Part 22

In our high schools we spend literally millions of dollars to equip laboratories, kitchens, carpenter shops, machine shops, and what not, to be used by a small part of the pupils for a small part of the short school day. This is partly because so to do is the fashion of the hour, partly also because the products of work in those shops, kitchens, and laboratories can be seen, touched, and handled, are real things even to the most unintelligent.

For books, the essential tools of every form of acquisition, we spend, outside of textbooks, a few paltry thousands. The things a child makes we can see, and we are impressed by them; the knowledge he gains, the power of thought he acquires--these cannot be made visible and are not appreciated by the ignorant; they can only be certified to by the teacher and demonstrated by the student’s words and deeds as he goes through life.

Mastery of print is mastery of world-knowledge. Our young people do not have it. Surely they should be led to acquire it, and where better than in the high schools? To aid them in this acquisition the high schools, should have ample collections of books, and these collections of books should become active teaching organisms through the ministrations of competent librarians.

Of all teaching laboratories, there is one which is plainly of supreme importance--that of books.

I trust that you are with me so far; for I am about to make a further advance that experience teaches me is very difficult, except for librarians. I am going to urge that your collection of books, when you have made it, be put in charge of one who has studied the methods of making the contents of books available to the reader--their shelving, physical preparation, classification, cataloguing; the ways in which to fit them to their users, to record their use, and to prevent their abuse. This means a trained librarian.

In all departments where expert knowledge and skill are necessary it is difficult to explain to a non-expert the reasons for this necessity and exactly in what the expert knowledge consists. We are so accustomed to accept the fact in certain departments that it passes there without question. Unfortunately that is not the case with the selection and administration of a library. Most persons understand quite well that special training is necessary before one can practice law, or medicine, or engineering. No one would undertake to drive a motor car or even ride a bicycle without some previous experience; but it is quite usual to believe that a collection of books may be administered and its use controlled by totally untrained and inexperienced persons--a retired clergyman, a broken-down clerk, a janitor, perhaps. I once asked a young woman who came for advice about taking up library work what had inclined her toward that particular occupation. She was quite frank with me; she said: “Why, my father and mother didn’t think I was good for anything else.” This estimate of the library is by no means confined to the parents of would-be library workers. And even where it is recognized that some training and experience are necessary in administering a large public institution, there is a lingering feeling that a comparatively small collection, like that in a school, needs no expert supervision. The fact that there are in a school plenty of experts in other lines seems to have been not without its effect on this attitude. “Why, Professor Smith is one of the best chemists in the state; Miss Jones is an acknowledged authority on oriental history; do you mean to tell me that either of them would not make a perfectly satisfactory librarian?” Which is something like saying, “Mr. Robinson is our foremost banker; should he not be able to superintend the dyeing department in a textile mill?” Or, “Rev. Mr. Jenkins is our most eloquent pulpit orator; he can surely run the 2:15 express!”

Are my metaphors too violent? I think not. We are dealing here with imponderables, as I have said, but the most imponderable thing of all, and the most potent, is the human mind. To wield, concentrate, and control our battery of energies we want a correlated energy--one whose relations to them all are close and one who knows how to pull all the throttles, turn all the valves, and operate all the mechanism that brings them into play. It takes two years of hard work, nowadays, for a college graduate to get through a library school, and it should not be necessary to argue that during these two years he is working hard on essentials and is assimilating material that the untrained man however able, cannot possibly acquire in a few month’s casual association with a library or from mere association with books, no matter how long or how intimate. You will pardon me, I am sure, some further quotation from Mr. Hicks’s illuminating article. After calling our attention to the fact that the effort to meet changing conditions in instruction is purely technical, he goes on:

The librarian stands in the position of an engineer to whom is presented a task which by the methods of his profession he must perform. Numerical growth, expansion, addition of new schools and new subjects, and the introduction of the laboratory method by which books are made actual tools for use, all mean to the librarian more books, larger reading-rooms and more of them, a large staff specialized and grouped into departments, the supervision of a complicated system, and capable business administration. These are all technical matters and are of sufficient magnitude to require all of the time and strength of those to whom they are entrusted....

In a reference library, open shelves, whether in department libraries or in the general library, require much high-grade library service. The reference librarian becomes a direct teacher in the use of books and gives constant assistance not merely in finding separate books but in dealing with the whole literature of a subject....

The whole development from the few-book method to the many-book method presupposes a system of reserve books. By this expression is meant the placing of a collection of books behind an enclosure of some kind from which they are given out by a library assistant for use in the room. The reserve collections, continually changing in accordance with the directions of instructors, are in reality composite textbooks....

The mere clerical work of maintaining an efficient reserve system is large, its success being dependent upon intelligent co-operation between the teaching faculty and the library, but it involves also a technical problem to be solved by the librarian. What relation does the number of copies of a given reserve book bear to its use? To put the question concretely, how many copies of a book are required to supply a class of 200 students, all of whom must read thirty pages of the book within two weeks?

I like so much one of Mr. Hicks’s expressions that I desire to emphasize it at the close of what I am saying. A library, used for teaching purposes in a school, is indeed, “a composite textbook.” It insures contact with a composite instead of a single mind. The old idea was that contact of this kind always resulted in confusion--in mental instability. There was a time when the effort was to protect the mind through life from any such unbalancing contact. The individual was protected from familiarity with more than one set of opinions--religious, political, social, philosophical, scientific. He was taught facts as facts and no emphasis was placed on the more important fact that there are degrees of certainty and points of view. The next step was to give the individual a free head after the formal processes of education had terminated. Getting out of college was like escaping from a box, where one had been shut up with Presbyterians and Free Traders and Catastrophists and Hegelians--or their opposites, for the contents of all the boxes were not alike. Now, we set the boy free when he enters college and we are beginning to give him a little fresh air in the high school. Why not go back to the beginning? Why not, at any rate, avoid the implication that there is the same backing behind all that we teach or tell? Some teachers, and some parents, have made this plan succeed. One of them is Mr. H.R. Walmsley, who writes in the Volta Review (Washington, April, 1915), on “How I Taught My Boy the Truth.” Says he:

I pondered over these things, and determined that I would never tell a falsehood to my child; that I would tell him the truth upon every subject, and that I would not evade or refuse to answer any question. I kept my resolution and have obtained most excellent results. The child doubted nothing I told him. He knew that as far as I was able I would reply truthfully to any question he might care to ask. In answering him I was always careful to qualify my statements thus: “This is so,” “I believe so,” “It is believed to be,” “It is claimed to be,” “Those who should know say,” etc. So he knew the basis from which I spoke. Throughout his life, when he was told anything that looked doubtful, he would say, “I will ask father.”

This plan is practicable from the child’s earliest years. As soon as he learns to read we may begin to supplement it by reference to original documents. This means a library at the very beginning, and at high school age it means a large library. It need not all be in the school. In the smallest towns there are now respectable public collections; the school may confine itself to the subjects in its own curriculum. But whatever we do, let us not teach the child, with the implication of equal authority, that twice two is is four, that material bodies are composed of molecules, and that the Tories in the Revolution were all bad. Tell him that there are other aspects, if they exist, and as soon as he is able let him examine those aspects. He will be able far sooner than some of us are willing to admit.

We librarians feel somewhat strongly on this matter because our own institutions possess by their very nature that form of neutrality that exposes both sides without advocating either. It seems to be assumed by some persons that neutrality means ignorance. Of course, ignorance is one method of insuring it. If a fairy story opens with the announcement that the King of Nowaria is at war with the Prince of Sumboddia, you cannot take sides until you know something about the quarrel. The trouble is that we do not live in fairyland. In my home city the school authorities have been trying to cultivate this kind of neutrality by cautioning principals not to discuss the European war with their pupils. What is the result? One of my branch librarians says in a recent report: “I have been greatly interested by the fact that the high-school boys and girls never ask for anything about the war. Not once during the winter have I seen in one of them a spark of interest in the subject. It seems so strange that it should be necessary to keep them officially ignorant of this great war because the grandfather of one spoke French and of another, German.” With this I thoroughly agree. I am not sure that I do not prefer a thorough and bigoted partisanship to this neutrality of ignorance. Better than both is the opportunity for free investigation with enlightened guidance. The public library offers the opportunity for the fullest and freest contact with the minds of the world. We try to give guidance, also, as we can; but we have not the opportunities of you teachers. Guidance is your business and your high privilege; and if some of you have in the past guided as the jailer guides his prisoners--for a walk around the prison yard with ball and chain--let us be thankful that this oppressive view is giving place to the freer idea of a guide as a counselor and friend. Such guidance means intellectual freedom. Freedom means choice, and choice implies a collection from which to choose. This means a library and the school library is thus an indispensable tool in the hands of those teachers to whom education signifies neutral training, the arousing of neutral energies, and a control of the imponderables of life--those things without physical weight which yet count more in the end than all the masses with which molecular physics has to deal.

THE LIBRARY AND THE BUSINESS MAN

The electricians have a word that has always interested me--the word and the thing it signifies. It is “hysteresis,” and it means that quality in a mass of iron that resists magnetization, so that if the magnetizing force is a moving one the magnetism always lags a little behind it. We see this quality in many other places besides magnetic bodies--the almost universal tendency of effects to lag behind their causes. I like to watch it in the popular mind--the failure to “catch on” quickly--the appreciation that comes just a little after the thing to be appreciated. Lag everywhere, in apprehension, in knowledge, in the realization of a situation. Everywhere hysteresis. Of course, sometimes the lag is great and sometimes it is slight. It may be affected by physical distance, as when the European thinks that Indians camp in the suburbs of Pittsburg and that the citizens of Indianapolis hunt the buffalo of an evening; or it may be a function of mental distance, as when the Wall Street financier fondly imagines that this country is still populated chiefly by lambs, as it undoubtedly was fifty years ago. I like to watch it as it affects the idea of the public library as some people hold it. Now of course, without progress, change, motion of some kind, there could be no lag. In a permanent magnet there is no hysteresis. If the Indians and the buffalo were still with us, the European would be thinking the truth. If we had not learned that the gold-brick and the green goods were frauds, we could still be fleeced. And if libraries were still what they were fifty years ago, there would be no lag in the ideas that some people hold about them. Libraries have changed. Some of you know it and some of you do not. Libraries have changed in the kind of printed matter that they collect and preserve; in the kind of people to whom they make their appeal; in the way in which they try to make the former available to the latter. They have utterly changed in their own conception of their status in the community, of what they owe to the community and how they ought to go about it, to pay the debt.

The old library was first and foremost a collection of material for scholars; the new is for the busy citizen, to help him in what he is busy about, to make it possible for him to do more work in less time. It has taken some time for the library to see itself in this light, but it has taken the great body of our citizens still longer to recognize and act on the change--else I should not be talking to you to-day about the library and the business man. The modern library is concerned, much more largely than the old, with contemporary relations, with what is happening and what is just going to happen. It sympathizes with the men who do things. It tries to let them know what is going on about them, and to assist them in what they are attempting--whether it be to achieve a world-wide peace or to devise a new non-refillable bottle.

The library has placed itself in a position where it can do this better than any other institution, for it is essentially non-partisan. Probably it is our only non-partisan institution. Mr. Bryan’s impartial government newspaper has not yet printed its first number. The school must take sides, for its deals solely with children. The library alone can store up material on all sides of every mooted question and offer it to him who reads, without in any way taking sides itself. It may run the risk of misconception. We had a big exhibit of war pictures last year. The Pacifists protested. It was very dreadful, they said, to see a library encouraging the militaristic spirit. This year we have a peace exhibit--prepared by the Union Against Militarism. The Preparedness people are horrified. They hate to see a library siding with those who would drag our country in the dust of humiliation. The trouble with all these good people is just hysteresis--lag. It may have been fifty years ago that a portrait of a monarch in a library meant that the institution was for him, body and soul. Now it means simply that he is an interesting contemporary thing. Display of a cartoon representing Woodrow Wilson doing something disgraceful does not imply on our part detestation of the president, but only a willingness to let the public see a good bit of drawing or perhaps to show them how some part of the community is thinking and feeling. It is all a part of our efforts at up-to-dateness--our struggles to brush off the dust and sweep away the cobwebs of medievalism.

As an incident of these struggles, we have discovered the existence of the Business Man. We have tried to find out what he is driving at and to help a little--to stock the kind of information that he wants and to help him get at it. An obstacle in the way has been the fact that much of what he wants is to be obtained best from material that the older libraries knew nothing of and would have despised had they known it--partly, printed matter that had no existence in those days, like the huge trade catalog and the informative railway folder; partly material that was ignored because it had no connection with scholarly pursuits--time tables, statistical schedules, directories, lists of names and addresses, commercial publications, maps, information regarding trade-routes and conditions. If the scholar of fifty years ago wanted to be set right about a Greek preposition or to find the color of Henry VII’s hair, he knew where to go: the library was the proper and inevitable place for such data. He brushed the dust from a pile of books and proceeded to look them up. But if he wanted to know the quickest way to ship goods to Colombo, Ceylon, or the comparative exports of cereals from Russia during the last decade, or the design of the latest machine for effecting a given result, did he go to the library? Remember that this is supposed to be fifty years ago. I am afraid I must confess that I don’t know where he went. I fear that in most cases he didn’t go at all, for business men as well as libraries have grown in the last half century--but I am quite sure that he went nowhere near the library.

The reason was that printed information of this kind either did not then exist or was thought improper for collection by a scholarly institution. If anyone had asked for it I know what the librarian would have said, for the same thing is occasionally still said by librarians, and I hear it at department stores and everywhere else where there is distribution of objects necessary to our lives. They would have said--“There has been no demand for it, so we don’t need to keep it.” Demand for it! Of course not. Is there any demand for fish in a sand-bank or for free-trade arguments in a stand-pat Republican newspaper? People go for things where they know the things are to be found; and they knew well fifty years ago that none of these things were to be found in a library. The sad thing is that altho the libraries have reformed, hysteresis is still getting in its deadly work. There is a lag of apprehension and appreciation among our business men, many of whom think the library is still the same old dusty, cobwebby institution of 1850. Take my word for it, it is not. It stocks all the things that the librarian used contemptuously to call biblia abiblia--books that are no books--city directories by the hundred, trade maps, commercial information, trade catalogs, advertising folders, railway announcements, hundreds of things that will answer the questions that every business man wants, or ought to want, to know. We, or any other library, may not have precisely what you want. We are not yet perfect and we have much to learn. But we are buying and putting at the business man’s disposal the kind of material that will help him in his business.

The modern library is democratic, not autocratic. It does not hand you down a volume from a very high shelf and tell you that is exactly what you want and you mustn’t ask for anything else. It says: we are the agents of a co-operative concern. For convenience sake, just as in the case of the public schools, you conclude to tax yourselves to maintain a public collection of books, instead of having to form private collections of your own, smaller and vastly more expensive. We are in communication with every one of you by telephone. The machine for which you have paid is all ready to work--stoked and cleaned and oiled. Why don’t you press the button? Those who don’t are just suffering from hysteresis--lag of apprehension. They think the library is what it was in 1850. They are behind the times.

Am I not afraid that if all the business men should press the button at once, the library would be swamped? There would be a little swearing at first, I fear. But ultimately there would be a realization that a library built and stocked and manned to serve perhaps 50 business men at once cannot serve 500 or 5000. There would be pressure on the legislature; we should have the necessary funds and in short order we should be serving our 5000 as smoothly as we served our 50.

Now let us get down to something concrete. Just what information are we prepared to give to business and industrial houses? Here are some actual questions asked lately and answered in our reference departments--many of them by telephone:

The uses of lye in baking powder. History and development of the plow.

Substitute for such commercial products as dyes, sealskin, fertilizers, etc.

Receipts for preparing in the wholesale manner mustard and salad-dressing, and for bottling olives.

Methods of installing a refrigerating plant.