbowing church, until finally we form grandiose projects of reconstruction, cutting avenues here and making parts there--projects which may be carried out and may remain on paper. So I have seen tasteful and expensive library buildings allowed to grow grimy and dilapidated day by day through lack of a systematic plan for renovation and repair. Some day the authorities will wake up and there will be reconstruction and redecoration in plenty--to be followed by another era of slow decay.

The third entity that an efficient system must enable the librarian to conserve is evanescent and almost indefinable. It is difficult to bring system to bear upon it at all, and yet its preservation is of the very highest importance of all, because without it the librarian cannot do the work in his community that every good librarian is trying to do. Reputation is a fickle thing, indeed. Gained sometimes in a happy moment, it may persist for long years, successfully defying all assaults; achieved elsewhere by decades of strenuous application and scrupulous observance, it may vanish in a day as the result of some petty act of forgetfulness or of the stupidity of a passing moment. None the less is it the duty of the head of every great institution to strive continually to attain and maintain it; to increase it if possible and to guard it jealously. There he is in the hands of his subordinates and such system as he may bring to bear may and should be directed toward creating and keeping alive within them a proper esprit de corps. The library that succeeds in creating a public impression that it and all connected with it are honestly trying to be of public service, to win public esteem, and to gain a place in the public heart, has two-thirds of its work done already. Its burden is rolled down hill instead of up.

We boast that in our country public opinion is all powerful; but we are often apt to regard public opinion as we do the weather. Its balmy gales and its destructive vortices, its gentle dews and its devastating torrents, are alike, we think, beyond our power to regulate. Yet, though public opinion may be unjust or capricious, it is usually level-headed. So the library that covets that good reputation which public opinion alone can give it, must so act as to deserve that good opinion. And as one broken cog will throw a whole machine out of gear, so one assistant who does not realize his or her responsibilities in this matter may mar a library’s reputation, otherwise well-earned. It is hard luck, indeed, that a librarian, who with the majority of his staff has striven long and well to earn the public good-will, should see it forfeited by the thoughtlessness or ill-temper of some one of his staff. This, however, is the way of our world with its multiple connections. None of us may live for himself alone; we stand or fall with others, and the smallest bit of orange peel may bring down the mightiest athlete to the pavement.

How may the librarian, or anyone else, bring system to bear on such an evanescent thing as this? It is a hard matter, indeed. But can it be denied that a well-oiled library machine, one that is quickly responsive to direction and control, one whose parts are as perfect in themselves and as perfectly connected as may be, is least likely to suffer from unfortunate accidents? A librarian whose bad judgment--or whose kindness of heart, perhaps--has misled him into admitting into his machine one false cog may find to his sorrow that this will slip at the critical time, betraying both him and the whole engine that he had hoped to wield for good. Here no one kind of system, no particular detail, alone suffices, but every detail, every series, every combination renders the whole fabric of reputation more solid and more secure. I sometimes think that we Anglo-Saxons are in greater need of the inspiration and aid that we get from records of past intellectual achievement than are some other races. For our intellectual heritage does not come at all from our physical ancestry. We are the intellectual heirs of the Greeks, the Romans and the Hebrews, not of our own Teutonic fathers. We can, therefore, not only rely on heredity to maintain our intellectual level; we must continually drink from the same fountains through which our fathers drew inspiration. We sometimes think a little contemptuously of what we call the veneer of modern civilization that the Japanese have put on, forgetting that our own civilization is in great part also acquired, although the acquisition is of earlier date. Moreover, the Japanese have, and retain, intellectual ideals and achievements of their own, having learned from the West hardly more than its mechanics and engineering. On the other hand, our mechanical achievements are our own, our intellectual and esthetic standards are borrowed. Our intellectual status may thus be compared to the electrical condition of the trolley wire, which in order that it may furnish its useful energy to the motor below must itself be supplied at intervals with this energy from an adjacent feed wire communicating directly with the source of electrical power. The feed wire in our case is the library--a collection representing the intellectual energy of all past ages, springing directly from the powerful brains of the masters of mental achievement throughout the centuries. Unless we supply our minds from this, we shall not maintain our intellectual position. Is this the reason why the popular library has attained with us a development that it has never reached in Latin countries, whose inhabitants possess through heredity many of the mental standards of value that our ancestors borrowed and that we must borrow ever and again from the records of the past? We may be sure that this is at least a possibility; and we may be equally sure that the adoption of system, both external and internal, will facilitate both this and all other functions of the library. The statement that “the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life” was never intended to mean that we are to neglect formal and systematic methods of work. The letter kills only when it is spiritless, with the spirit to give it life it does well its part, ensuring that the institution to which it applies shall produce its results, surely, quietly and effectively, with a minimum of noise and effort and with a maximum of output. Let no one, then, deride or decry the formation or the operation of a library machine; we live in an age of machinery--of machines formed by effective human co-operation, as well as by interlocking gears and interacting parts. Rudyard Kipling makes his Scotch engineer see in the relentless motion of his links and pistons something of that “foreknowledge infinite” in which his Calvinistic training had taught him to believe and trust. So may we see in library machinery an aid to the accomplishment of that “far-off divine event” toward which our whole modern library creation has been and is still silently, but no less powerfully moving--the bringing into intellectual relationship of each living human brain within our reach with every other companionable or helpful human brain, though physically inaccessible through death or absence. This is the comprehensive ideal of the librarian; no machinery that may work toward its attainment is superfluous or inept.

THE EXPLOITATION OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

Two and a half years ago; or, to be more exact, on January 22, 1909, in an address at the dedication of the Chestnut Hill Branch of the Free library of Philadelphia, the present writer used the following words:

“I confess that I feel uneasy when I realize how little the influence of the public library is understood by those who might try to wield that influence, either for good or for evil.... So far there has been no concerted, systematic effort on the part of classes or bodies of men to capture the public library, to dictate its policy, to utilize its great opportunities for influencing the public mind. When this ever comes, as it must, we must look out!...

“Organizations ... civil, religious, scientific, political, artistic ... have usually let us severely alone, where their influence, if they should come into touch with the library, would surely be for good ... would be exerted along the line of morality, of more careful book selection, of judicial mindedness instead of one-sidedness.

“Let us trust that influences along this line ... if we are to have influences at all ... may gain a foothold before the opposite forces ... those of sordid commercialism, of absurdities, of falsities, of all kinds of self-seeking ... find out that we are worth their exploitation.”

There have been indications of late that the public, both as individuals and in organized bodies, is beginning to appreciate the influence, actual and potential, of the public library. With this dawning appreciation, as predicted in the lines just quoted, has come increased effort to turn this influence into the channels of personal or of business advantage, and it may be well to call the attention of librarians to this and to warn them against what they must doubtless expect to meet, in increasing measure, as the years go by. Attempts of this kind can hope for success only when they are concealed and come in innocent guise. It is extremely hard to classify them, and this fact in itself would indicate that libraries and librarians have to deal with that most ingenious and plausible of sophists, the modern advertiser.

But in the first place I would not have it understood that the use of the library for advertising purposes is necessarily illegitimate or reprehensible. If it is open and above board and the library receives proper compensation, the question resolves itself into one of good taste. The taste of such use may be beyond question, or it may be very questionable indeed. Few would defend the use of the library’s walls or windows for the display of commercial advertising; although the money received therefor might be sorely needed. On the other hand, the issuing of a bulletin paid for wholly or in part by advertisements inserted therein is approved by all, though most librarians doubtless prefer to omit these if the expense can be met by other means. Under this head come also the reception and placing on the shelves of advertising circulars or catalogs containing valuable material of any kind. Here the library gets considerably more than its quid pro quo, and no librarian has any doubt of the propriety of such a proceeding.

Again, where the advertising takes the form of a benevolent sort of “log-rolling,” the thing advertised being educational and the quid pro quo simply the impulse given to library use by anything of this nature, it is generally regarded as proper. Thus most libraries display without hesitation advertisements of free courses of lectures and the like. When the thing advertised is not free, this procedure is more open to doubt. Personally I should draw the line here, and should allow the library to advertise nothing that requires a fee or payment of any kind, no matter how trifling or nominal and no matter how good the cause.

These things are mentioned only to exclude them from consideration here. The library is really exploited only where it is used to further someone’s personal or business ends without adequate return, generally with more or less concealment of purpose, so that the library is without due realization of what it is really doing. Attempts at such exploitation have by no means been lacking in the past. Take if you please this case, dating back about a dozen years: An enterprising firm, operating a department store, offered to give to a branch library a collection of several thousand historical works on condition that these should be kept in a separate alcove plainly labeled “The gift of Blank Brothers.” Nothing so unusual about this. Such gifts, though the objections to the conditions are familiar to you all, are frequently offered and accepted. In this instance, however the name of the branch happened to be also the name of the enterprising firm. The inference would have been overpowering that the branch had been named after the firm. The offer was accepted on condition that the books should be shelved each in its proper place with a gift label, to be of special form if desired, and that the donation should be acknowledged on the bulletin board. These conditions were not acceptable--a sufficient indication of the real object of the gift. Other cases might be cited, to say nothing of the usual efforts to induce the library to display commercial notices or to give official commendation to some book.

Several cases of the more ingenious attempts at exploitation having come to my notice during the past few months I set myself to find out whether anything of the kind had also been noted by others. Letters to some of the principal libraries in the country elicited a variety of replies. Some librarians had noted nothing; others nothing more than usual. One said frankly that if the people had been “working” him he had been too stupid to know it. But others responded with interesting instances, and one or two, in whose judgment I have special confidence agreed with me in noticing an increase in the number of attempts at this kind of exploitation of late.

I may make my meaning more clear, perhaps, by proceeding at once to cite specific instances which must be anonymous, of course, in accordance with a promise to my informants.

A photographer offered to a public library a fine collection of portraits of deceased citizens of the town. This was accepted. The photographer then proceeded to send out circulars in a way that rendered it very probable that he was simply using the library’s name to increase his business.

A commercial firm, which had issued a good book on a subject connected with its business, offered to print for various libraries, at its own expense, a good list of works on this subject on condition that it should be allowed to advertise its own book on the last page. Submission of a proof revealed the fact that this advertisement was to be printed in precisely the same form and with the same kind of heading as information about the library given on the preceding page. The reader’s inference would have been that the matter on the last page was an official library note. Of the libraries approached, some accepted the offer without finding any fault with the feature just noted; others refused to have anything at all to do with the plan; still others accepted on condition that the last page should be so altered that the reader could see clearly that it contained advertising matter.

A lecturer gained permission to distribute through a library complimentary tickets to a free lecture on an educational subject. When these arrived, the librarian discovered that the announcement of the free lecture was on the same folder with advertisements of a pay course. The free tickets were given out, but the advertisement was suppressed. Efforts of this kind are perhaps particularly noticeable in connection with the use of library assembly-rooms. There is no reason, of course, why libraries should not rent out these rooms in the same way as other public rooms, but it is usual to limit their use to educational purposes and generally to free public entertainments. Some efforts to circumvent rules of this kind are interesting.

Application was made to a library for the use of an assembly-room for a free lecture on stenography. On cross-examination the lecturer admitted that he was a teacher of stenography who desired to form a class, and that at the close of his lecture he intended to make announcement of his courses, prices, etc. He was told that this must be done outside the library.

It is very common, where the exaction of an admission fee is forbidden, to take up a collection before or after the lecture. When told that this is inadmissible, the lecturer sometimes takes up his collection on the sidewalk outside. There have been cases where employees of a library have embraced this opportunity to gather contributions. A colored janitor of a branch library was recently admonished for standing outside his own assembly-room door and soliciting money for a pet charity. Another janitor made a pilgrimage to the central library to collect from the staff. A classic instance of this kind is that of the street gamin who for several hours stood at a branch library door and collected an admission fee of one cent from each user. The branch was newly opened and its neighbors were unused to the ways of free libraries.

An example of the difficulty of deciding, in matters of this kind, whether an undoubted advertising scheme may or may not legitimately be aided by the public library is found in the offer, with which all of you are familiar, of valuable money prizes for essays on economic subjects, by a firm of clothiers. The committee in charge of the awards is composed of eminent economists and publicists; the competitors are members of college faculties and advanced graduate students; the essays brought out are of permanent value and are generally published in book form. Under these circumstances many libraries have not hesitated to post the announcements of the committee on their bulletin boards. Others regard the whole thing as purely commercial advertisement and refuse to recognize it. One library at least posted the announcement of the competition for 1910, but refused to post the result. It would be hard to tell just how much altruism and how much selfishness we have here and the instance shows how subtle are the gradations from one motive to the other.

Advertising by securing condemnatory action of some sort, such as exclusion from the shelves, has also not been uncommon. This requires the aid of the press to condemn, abuse or ridicule the library for its action, and so exploit the book. The press, I grieve to say, has fallen a victim to this scheme more than once and has thereby given free use of advertising space ordinarily worth thousands of dollars. A flagrant instance of this kind occurred in one of our greatest cities about ten years ago. The work of a much-discussed playwright was about to be put upon the boards. A wily press agent, in conversation with an unsuspecting librarian, obtained an adverse opinion. The aiding and abetting newspaper, which was one of ostensible high character, proceeded at once to heap ridicule and contumely on the library and the librarian for their condemnation and exclusion of the play (which really wasn’t excluded at all). The matter, having reached the dignity of news, was taken up by other papers and for a week or more the metropolitan press resounded with accusation, explanation, recrimination and comment. The gleeful playwright cabled objurgations from London, and the press agent, retiring modestly into the background, saw advertising that would have cost him $100,000, at the lowest estimate, poured into his willing lap by the yellow, but easy, press of his native burg. It is possibly unfair to cite this as an attempt to “work” the library--it was the public press that was ingeniously and successfully exploited through the library.

The fact that the mere presence of a public library is an advantage to the neighborhood in which it stands has led to numerous attempts to locate library buildings, especially branches, in some particular place. These are often accompanied by offers of building-lots, which, it is sad to say, have occasionally appealed to trustees not fully informed of the situation. I recall several offers of lots in barren and unoccupied spots--one in an undeveloped region whose owner hoped to make it a residence park and another in the middle of a flourishing cornfield, whose owner considered it an ideal spot for a branch library--at least after he had sold off a sufficient number of building lots on the strength of his generous gift. These particular offers were declined with thanks, but in some instances members of boards of trustees themselves, being only human, have not been entirely free from suspicion of personal or business interest in sites. Here it is difficult to draw the line between the legitimate efforts of a particular locality to capture a branch site and those that have their origin in commercial cupidity. Both of course have nothing to do with the larger considerations that should govern in such location, but both are not exploitation as we are now using the word.

A curious instance of the advertising value of the mere presence of a public library and of business shrewdness in taking advantage of it, comes from a library that calls itself a “shining example of efforts to ‘work’ public libraries for commercial purposes.” This library rents rooms for various objects connected with its work, and finds that it is in great demand as a tenant. Great effort is made by property owners both to retain and to move quarters occupied for library purposes. The board has recently refused to make selection of localities on this basis.

There is another respect in which the public library offers an attractive field for exploitation. In its registration files it has a valuable selected list of names and addresses which may be of service in various ways either as a mailing-list or as a directory. Probably there are no two opinions regarding the impropriety of allowing the list to be used for commercial purposes along either line. The use as a directory may occasionally be legitimate and is allowable after investigation and report to some one in authority. I have known of recourse to library registration lists by the police, to find a fugitive from justice; by private detectives, ostensibly on the same errand; by a wife, looking for her runaway husband; by persons searching for lost relatives; and by creditors on the trail of debtors in hiding. Where there is any doubt, the matter can usually be adjusted by offering to forward a letter to the person sought, or to communicate to that person the seeker’s desire and let him respond if he wishes to do so. One thing is certain: except in obedience to an order of court, it is not only unjust, but entirely inexpedient from the library’s standpoint to betray to anyone a user’s whereabouts against that user’s wishes or even where there is a mere possibility of his objection. If it were clearly understood that such consequences might follow the holding of a library card, we should doubtless lose many readers that we especially desire to attract and hold.

Of course the public library is not the only institution whose reputation has exposed it to the assaults of advertisers. The Christian ministry has for years been exposed to this sort of thing, and it is the belief of Reverend William A. Lee, who writes on the subject in “The Standard,” a Baptist paper published in Chicago, that in this case also increased activity is to be noted of late. Persons desire to present the minister with a picture on condition that he mentions the artist to his friends; to give him a set of books or a building-lot that his name may be used to lure other purchasers; they even ask him for mailing-lists of his parishioners’ names. “I am constantly being besieged,” says Mr. Lee, “by agents of divers sorts, and of divers degrees of persistency, for indorsements of patent mops, of ‘wholesome plays,’ of current periodicals, of so-called religious books, of ‘helps’ almost innumerable for church-workers and of scores of other things which time has charitably carried out of memory.”