Part 34

This is really museum material, but if no museum takes it up, I should like to see the Public Library begin the work. We already have the films of our great St Louis Pageant of 1915, which may serve as a beginning.

It has been said above that museum material adaptable to library use is so for physical reasons. We may go further and say that the whole difference between a library and a museum is a physical difference rather than one of either object or method. The difference is one of material and of the manner of its display, and these are conditioned by physical facts. The difference between an object and a picture of it is physical. It should not astonish us, then, that when this physical difference is abolished, as it is when the object itself is a picture, or is minimized, as when the object is flat like the picture and resembles it closely, like a textile specimen, the boundary between the museum and the library practically disappears.

THE LIBRARY AND THE LOCALITY

There is nothing more important than standardization, unless it is a knowledge of its proper limits. Probably no more important step has ever been taken than the introduction of standardization into the industries; the making of nails, screws, nuts and bolts of standard sizes, the manufacture of watches, firearms and machines of all sorts, with standard interchangeable parts. If you take apart a thousand Ford automobiles and mix up the parts a thousand automobiles may be at once assembled from those parts, without any effort at selecting the particular ones associated with each other at first. You know that this principle is now being applied to what are known as “fabricated” ships where certain types of freight-carriers are made standard and then twenty or thirty of a kind are built at once in the same yard, being assembled from steel parts cut out and punched in what are called “fabricating ships”.

Now I need not waste time in arguing here that this process can not be made to apply universally or be used indefinitely. To standardize a work of art would be to kill it. Standardization is valuable where interchangeability is necessary rather than adaptation to local conditions. Portable houses, for instance, with interchangeable parts, have been standardized to a certain extent, but only within the bounds of uniform climatic conditions. The standard houses for Michigan and Alabama would have to be different. It is important, therefore, as I have said, to know, when standardization is being carried out, the limits of its advisability and the conditions under which it becomes useless or injurious. This is of interest to us librarians because our methods and processes, our buildings, our book collections and the use of both have long been undergoing this very process. And it is surely desirable that almost all the routine processes of library work, and the others to some extent, should be standardized.

This standardization has been going on ever since librarians began to meet together and began to issue their own professional literature; in other words, ever since the formation of the A.L.A. in 1876 and the establishment of The Library Journal about the same time. The subsequent formation of State Library Associations and local library clubs, as well as the establishment of other library periodicals, has greatly multiplied the opportunities for librarians to talk over their work with each other, to learn of other and better ways of doing things, to compare existing methods and to determine, if possible, which of them best serves the purpose for which it was devised. These things having in some measure been decided, they were then crystallized and fixed by the rise and success of Library Schools, summer-schools and training classes, which selected the methods that had stood the test of time and had emerged from the crucible of discussion and formulated them into standards which were thenceforth taught to their students. This, I think, is a fair statement of the way in which our present library standards came to be standards.

It is a good way to select the best and to ensure that the best shall not be departed from. If the best always remained best, we should have no quarrel with it. Unfortunately there is flux and change all about us. A method is best when it best corresponds to the conditions. We can ensure that the method shall not be changed, but we have no control over a large proportion of the conditions. They change, in spite of us; and then the methods ought to change with them. In some instances we have erred, possibly, by making it a little hard to change them. We are now ready to consider some of the cases where standards ought not to obtain--where one library ought to try to be different from another instead of exactly like it.

It is evident from what was said above about portable houses, that difference of locality is apt to introduce important exceptions into any rule of this kind; and it is on these exceptions that we are to dwell particularly to-day. There are thousands of particulars in which it is desirable that a library in one town should be conducted exactly like one in another town. What are the particulars in which the library must or should be different?

First, let us consider the stock of books. If these have been selected properly, differences between the two towns will perhaps be first reflected in these, for a library’s ability to serve its community depends primarily on certain correspondences between the books and the readers. These correspondences may be summarized by saying that the books in a library must represent a combination of the readers’ wants and their needs. These might always coincide in an ideal community, but in practice no librarian thinks of paying attention to the one to the exclusion of the other. At the same time the demands of the readers should always be known and always considered even if they want what is unnecessary; and we must likewise try to ascertain what they need, even if they have no desire for it. The extremes in a community without library taste would be a library of trashy fiction and one of serious standard works at which no one ever looked. A book-selector who uses good judgment will of course steer between this Scylla and this Charybdis, and the result will be a collection that the community can use with both pleasure and profit. Moreover, as time goes on, the readers’ taste and the quality of their library will both slowly but surely rise. No two towns are alike. Where the books have been thus selected, the collections will reflect the character of the communities, not only in literary taste but in many other things. The industries of the towns are likely to differ. In one, perhaps, there are potteries; in the other, shoe factories. The workers in the industries and even outsiders interested in them for local reasons, should have an opportunity to consult their literature. The natural resources of the regions doubtless differ--their crops, their mineral output, their attractiveness to the summer tourist. Transportation facilities vary. All these things have their reflection in books and the differences of the towns have their corresponding reflections in their libraries.

Many years ago, your lecturer called the attention of librarians to the fact that they have in their own statistical tables a means of ascertaining whether they are keeping up with the reading-tendencies of their communities in book-purchase. Nearly every library classifies both its stock and its circulation, and tabulates both for the year, giving also the percentage of each class to the whole. Now suppose, for instance, that his tables show nine per cent. of history on the shelves, we will say, whereas the circulation of the same class is eleven per cent. Evidently his readers are fonder of history than he is. They read it in greater degree than he buys it. Moral: buy more history. Of course this would be the moral only where the tendency shown was to be encouraged. For instance the average percentage of fiction on the shelves in a public library is probably about thirty, whereas its circulation runs from sixty to sixty-five. We do not say here “Buy more fiction”, because fiction reading needs no encouragement, but rather judicious restraint, although I certainly am not one of those who condemn it. I wish, however, that we could divide our novels into three classes, good, indifferent and bad, and then test the public demand by the method outlined above. I am convinced that some surprises might be in store for us.

Among the subjects that differ totally in two localities, local history and biography are conspicuous. Both citizens and visitors are often interested in them. There are features of each that are of more than local interest, but the purely local side must generally be taken care of by the library or not at all. Sometimes there is a local historical society whose work, of course, the library will not try to duplicate; but there is always room for co-operation, stimulation and aid. A moribund historical body may often be galvanized into life by an interested librarian. The library may offer such a body the hospitality of its building and shelf-room for its collections with mutual benefit. But in scores of towns there is only languid interest in local history or local worthies, and the library itself must do all that is done. Material bearing on these local matters rarely consists of books. It will include local newspapers, clippings, a pamphlet or two, menus, leaflets, programs--all sorts of printed things issued by churches, schools, clubs and societies, and lost as soon as issued unless caught at once and preserved. Here is the library’s chance to possess a collection that is the only one of its kind in the world; for outside the home town no one would think of getting it together. Supplementing these printed records may be all sorts of manuscript material--letters, diaries, reminiscences or narratives written or dictated especially for the library by persons who have something locally interesting to tell. If there are maps showing the growth of the town or anything else of interest about it, the library is the place for it. The collection and arrangement need take none of the busy librarian’s time, for there is always someone in the town whose interest and labor can be enlisted. If nothing else can be done, at least a file of the local newspaper can be kept and indexed on cards, especially for names of localities and persons. Work of this kind done currently and not allowed to accumulate, does not take much time.

In these days of universal snapshots, local photographs are easy to get. The librarian may take a few herself and the library may well defray the expense. A hundred years from now, twenty views of your main street, taken at five-year intervals from the same point and showing the progressive changes, would be worth their weight in gold. Groups taken “just for fun” or for family reasons, are often worth keeping because they show the fashions of the day. These are of no particular interest to us now, but any of us would be glad to have in our libraries a collection of groups showing prevalent modes of dress in our towns during each year in the last century. Old buildings are often torn down to make room for new. These should be photographed before they go.

All material of this kind is peculiar to the library where it is preserved and helps to make that library’s collections a departure from standardization whose importance we need, perhaps, insist on no further.

It may not be possible to collect in the library all of the interesting local material in the town. Much of it may be in the hands of private owners who will not part with it. Some of it may be owned by clubs, churches or public bodies. In this case there should be an index somewhere to indicate where it is, and there is no more appropriate place for this index than the library. I have elsewhere suggested that where this privately-owned material consists of books, cards for them may be inserted also in the library’s public catalogue. But, in addition, there is no limit to the extent to which the library may go in indexing material, and this work may well enlist the interest and efforts of volunteers. There may be an index to old furniture, one of colonial houses, possibly illustrated and annotated like the fine one prepared by Mr. Godard for the Connecticut State Library, one of soldiers sent by the town to various wars, one of noteworthy storms or of very high or low temperatures, one to local organizations, past and present. The special interests of the community will guide those efforts, and here too the library of one town will differ materially from that of another.

Possibly library standardization has affected buildings more than anything else about a library. There was a time where its absence was doing a great deal of harm, especially in the case of small or medium-sized libraries put up under the Carnegie gift. Every board and every local architect had a different idea, but all seemed to agree that the building, no matter how small, was to be a monument, with a rotunda and a dome; and a good deal of waste resulted. There was a loud call for some kind of a standard plan, and small library buildings, whether for branches or independent libraries, are now a good deal alike, so much so that we can often pick out a library building by its outward guise, and that we will sometimes say of a post-office or an art gallery, “That looks exactly like a library”. This ease of identification is of course good as far as it goes; but it should not interfere with a certain degree of adaptation to local conditions. This is obvious in the case of sites offering local peculiarities. For instance, the High Bridge Branch of the New York Public Library is built on a steep hillside. The architect has taken advantage of this fact to arrange an entrance on the ground level on each of the three floors. The lowest is a service entrance, the next above leads to the children’s room and the upper-most to the adult department. Each door opens on a different street and the three facades are respectively three, two and one story high. Evidently no standard plan would have been of use here. The building, inside and out, had to be planned for this site and this alone. And although not many sites require such special treatment as this there are many that do not lend themselves to the erection of a rigid standard building. In Detroit the Carnegie Committee, I am told, were inclined to insist on a basement assembly room in branches to be built on ground where any basement at all would involve wasteful expense of construction. The proposed contents of a building should often affect its plan. Some architects have not yet learned the difference between an independent library and a branch of the same size and probable circulation. An independent library may have to house treasures, and should be of fire-proof construction. A branch rarely houses anything that can not easily be replaced and it may be waste of money to make it fire-proof.

The architectural style of a library building is often properly made to conform with some style peculiar to the locality or regarded as suitable for it. The Riverside Public Library in California is properly in the Spanish colonial or Mission style; that of New Haven, Conn., is a modified New England Colonial, the Jackson Square Branch in New York is Dutch, the Chestnut Hill Branch in Philadelphia and the Public Library in Harrisburg are of the irregular stone masonry so familiar in many parts of Pennsylvania. Some of the branches in Portland, Ore., used to be and perhaps still are of wood, built of the Douglas fir of the surrounding region.

The power of the purse is an important thing in libraries as elsewhere, and possibly we should have taken up earlier the variations of library income with locality. Not only are some communities better able to support a library than others, but of two with equal ability one will excel in interest and willingness to give. An attempt to regulate income by rule is the requirement of the Carnegie Committee that a municipality shall appropriate for the support of a library in a Carnegie Building, not less than ten per cent. of its cost. I know that the condition is primarily stated the other way around. The town is supposed to decide what it can give to support a library and then the Carnegie Committee is willing to capitalize this at ten per cent. But the library once built, its cost becomes the fixed item and the appropriation the variable one, and in many cases it has varied so far downward as to constitute a violation of the town’s library contract. Of late the Committee is making an effort to detect and tabulate these violations and to use them as a basis for withholding donations in neighborhoods where they have been frequent. A man is known by the company he keeps, and it may be just to regard with some suspicion one who lives in a neighborhood where dishonest persons congregate. Still, towns are unlike men, since their locations are fairly permanent, and it scarcely seems right to turn down Jonesville’s request for a Carnegie library because Smithtown, 35 miles away, has been unable to appropriate the ten per cent. that it promised. The Committee has also made what I regard as the mistake of finding fault with the library that suffers from an unduly reduced appropriation, instead of with the city or town government that is responsible for the reduction. To throw blame on the head of an institution that has just been robbed of its birthright would seem to be adding insult to injury. But despite the failure of this particular effort at standardization, there seems to be a feeling that library incomes should be so far standardized as to be calculable from the particular set of circumstances under which the library is working. The State of New York once attempted to regulate its library appropriation by home-use alone--so many cents per volume circulated. This was a very crude attempt, but possibly we ought to be able to say just how many dollars ought to support a library in a building of specified size with so many books, and a circulation of so many per year. This matter was the subject of earnest discussion for a year or more in the American Library Institute, but no definite conclusion was reached. It has always been my belief that some sort of formula could be deduced by mathematical methods from a large number of observed data, that is, the statistics of a series of normally-conducted libraries. Observe that this is not so much standardization as an attempt to systematize the recognition of differences.

With the average librarian the practical question is not so much what sum he ought to have to run his library, as how he can and shall run it with what he has. Limitation of income invariably limits service, and unfortunately the kind of service on which it bears most sharply is that which is the library’s specialty--namely the provision of books. The purchase of books should be the last thing in which the library ought to economize but in practice it is generally the first. The building must be cared for--lighted and heated; the public must be served. But it is easy to stop buying books, and it is in book-purchase that the library with small income differs from its neighbor with plenty of money. There are some curious exceptions where the library can not wholly control the expenditure of its money, which is regulated by the dead hand of a testator. Thus the Forbes Library of Northampton, Mass., now sensibly consolidated with the Public Library of that city, was obliged for years to expend most of its income for the purchase of books, leaving practically nothing for keeping up its building or paying its staff. It was thus rich where a library is usually poor and vice versa.

The earliest efforts at standardization among librarians were directed toward cataloguing; and probably cataloguers are our greatest sticklers for a rigid adherence to rules. Those who read Mr. E. L. Pearson’s column in The Boston Transcript realize that there are some librarians who consider this fact a legitimate target for ridicule. And it is clear, I think, that both the methods and results of cataloguing ought not to be immune from modification to adopt them to local peculiarities. Some public libraries are used so much for scholarly or antiquarian research that their catalogues need to approximate that of a university library; others are of so popular a nature that they hardly need a catalogue at all. The needs of a certain community may require the very full analysis of certain books, whereas elsewhere these could do very well with less analysis, or possibly none at all. The selection of subject headings may have to be made with due regard to the use that a catalogue is likely to receive. Books on open shelves do not need precisely the same kind of cataloguing as those to which access is not allowed. A library’s public, too, sometimes gets into habits, and if these are unobjectionable, it may be better to humor them than to try to change them. Some bodies of readers like as many printed lists as possible; others rarely use them. In some places there is great demand for a monthly bulletin; elsewhere it is little used. Any librarian who does not stand ready to adapt his catalogue in some respects to the character and needs of his readers runs the risk of limiting his field of service.

Methods of distribution may require selection or modification to suit local peculiarities. Take, for instance, the choice of a charging system. “Which is the best charging system?” is a question frequently asked of experienced librarians or library school instructors. This query is on a par with “What is the best material for clothes?”, or “Is paregoric or ipecac the best medicine?” A librarian who finds in her new job a charging-system that she dislikes, which has been used without complaint for years, should investigate before changing. Acceptance of the system may be simply due to habit. Even then, as we have seen, there may be reason for retaining it. And there is a fair chance that it may have held its ground because it is in some way better adapted to the community. Of course the adaptation may be to something else--size, for example. A rapid rise in the circulation may take a library out of the small-library class and necessitate changes not only in charging system but in many other things.

Some day an industrious student of library economy will tabulate these things that are independent of local conditions, or so nearly so that it is better to standardize them, and tell how the others should be varied with local topography, climate and population. There is no time for that in a single lecture; and if I can leave firmly fixed in your minds the idea that some things are better standardized, while others should be functions of variable local conditions, I shall have accomplished all that I set out to do.

I have already noted some of the differences between a branch library and a central library. Possibly these deserve further mention as an instance of the adaptation of methods of distribution to locality. I have frequently had occasion to deal with complaints which on investigation proved to be due to the fact that the complaining reader expected to find at a branch library all the facilities of a central library. He had lived near the central library in one city, and had moved to another where it was more convenient for him to use a branch. The first thing that strikes him is that the reference collection is inadequate. He does not realize that the central reference collection can not possibly be duplicated at branch libraries. Such complaints, however, may often give the librarian a hint. He may have equipped all his branches with the same small, good reference collection, forgetting that reference work varies with locality. Several complaints of this sort from the same branch may indicate the necessity of enlarging the reference collection there or perhaps of adopting some such scheme as we are trying in St Louis of a central reference collection of duplicates for supplying temporary branch needs.

It is not always realized that the character of the book-collection in a branch library is influenced by the mere fact that it is a branch, apart from considerations of size, circulation and character of readers. There are many standard books, in small demand, that no library should be without. One copy will serve the needs of the whole town. If there is but one library there the book must form part of that library’s collection, whereas if there are a central building and branches, it should be in the central library--not in the branches. It is for this reason that the A.L.A. catalogue should not be used for stocking a branch. I know of cases where numbers of books lie idle on the shelves of every branch in a city system, because they are not branch books at all. One or two copies at Central would have been sufficient, and to place them in branches has been waste of money.

When the New York Public Library took in a considerable number of small independent libraries as branches I had the opportunity, a year or so after the event, of ascertaining from the librarians, what difference to them and to their readers the change of status had made. They were unanimous in saying that although they, as librarians, felt less independent, the service to readers was vastly improved, owing to the fact that the library now formed part of a large system. This is always the result of any kind of union of effort, whether by consolidation or co-operation. The individual is somewhat hampered but the community is benefited. This, of course, is something of a departure from our subject.

Sometimes the chief difference between two localities is in the character and temper of the readers. The whole scheme of relations between library and public needs often to be altered in moving from one place to another. This is perhaps most noticeable in a city where there is a system of branch libraries. The assistant who has been transferred from a Jewish to a Scandinavian district and then to one occupied by well-to-do Americans will understand what I mean without further explanation.

But this difference in readers is of course much wider than mere racial difference. It may be a difference in social status. We Americans are too apt to pretend that this sort of thing does not affect a public educational institution, but it decidedly does. Some librarians make the mistake of thinking that these differences are racial also. It is a matter of common knowledge among city librarians that in a “slum” library the problem of discipline is simplicity itself compared with a library where the readers are nearly all well-to-do. This is often asserted to depend merely on the racial difference between the newly arrived immigrant--Russian Jew, Italian or Pole--and the native American. But we find that when the immigrant has learned the customs of the country and has made enough money to raise him in the social scale and enable him to move from his slum surroundings, he quickly takes his place with the well-to-do library patrons. He is more exacting and his children are harder to manage. The difference is really a social one. The immigrant is accustomed to being looked down on in his native country, to living on little and having few principles. He is humble and thankful for small favors. What he gets at the library fills him with amazement and gratitude. Mary Antin has told us all about it. But the well-to-do citizen, whether by birth or recent acquirement, realizes that the library is being supported by his taxes. He realizes it, in fact, so keenly, that he gives it somewhat undue prominence in his mind and sometimes shows this in his treatment of the library staff. Knowing that the library belongs in part to him, he may often forget that it belongs in equal degree to others. He is impatient or even resentful of rules intended to maintain equality of service. His children unconsciously absorb this same attitude. They resent control and are hard to keep in order. Much of the librarians’ time must be given to smoothing down ruffled feathers and maintaining discipline--time which ought to be given to bettering the quality of service.

Evidently these two kinds of communities must be handled differently. They call for different training on the part of the staff--a different stock of books--almost for different buildings. Then there is the indifferent community, which may be anywhere in the social scale and which requires special handling. It is even difficult to tell at times whether or not a community is really indifferent. Their reaction to the library is often a phase of the local feeling that is the subject of this lecture. It is present in some communities and absent in others, but its presence does not always mean real appreciation of library privileges, nor does its absence mean lack of such appreciation.

Not more than a few months apart, about ten years ago, two branch libraries were opened in New York. One was in Greenwich Village, a district of strong local peculiarities, which I fear it is about to lose because writers have taken to describing them in the magazines. The other was on 96th street, which was a part of New York like any other. The “Village” took the greatest interest in the library from the moment when its site was selected. The building was watched from its foundation up. Bad little boys annoyed the workmen. Local politicians and merchants congratulated the neighborhood and told us how fine they thought it was all going to be. Everybody wanted to take part in the opening exercises and nearly everybody did. There were floods of oratory and crowds of visitors. But having obtained the library and done what it considered its whole duty in the premises, Greenwich Village, not being a community of readers, proceeded to leave us to our own devices and it was only after months of up-hill work that the Branch succeeded in getting anything like a respectable circulation.