Part 20

This may seem to be the same as the plan by which the authority of one department is absolutely done away in the disputed sphere. It is of the same type, but not so drastic. In the other plan one has not authority to do anything; in this, one must ask permission--not the same thing by any means. This plan is practically in effect at some libraries; it would probably be regarded as equitable by most department heads--provided their own department were put ahead of the other. The trouble is that it involves an arbitrary subordination--one that does not exist in the nature of the classification. And this subordination is local and partial; it cannot hold good for the whole department. No one would think of placing the branch department, as a whole, under the children’s department, or vice versa. And the objections, although not so strong as those to the extinguishment plan, are of the same kind. The efficiency of one department or the other is bound to suffer, and for this reason I do not consider this the best plan.

4. All department heads in conflicting spheres, may be regarded simply as advisers of the librarian and not as possessing authority in themselves to give orders. A conflict is thus reduced to contradictory advice from two sources. The librarian then pursues whatever course seems good to him. This plan has attractive features, especially to administrators of the type that like to keep a finger in every pie. There is doubtless danger in aloofness. The librarian must know what is going on, but I see no advantage in requiring him to decide questions of trivial detail at frequent intervals, as he must do under this plan; for conflicts generally begin in questions of detail and it is at the beginning or even earlier, in anticipation, that they must be caught and adjusted. This plan works, but it reduces the department head to a consulting expert and burdens the librarian with detail. It does not appeal to me at all.

5. The two conflicting departments may co-operate, intelligently and courteously without sacrifice of authority or self-respect, under the advice and orders of the librarian.

This is the plan that I recommend. It is the most difficult of all, and no regulations or specifications can be formulated for carrying it out. For this reason it will never be widely in favor. A wicked and rebellious generation demands a sign, and in this plan there is neither sign nor formula except that general principle of helpfulness and willingness to place the common whole above the selfish part that is at the antipodes of both wickedness and rebellion. It is a personal matter and it adds one important qualification to those already necessary in department heads--the ability to do team work. This qualification, however, is so important, quite apart from its necessity in connection with this plan, that we may consider it an advantage, rather than otherwise, that the plan puts it forward and insists upon it. On the whole I think that a library with mediocre department heads having this qualification is better manned, and will do more satisfactory work than one with a staff of supremely able experts, cranky, self-centered and all pulling different ways. The efforts of members of a body like a library staff are not to be measured arithmetically--they are what mathematicians call “vectors”--directed quantities, like force, velocity or acceleration. To know where a man will bring up one must have not only his speed, but its direction. The sum of two equal forces may be anything from zero up to their double, depending on their relative directions, and if the sum is zero, no matter how large the components may be, the result is precisely the same as if those components are small, or as if neither existed. It is this sort of thing that an eminent employer of labor had in mind when he advised, “If two of your subordinates don’t get along together, discharge both of them, no matter how good they are.” In this man’s estimation the relative value of team work evidently stands pretty high. I should not follow his advice, however, without giving everyone a fair chance. I have known the opinions of one department head about another and their ability to work together to improve greatly on acquaintance.

The part necessarily played by the librarian in this scheme may be regarded by some as an objection. I have already referred to administrators who, like the late Czar of Russia, prefer to regulate all the details of the kingdom by personal supervision. There is also the precisely opposite type, who like to make a good machine, set it going, and then let it alone. The trouble is that machines will not run of themselves. They need oversight, oiling, cleaning and repairing. The best require a minimum of all this, but all must have some of it. And such machinery as there is in this plan requires a maximum of oversight. It is, however, not the control of details but rather the watching of general methods and results. Is everything running smoothly, without “lost motion” or “backlash,” and turning out a satisfactory finished product? If not can the trouble be located? Yes; these two cogs do not work smoothly together. Let us find out which is at fault and adjust or replace it; but if our investigation is fruitless, possibly the best plan is to discard both.

I trust I have misled no one by treating here specifically of two departments. I might have substituted the names of a dozen others. All through library administration, and especially in the administration of a system of branch libraries, these possibilities of conflict occur. In branches they are generally between the branch administration and the central departments--finance, supplies, cataloging, book-orders, reference and circulation.

The handling of this whole matter depends, of course, on the librarian. He it must be who is to decide on general policies or go to his Board for a decision in cases so important that he feels their action necessary. If the work of departments overlaps in some field where the library’s policy has not yet been decided upon and defined, he has no one to blame but himself if the adjustment is difficult. And if policies are defined in advance and pains taken to inform department heads thoroughly of their existence and import, the likelihood of serious disagreement will be considerably lessened.

It must not be forgotten, also, that the success of any plan may be increased or diminished by skill, or lack of skill, in handling it.

I am confident that any of the plans about which I have spoken unfavorably above would work better under a good librarian than the best would work under a bad one. But I forget myself; we librarians are like Kentucky whiskey--some are better than others, but there are no bad ones!

THREE KINDS OF LIBRARIANS

The human eye is so constituted that it can see clearly but a small part of the field of vision at one time. We have learned by habit to move it about quickly and comprehensively, so that unless our attention is called to the fact we do not realize this limitation; but it exists. In like manner, it is difficult for the human mind to take a comprehensive view of a subject. We are apt to fix upon some one feature and ignore the rest. In recent times we have been devoting our attention to the personal element. We talk about the “man behind the gun,” a good deal. I would not underrate him or what he can do; but it is surely necessary to have the gun itself before the man behind it can be effective. In fact the man per se is about the most helpless of animals. His superiority to the mere brute lies in his ability to use tools; his inferiority in the fact that he can do almost nothing without them. A man with a gun is indeed formidable; a wildcat can do nothing with such a tool, but then he is reasonably formidable without it. I have yielded thus to the temptation to depreciate the personal element somewhat, at the beginning of an address in which it is to be discussed, because this defect of the human mind, that tends to fix it upon one feature to the exclusion of others, has of late apparently led many to think that a man is valuable in himself and by himself, without anything to work with or anything to work on.

A man is making a failure of his job; the first thought is that he must be replaced. Nine persons out of ten fail to inquire whether anyone at all could have succeeded under the same conditions. Your cook prepares an inedible meal; you rage and call loudly for a new regime in the kitchen; whereas all the time your competent servant has been struggling with a faulty range, tough meat and bad flour.

Shall we, then, sit down and refuse to do anything at all unless our tools and our materials are of the best? By no means; one of the chief distinctions between a capable and an inefficient worker lies in the ability of the former to make the best of unpromising conditions. No one can do as well with poor tools and materials as with good ones; but the good worker will turn out a better job with the former than the inefficient one will.

These things apply of course to the library worker as to all others, especially to librarians in small towns where tools and materials are apt to be not of the best. Among tools we may reckon buildings, books, and all kinds of library appliances. The material is the community on which the librarian by proper use of her tools aims to produce a certain effect.

Now it is open to such a worker to view her task from any one of three different standpoints--to choose, we will say, from three different kinds of librarianship. She may be a librarian of the day before yesterday, of yesterday, or of to-day.

The librarian of the day before yesterday is the librarian of a part of the community. Not only does she make no effort to encourage the use of her library, but she distinctly discourages certain persons, and certain classes of persons, from entering it. This grade of librarian includes as many kinds as there are persons or classes of the community that may be discouraged. Some, for instance, exclude all the poorly-dressed, or all of inferior social status; others welcome just these and exclude the well-dressed and well-to-do. The philanthropic donor of a city branch library building once waxed very wroth when she saw a carriage standing in front of the building. Her library, she said, was for the poor, not for “carriage people.”

These ways of looking at things are sometimes an inheritance from former conditions. A subscription library turned into a free public library hesitates to welcome, all at once, the lower strata that have so long been banished from its doors. On the other hand, a public library that has developed from a charitable foundation regards these as its proper users and looks askance at the well-to-do, as in the case of the good lady with her “carriage people.”

When I speak of the exclusion of a class of persons, I do not mean that they are formally kept out or even consciously discouraged; this is why it is so easy to be a librarian of the day before yesterday. That day was a comfortable day; an easy day to be self-satisfied in; it had its libraries for the rich and its libraries for the poor. Some class was always named, even if some were always left out.

It may be that the exclusion operates through features that are in themselves excellent. I have seen, in a small community, a library building so fine, with such an atmosphere of quiet good-taste and so lady-like a librarian, that the great public no more dared to enter therein than if a fierce lion had stood in the doorway. I have known libraries, too, in which the books were too good. Certain classes in the community where not intellectually up to them.

I have also known libraries that were never used by the foreigners in their communities, or by the colored people. These latter, strange to say, were largely in the North. The South recognizes the Negro and pays him much attention--in its way. It settles his status and sees that it is observed. He has the last four seats on the trolley car and he has his separate library accommodations. In the North he is on an equality with the white man--in everything but reality. He is welcomed to the library in theory and he does not use it in practice. I fear that in this respect too many of us belong to the day before yesterday.

I trust that I have made it clear that the librarian of day-before-yesterday is not a bad librarian. He or she is just a librarian of day before yesterday--that is all.

Now we will step into one of Mr. H.G. Wells’ “Time machines” and take a short spin ahead into yesterday. The librarian of yesterday excludes no one at all from his library; for he is within one step of being up-to-date. He discourages no person nor any class of persons. He stands in his doors with outstretched arms and announces that his library is free to all, that it has books for all--rich and poor, old and young, barbarian, Scythian, bond and free. The selection of books is well thought-out and adapted to the community in which it is. The accommodations are ample and fitting. Everyone is welcome. What more could you ask? Nothing at all; provided you are still in yesterday. Yesterday this sort of library was regarded as the last word in the popularization of the book, and it is indeed a long step in advance of day-before-yesterday. The librarian’s material is before him; he has good books; is more needed than this? Yea, verily. One may have a nail and a hammer to drive it; also an egg, and a pan to fry it, yet one cannot fry the egg with the hammer. Some selective action is necessary before we can attain the result that we want. A minister, presiding at a wedding, in which several couples were to be united at once, read the marriage service and then exclaimed: “I pronounce you men and wives; now you can sort yourselves.” The trouble is that things will not “sort themselves”; they must have some one to sort them--and this is what is the matter with the library and the librarian of yesterday. They fail to make connection between the man and the book, so that part of the fine collection remains wholly or relatively unused, and part of the community that it ought to serve remains apart from the library, despite the librarian’s outstretched arms and his words of welcome. If he had read his Bible as his great-grandparents used to do, he would have realized that to fill the table at the wedding feast of literature and life a simple invitation sufficeth not. We must go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in. The attitude of passive expectancy, of ability and willingness to serve those who come, was well enough for yesterday, but not for the new library day that has dawned in these United States of America. Apparently the library dawn moves eastward as the physical day moves westward, for over in the mother country only a few lofty peaks are yet gilded by its sunshine. Even in our own land there are gorges where the dusk lingers; there are even grottoes where darkness will always be. But we are mostly in the light. We realize that if we have a book on the dyeing of textile fabrics and if there is an unheeding man in our community who would be helped by that book, all the complacent receptivity that we can muster will not suffice to bring them together. And with this knowledge comes an awakening of conscience. Long ago we stopped crying out “Am I my brother’s keeper?” We realize that as members of the community we must bear our share of responsibility for what is done in the community and that collectively we must take measures for the community’s welfare. Each of us is a Roman dictator, in that it is our business to see that the Republic suffers no harm. Thus the community appoints special officers to look out for the interests of its members in certain directions. We public librarians are such officers. We are proud of saying that we stand on the same plane as the teachers in our schools and the professors in our colleges; nay, even a little higher, for the facilities for education over which we preside are offered long after school and college years are over.

Now the teacher does not stand in the doorway and announce that she is willing and ready to instruct all who may so desire in reading, writing and arithmetic--that she has a well-equipped schoolroom, blackboards, globes and textbooks for all who will take advantage of them. Not so; the community goes out and compels its members to take advantage of all these things. In like manner, also, the community makes all sorts of laws for its own preservation and betterment; it does not say “See, here are good laws; come ye who will and obey them.” On the contrary it goes out into highways and hedges and sees that all its members obey.

I would not push this analogy too far. No one expects that the community will require that every one within its borders shall use the public library so many times a month, or, indeed that it shall be used at all. The nature of the institution precludes such compulsion. But it should require that every effort be made to see that no section of the books on the library shelves shall lie idle and that no section of the community shall fail to use books, either through ignorance or through doubt of a welcome.

The librarian should say: Here is an unused book. Is it without value in this community? Then let it make place for a better. Has it value? Then why is it not used? Somewhere, in this community, is the man, woman or child, who, whether realizing it or not, would derive pleasure or profit, or both from reading it. It is my business to seek out that person.

Again: Here is a man who does not read books. Is this because no book would appeal to him? Impossible! He may think so, but there lives no one to whom the soul of some fellow man, speaking through the printed page, will not bring a welcome message. Is there such a book on my shelves? If so, it is my business to get it into that man’s hands; if not, I must buy, beg or borrow it as soon as I may.

When the librarian has begun to talk in this fashion, lo! the dawn is shining, he is a librarian of to-day. The librarian of to-day frowns on no one, discourages no one; and he stands not passively at his door with open arms. He walks through his library; he walks through his town. He knows the books in one and the dwellers in the other, and he knows both in their relationships, actual and possible. If there are disused books on his shelves or non-readers in his community, it is not because he has made no effort to bring them together; his failures are not those of negligence.

The other day, sitting in a stalled trolley car, my eye fell upon a street-cleaner, and I began to watch him with interest. He was busy--apparently, I was going to say, but that does him injustice. He was really busy. While I watched him--and the car was delayed for some little time--he was constantly at work, pushing over the asphalt the broad scraper that was intended to rid it of dust and refuse. And yet he did not clean the street, for he took no account of the inequalities of its surface. These required intelligent adaptation of his movements at every instant, and to this he paid no attention. He went through the motions; his actual expenditure of physical energy was probably as great as if he had mixed a little brain-work with it, but it failed to accomplish what it ought, simply from that lack. And yet it would have been difficult for any overseer to give him orders that would have bettered the matter. It would have been hard to point out at any given instant, his errors of commission or of omission. The only way in which one could tell that he was not doing his work properly was by the result. He was put there to clean the street--and the street was not cleaned.