The public library
Date: 2025-07-28T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Public libraries -- Great Britain; Library extension -- Great Britain

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Title: The public library

Author: Ernest A. Baker

Release date: July 28, 2025 [eBook #76583]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Daniel O'Connor, 1922

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76583

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PUBLIC LIBRARY ***

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY.

King’s Library, British Museum.
Photo by Donald Macbeth

THE
PUBLIC LIBRARY

By ERNEST A. BAKER, D.Lit.
PUBLISHED IN LONDON
BY DANIEL O’CONNOR
90 GREAT RUSSELL STREET,
W.C.1. 1922.

France and England literally, observe, buy panic of each other; they pay, each of them, for ten thousand thousand pounds’ worth of terror, a year. Now suppose, instead of buying these ten millions’ worth of panic annually, they made up their minds to be at peace with each other, and buy ten millions’ worth of knowledge annually; and then each nation spent the ten thousand thousand pounds a year in founding royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal museums, royal gardens, and places of rest. Might it not be better somewhat for both French and English?

Ruskin: Sesame and Lilies.

CONTENTS.

Chap.

Page.

| List of Illustrations |
| Preface |
I. | Historical Sketch | 1
II. | What is a Library Service? | 32
III. | Library Extension | 96
IV. | Rural Libraries | 135
V. | A National Library Service | 169
VI. | Training in Librarianship | 211

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

King’s Library, British Museum | Frontispiece
| To face page
Lambeth Palace Library | 12
Central Public Library, Nottingham | 22
Reading Room of the British Museum | 44
Guildhall Library | 52
Reading Room, Stepney Public Library | 56
Patent Office Library | 74
Library of the Institute of Actuaries, Staple Inn Hall | 90
Library of The South-Eastern Agricultural College, Wye | 162
Reading Room of The General Library, University of London | 178
The Oratory Library | 200
University College, General Library | 214
Reading Room of The Goldsmiths’ Library, University of London | 226

PREFACE.

Our Public Libraries are entering upon the critical period of their history. They have been saved by the Act of 1919 from imminent bankruptcy; but the efforts of the Adult Education Committee to find a place for them in a national scheme of reconstruction seem to have come to naught. An Act which it was hoped might have been a new charter, and have ensured their utilization as a chief instrument of adult education and the intellectual and spiritual development of the people, did away with two heavy grievances the abolition of which was long overdue; it left a programme of constructive reforms unfulfilled.

In this brief account of our public libraries, the work they have done and the far greater work they are capable of doing, many points have been suggested that call for more comprehensive legislation. The one hope now is that the urban and rural libraries already existing or soon to be may be co-ordinated into a national system, or group of systems, worked on economic lines, and empowered to act the part they were surely destined for in a civilized world.

Sociologists, including those treating of education in the widest sense, have paid scant attention to the part played by the public library in social life, in the present or the future. Even such an inventory of our intellectual assets as the Cambridge History of English Literature has in its fifteen big volumes no reference to the effects of the Ewart Act or to the vast collections of literature amassed and thrown open to the people through its operation. This book will be a small addition to a very small group of works on various sides of a momentous subject.

The author is deeply indebted to Mr. W. C. Berwick Sayers, Chief Librarian, Croydon Public Libraries, for his kindness in reading the proofs and for many useful suggestions, and to his daughter, Miss Ruth Baker, for indexing the book.

E. A. B.

I.
HISTORICAL SKETCH.

In the period of reconstruction after Waterloo, there was, among other analogies with the present time, a keen popular desire for education and opportunities for self-culture. It met with both encouragement and discouragement from the governing classes, more of the latter than the former, much more of direct opposition than dare show its head to-day. The state of the universities and the public schools had been since the middle of the last century more backward than ever before in history. Both universities still shut their doors to Dissenters. They had no sympathy with and probably no consciousness of the needs of the masses for self-improvement. In spite of earnest writers on education, and manifold discussions of Rousseau’s doctrines, even in the ingratiating form of fiction, nothing could stir the sullen apathy of the ruling powers; and in educational machinery and practice England lagged far behind both Germany and France. Samuel Whitbread introduced an Education Bill in 1807 which was rejected by the Lords. After his death, Brougham became leader of the group of educationists in the House of Commons, and in 1816 secured the appointment of a Select Committee to inquire into the education of the lower orders of the metropolis. The report of this committee furnished material for two Bills. The first, for the reform of educational charities, passed in 1818, after its best features had been pruned away by the Government; but the Education Bill of 1820, which would have extended to England the excellent parish school system of Scotland, was thrown out. Not until 1833 was the work already being performed by voluntary agencies approved, by the grant of an annual sum of £20,000 to assist in the erection of school buildings. Not until 1839 was there any recognition of the national responsibility for primary education. In that year, a committee of the Privy Council was appointed to superintend the application of grants for educational purposes. This was the forerunner of the Education Department to be established in 1856. Roebuck in 1833 had failed to carry a resolution in the Commons in favour of universal compulsory education. On the eve of the Education Act of 1870, it was computed that there were nearly as many children without any kind of schooling as there were attending all the state-aided and private schools put together. So slowly had education advanced.

But, whilst Parliament was engaged in repressing or ignoring educational demands, or debating whether it was wise or safe that the commonalty should be educated at all, the people, headed by those who had faith in an educated nation, were establishing the requisite machinery for themselves. There had been elementary schools of a sort in existence in most parts of the country for nearly a century. The academies set up by the Dissenters after the Toleration Act, the charity schools of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, the schools founded by the Methodists and the Society of Friends, provided a general education based primarily on the principle of moral and religious instruction. Many of these schools catered for grown-up persons as well as children; the Sunday Schools, for instance, which sprang up after 1780, taught reading and sometimes writing to the illiterate of all ages. There were also private schools in the towns and many villages where the rudiments were imparted, unsatisfactorily, for a few pence. These organized efforts were mainly the work of middle-class evangelicals and philanthropists intent on the moral and religious improvement of the people. But new motives came into play in the new century, and the people themselves began to take an active part in the movement, with far-reaching results. Political agitation might be repressed, but an intellectual awakening could not be extinguished. Knowledge was demanded for its own sake; it was demanded also for economic reasons. The artisan who saw wonderful mechanical inventions enabling him to perform his operations with undreamt ease and efficiency, or depriving him of his job, was roused to an intense interest in science and a desperate desire to fit himself for a place in the new industrial order. The country was flocking into the towns; the major part of the population was becoming industrial. Education was perceived to be a necessity of life, and a necessity that concerned, not merely the rising generation, but even more momentously the adult workman. A passionate demand for education was faced with a sporadic supply, and it was a demand for education in other directions than had been contemplated by the promoters of charity schools and Dissenting academies.

Whitbread and Brougham, Bentham, Place, and Mill encouraged and directed these aspirations. Philosophic Radicalism affirmed the right of every citizen to an elementary education, which the State was in duty bound to provide. Further, such education must be unsectarian; and here were the beginnings of the age-long strife between the advocates of secular education and the defenders of voluntary schools, which were now being planted all over the country by the National Society and the British and Foreign Society. Throughout the nineteenth century the history of education was chequered by these conflicts over the rights and wrongs of religious teaching. Another thing that hampered progress was the temptation to provide schooling on the cheap, by the monitorial system and other contrivances, which were maintained for reasons of economy long after they had been discredited. We shall find this British failing again and again crippling the finest schemes, and entailing costs in the long run incalculably greater than the saving at the outset. It is a form of economy that is not economic.

How deep and sincere was the working man’s desire for enlightenment is illustrated most tellingly by the co-operative institutions which it now brought into being in almost every industrial centre. The Mechanics’ Institutes were not gifts from a railway company or a large firm to its employees, but the creation of the operatives themselves, established and kept up mostly from their own unaided resources. Apart from the schools and classes for children and adults carried on by the religious bodies in the eighteenth century, these Mechanics’ Institutes, with their lectures, classes, study-circles, debating societies, libraries, and other educational activities, were the real beginnings of adult education in this country. They were the immediate forerunners of the municipal library, and, at a further remove, of the modern technical college and the polytechnic. Thus adult education begins in a spontaneous movement, ready for large self-sacrifices to achieve its practical ideals; and, at the outset, the library is recognised as an integral part of its scheme. The great mistake in the Public Library Acts, we shall find, was that they failed to build on the combination of reciprocal activities in this promising model, and thus divorced the library from the other departments of adult education. Conversely, the weakness of many admirable schemes for adult education has been neglect or omission of the library as an essential part. Once the separation had taken effect, it became very difficult to establish relations again. Librarians have since learned the impossibility of making one part of the social machine work properly in detachment from the rest. The Mechanics’ Institutes were not troubled with unprepared and indifferent readers. They led their horses to the stream and had no difficulty in making them drink. The troughs provided by their municipal successors were larger and handsomer, but the excellent supply of water was too often unappreciated.

Ewart and his coadjutors in 1850 concentrated on the single object, libraries; and libraries they got, their bare object—bare at first in the literal sense of the word, till they were later on allowed to spend money in furnishing them with books. As a consequence of this policy, libraries and art galleries, schools, technical education, university extension, tutorial and continuation classes, have carried on their work on separate lines, though labouring for identical ends, and though they might have worked in unison much more effectively and economically. The problem now is to bring them into harmony again. Perhaps the time was not ripe for such a comprehensive alliance. Perhaps, also, had such an idea been realized it would have had to undergo the blighting influence of the examination system and payment by results. On the other hand, a popular institution might have contained the antidote to those delusions. At all events, it is a matter for lasting regret that a great opportunity was missed. Nationalized Mechanics’ Institutes, cured of the imperfections due to their dependence on the voluntary support of the unwealthy, with their numerous activities developed, their technical and utilitarian classes supplemented by humanist, non-vocational teaching, and the recreative side fully expanded, would have been an invaluable instrument for the great social effort which was then and is now required. And the initiative would have come from below, not from above; the danger of bureaucratic and academic projects for other people’s welfare would have been avoided. A central part of this many-sided organism would have been the library, a part ministering directly to every other part. Such a conception is still useful. In town life the different agencies may have to work side by side, though there need not be dense partitions between. In the villages, where there are no museums or picture-galleries, and the club is too often only a well-meaning but aimless substitute for the public-house, institutes of such a composite and elastic type are obviously the very thing required.

The first of these promising institutions came into existence in 1823. George Birkbeck had given free courses of lectures to artisans at the Andersonian Institution in Glasgow, where, after his removal to London, there had been a schism. The seceding members set up for themselves the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institution, and elected Birkbeck their first president. Next year, the London Mechanics’ Institution, now Birkbeck College, was started in emulation, speedily enrolling some 13,000 working men as members. That same year saw the establishment of an institute at Manchester, which had had a Literary and Philosophical Society since 1781, an offshoot of this, the College of Arts and Sciences, being a sort of prototype of the new working men’s institution. Huddersfield, Leeds, and other industrial towns followed suit next year; and by 1837 the West Riding had so many that a union of mechanics’ and similar institutions was formed, to be followed in 1839 by a Metropolitan Association, and by a Lancashire and Cheshire Union in 1847. “In 1851 it was estimated that there were 610 institutes in England with a membership of over 600,000, that the number of lectures delivered in 1850 was 3,054, and that the number of students attending classes was 16,029.”[1] In 1849, four hundred Mechanics’ Institutes had between three and four hundred thousand volumes, with a circulation of more than a million.

In his Practical Observations upon the Education of the People, Brougham, one of the four trustees of the London institution, announced the programme of what Peacock in Crotchet Castle nicknamed the “Steam Intellect Society.” Lectures and conversation classes, on the lines of a modern tutorial class, libraries and book-clubs, were to be provided; and, as a more extended enterprise, elementary primers and other cheap works on science and the useful arts were to be published for the benefit of the working classes. Brougham was the first president of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded in 1827 to give effect to this second part of the scheme. Dr. Folliott tells the company at Crotchet Castle how his house was nearly burned down by his cook taking it into her head to study hydrostatics, in a sixpenny tract published by the Steam Intellect Society, and reading what he calls “the rubbish” in bed. Other persons, besides Peacock, were disturbed by this portentous “march of intellect.” The Mechanics’ Institutes spread to all parts of England and Scotland, but they failed, from lack of means, to find the qualified lecturers and experienced teachers that their well-meaning but ambitious aims required. Good teachers were very scarce in those days. It was more than combinations of the lower middle classes unaided by public funds could be expected to achieve. When, in the course of two decades, the first enthusiasm faded, the buildings fell more and more into the hands of those who could afford to maintain them as comfortable lounges and literary clubs. This educational failure and the secular nature of the education that they sought made them unsatisfactory in the eyes of the Christian Socialist group, who in 1854 founded what they considered a better type of mechanics’ institute in the Working Men’s College. But the Mechanics’ Institutes, though most of them were transformed or absorbed into a different kind of institute, did not cease to exist; a number have survived to this day or the eve of it, and some have carried on work of priceless importance, side by side with the public libraries, which were now about to arise.

To say that there were no free libraries for the people before 1850 is practically though not literally true. Those interested in the history of libraries can point to many older examples, certain of which were open to all comers. Long before the nineteenth century idealists schemed to provide every reader in the nation with access to books, as for instance the Scottish grammarian James Kirkwood, author of a pamphlet in 1699 entitled “An Overture for Founding and Maintaining of Bibliothecks in every Paroch throughout the Kingdom,” and of a project for erecting a library in every presbytery or at least county in the Highlands. The project was approved by the General Assembly, but had no great results. In the Middle Ages, many of the monastic libraries were nominally open to the public; but as a reading public hardly existed the fact does not amount to much. Nor is it of more than antiquarian interest whether London had a public library as far back as the early fifteenth century, the joint foundation of Sir Richard Whittington and William Bury. Readers did exist at the beginning of the next century, wherefore the appearance of a city library here and there is of more significance. Norwich claims to have the oldest of these that has never perished, founded in 1608 and preserved in the public library there to-day. The library founded at Bristol in 1615 came under the operation of the Public Library Acts when these were adopted by that city in 1876. The venerable Chetham Library at Manchester dates from 1654, when the books were placed in the quarters they still occupy in the college built in 1421. The number of volumes is vastly greater, but the Chetham Library has not changed in character or in the atmosphere of a still remoter antiquity that it had at its beginning. Dr. Bray and his associates established 78 parochial libraries and 35 lending libraries between 1704 and 1807, which were meant for the use of poor clergymen. He also secured an Act “For the Better Preservation of Parochial Libraries;” but this in time became a dead letter. The British Museum was established by Act of Parliament in 1753, opened to the public in 1759, and gradually absorbed various royal and other collections, forming a great storehouse of books for scholars and other literary workers. London, nearly a century later, when the public library agitation was in progress, had four public or semi-public libraries, those at Sion College and Lambeth Palace, and Dr. Williams’s and Archbishop Tenison’s libraries. In a number of large towns, readers of the better class enjoyed the advantages of good reference and lending libraries belonging to the Literary and Scientific Institutions.[2] The library work of the Mechanics’ Institutes has already been described. But the libraries of various kinds that were in existence, most of them subscription libraries or otherwise restricted to a narrow class of users, served only to whet the appetite of the ardent seeker after knowledge, and to provide the apostle of popular culture with an illustration of the possible.

Photo by Langley & Sons.
Lambeth Palace Library.

The campaign which led to the Public Library Acts of 1850 and 1853 opened in 1844, when Richard Cobden presided at a public meeting in Manchester to consider the means of improving popular taste. Joseph Brotherton, the member for Salford, laid the proposals carried at this meeting before the influential William Ewart, member for the Dumfries Burghs, a rich, well-educated, much-travelled person, who was an old parliamentary hand, with a general desire to see his country provided with library facilities at least equal to those which he had found on the Continent. Brotherton, a Liberal of the Manchester school and a strict Nonconformist, had a profound belief in an educated people, and a special confidence in the Lancashire operative; he was returned again and again for Salford, holding the seat continuously 1832-57. These two public men found an energetic and well-informed coadjutor in Edward Edwards, a supernumerary assistant in the British Museum, who had cut a prominent figure in the parliamentary inquiry into the administration of that library, writing pamphlets and appearing as an expert witness before the second Select Committee in 1836, after forcing himself into notice by his severe handling of the evidence laid before the committee of 1835. His wide knowledge of libraries at home and abroad and his thorough acquaintance with the methods of the British Museum, particularly on their defective side, together with the freedom and far-sightedness of his criticisms and suggestions for reform, impressed the committee, and led, rather surprisingly, to his being given his post in the Museum in 1839. Later, his independent attitude led to friction with his chief Panizzi, and he left abruptly in 1850.

Edwards was broad-minded enough not to pin his faith on libraries alone as an engine of intellectual progress; he took part as a pamphleteer in the warfare over London University in 1836, persistently maintained that libraries and schools were complementary to each other, and pointed out that libraries should fulfil a very definite function in promoting the intellectual life of all classes. His radical views on the extension of hours and the opening of the reading room in the evening, on branch libraries for the utilization of duplicate books, on improved catalogues, the better supply of foreign literature and materials for research, and on numerous points of administration at the British Museum, have been fulfilled in large part since his time; yet some still remain a counsel of perfection.

His aid was enlisted by Ewart and Brotherton after he had published some long articles, packed with statistics, on the inadequacy and inaccessibility of the library resources of Great Britain and Ireland, and on the liberal provision enjoyed on the Continent, which had a great deal to do with making converts and securing votes when public library legislation was before Parliament. Edwards probably exaggerated his case, and painted too glowing a picture of the wealthy Continental libraries, at any rate in the freedom of access said to be enjoyed by every citizen. But his instances of British scholars put to undue expense and compelled to live abroad in order to have libraries of historical material at hand were relevant enough. Gibbon complained that he had the greatest difficulty in consulting books and had to obtain them from abroad at a heavy expense; he found himself better provided when living in Switzerland or France than in his own country. Buckle, later on, and, still later, Lecky and Acton had to seek their material in Continental libraries. One telling point Edwards made, that England was unrivalled in its private collections, though so poor in those open to the public—a state of things by no means wholly remedied yet.

Meanwhile, Ewart and Brotherton having put their heads together, a piece of legislation was secured that would and did ensure the establishment of a certain number of public libraries, rate-aided if not entirely rate-supported. This was the Act of 1845 for “Encouraging the Establishment of Museums in Large Towns,” first-fruits of the proposals passed by the Manchester meeting of the previous year. It authorized the levy of a halfpenny rate, in towns of not less than 10,000 inhabitants, for the erection of museums of science and art; it did not allow public funds to be used for purchasing books or even exhibits; and it was supposed that salaries and other maintenance charges would be defrayed out of the penny-fees for admission. Timid and inadequate as such measures were, the Act was followed at once by the opening of museums at Warrington, Salford, Canterbury, Liverpool, Leicester, Dover, and Sunderland, the first three towns forming collections of books as well. In 1848 Warrington provided the first free reference library under the Act, and also a lending library for the use of subscribers. Brotherton, with the aid of a local benefactor, saw to it that a library and museum were opened at Salford in 1850. Thus, although looking back we may think it strange that museums should be started before libraries, they did prove a stepping-stone to the greater necessity.

Ewart now applied himself to inducing the House of Commons to appoint a Select Committee on the question of public libraries, and availed himself of the services of Edwards in preparing evidence and framing proposals. Edwards was the chief witness before the first Committee appointed, in 1849, and a special motion of thanks for his services was appended to their Report. He gave an account of the resources, conditions, and relative accessibility to the public of 35 British libraries, the majority of which were university or college foundations and only two, the Warrington and Chetham libraries, public in a true sense; he drew an elaborate comparison with 383 libraries of not less than 10,000 volumes apiece which, he affirmed, were open to every one on the Continent, and with about a hundred in the United States. In his examination by the Committee, he pleaded for grants from the Privy Council to supplement local contributions, as were already being given for elementary education; the inspection of libraries by the Committee of Council on Education, and the institution of a Ministry of Public Instruction charged with the control of public education and the supervision of public libraries; the establishment, not as a tax on publishers but at the national expense, of public depositories for all books published in the United Kingdom; the international exchange of books for the encouragement of libraries. Edwards urged other advanced ideas, some of which, such as the provision of a different class of public libraries for country parishes, have generations later begun to be put into actuality. A second Select Committee was appointed early next year to report on the best means of extending the establishment of free public libraries, and Edwards was again in request as a witness. An article of his in the British Quarterly for Feb., 1850, had no doubt considerable influence on the passage of the Public Libraries Act on March 13th, in spite of damaging criticisms of his statistics.

The Ewart Act, as it is often called, “for Enabling Town Councils to Establish Public Libraries and Museums,” was purely permissive. A poll of burgesses was required before the Act could be put in force, and a two-thirds majority was prescribed. The promoters believed that if buildings were put up, suitable contents would be forthcoming from local benefactors. Accordingly, no power was granted to buy books. The rate levied must not exceed a halfpenny, the same as had been allowed by the Museums Act, of which this was merely an extension. The debate on the second reading is remarkably interesting. The arguments of Ewart, Brotherton, the father of Labouchere, and even John Bright, were essentially utilitarian. “Nothing,” Bright was sure, “would tend more to the preservation of order than the diffusion of the greatest amount of intelligence, and the prevalence of the most complete and open discussion, amongst all classes.” Brotherton said, “Here were £2,000,000 a year paid for the punishment of crime, yet honourable gentlemen objected to tax themselves a halfpenny in the pound for the prevention of crime. In his opinion it was of little use to teach people to read unless you afterwards provided them with books to which they might apply the faculty they had so acquired.... He was satisfied that expenditure upon this object would be productive not only of immense moral good but of very material public economy in the long run.” The adverse arguments were likewise utilitarian and, as a rule, economic in the purely mercenary sense. Roundell Palmer, afterwards Earl of Selborne, “was most truly desirous to see learning extended,” but protested against compulsory rating, which he loftily said would put a positive check on the “voluntary self-supporting desire for knowledge which at present existed amongst the people.” One obstructor, who “did not like reading at all, and hated it when at Oxford,” said, “However excellent food for the mind might be, food for the body was what was now most wanted for the people;” and that he would have been “much more ready to support the honourable gentleman if he had tried to encourage national industry by keeping out the foreigner.” Summed up, the objections were four: that increased taxation was undesirable; that it was unjust if not unconstitutional to make non-users pay for the upkeep of the new institution; that too much knowledge was a dangerous thing; that there were ulterior objects in the project, and that libraries might become centres of political agitation, awake feelings of discontent, and encourage economic unrest. The same arguments, observe, were heard in the brief debates accorded to the abortive amending Bills in the decade before the last Public Libraries Act. Yet the Ewart Act, at this interval of time, looks a timid, experimental, and by no means far-sighted enactment, defended against excesses by clauses that could scarce fail to make the very existence of the institutions it brought forth precarious and unfruitful. Such clauses could hardly have been accepted had not the framers of the Bill contemplated further legislation at an early date, and concentrated their efforts on making a small but irrevocable beginning.

The operation of Ewart’s Act was extended to Ireland and Scotland in 1853, and the same year the Act was amended with respect to Scotland, raising the rate limitation to one penny. Ewart brought in a Bill in 1854 for raising the rate limit in England and Wales to the same figure, and authorizing expenditure of the rate income on books. By this time thirteen towns had adopted the Act. As the Government opposed the Bill, it was dropped after the second reading; but next year he brought in a new Bill, which, after a keen debate on the proposal to provide newspapers out of the rates, passed with little demur. The rate limit was now one penny, and places of 5,000 inhabitants or more were entitled to the benefits of the Act; clauses dealing with borrowing powers, the acquisition of sites, the mode of adoption by a poll of ratepayers, and the special circumstances of the City of London, were included. There were amending Acts in 1866 and later years, but this remained the principal statute for England and Wales till 1892.

The first town to set up a municipal reference and lending library under the Act of 1850 was Manchester. A subscription reaching £12,823, of which £800 was collected by a working men’s committee, was raised; the Act was adopted by an enormous majority of ratepayers; Edward Edwards was appointed librarian, and books were acquired in readiness out of the voluntary fund. The original building in Campfield was opened on September 2nd, 1852, with great ceremony, Dickens, Thackeray, Lytton, and Monckton Milnes being among the statesmen and other personages on the platform. Dickens described the Manchester undertaking as “a great free school bent on carrying instruction to the poorest hearths.” Thackeray improved upon Hogarth’s contrast of the wicked mechanic reading Moll Flanders and the good mechanic reading the story of the apprentice who became Lord Mayor, by picturing the Lancashire mechanic reading Carlyle, Dickens, and Bulwer. John Bright looked forward to when the farmer and country labourer would have a library service. Norwich and Bolton were actually before Manchester in adopting the Act, Oxford and Winchester were almost as prompt. Liverpool obtained a special Act in 1852 to raise a penny rate for a library and museum. Brighton had got a local Act in 1850, but was late in establishing its library. Sheffield and Exeter refused at first to adopt the Act, but reversed their decision in 1853 and 1870 respectively. Blackburn, Cambridge, and Ipswich voted for libraries in 1853; Maidstone, Kidderminster, and Hereford, in 1855. Airdrie was the first town in Scotland, and Cork the first in Ireland to adopt the Acts pertaining to those countries. Birkenhead, Leamington, and two parishes in Westminster adopted the Acts in 1856, Walsall, and Lichfield in 1857, Canterbury in 1858. In London progress was slow and chequered. Adverse polls were recorded in the City of London, Islington, Paddington, Marylebone, St. Pancras, and Camberwell, though several wiped out the stigma later; Hackney, Whitechapel, Putney, Cheltenham, Bath, Hull, and other places were likewise recalcitrant; but Cardiff, after voting down the proposal by a majority of one in 1860, adopted the Acts in 1862. Leicester, Burslem, Warwick, Oldham, Dundee, Paisley, Nottingham, Coventry, Leeds, Doncaster, and Wolverhampton, were among the forty-six places that had accepted public library legislation by 1868, the year taken in a parliamentary report dated April 11th, 1870, from which it appears that fifty-two libraries had been established, nearly half a million books acquired, and an annual issue of 3,400,000 attained. This was the year of the Elementary Education Act, which was to do away with the enormous amount of sheer illiteracy that still prevailed, and to raise up potential readers in their millions, though it was yet too early to ask for that intimate co-operation between schools and libraries which would have taught the people not only to read but also how and what to read, and tended to make the results of even a brief elementary education deep and permanent.

Central Public Library, Nottingham.

The library movement made most headway in the northern counties and the midlands; the southern towns were slow in coming in. Scotland also was late in adopting the Acts—a curious fact, probably due to the way Scotland is used to the private endowment of public foundations. The Scots are frugal and saving; but no people are so generous in works for the common weal. Hence it is not difficult to understand the reluctance of Glasgow to saddle itself with a library rate, when it already had its Baillie’s Institution and Stirling’s Library, and the Mitchell Library was coming—it actually came in 1877. Edinburgh also rejected the Acts, obviously on similar grounds, until in 1886 an offer of £50,000 from Andrew Carnegie induced the city to change its mind, at first however, levying only a halfpenny rate. Ireland was very much behindhand.

The following table shows the relative rate of growth, down to 1909, of public libraries established under the Acts; it does not include a number provided by voluntary agencies or under special legislation.[3]

| England. | Wales. | Scotland | Ireland. | Totals.
1840-1849 | 1 | — | — | — | 1
1850-1859 | 18 | — | 1 | 1 | 20
1860-1869 | 12 | 1 | 1 | — | 14
1870-1879 | 38 | 5 | 5 | — | 48
1880-1889 | 51 | 5 | 9 | 5 | 70
1890-1899 | 121 | 17 | 15 | 8 | 161
1900-1909 | 125 | 29 | 42 | 12 | 208
—————————————————————————————————————
| 366 | 57 | 73 | 26 | 522
—————————————————————————————————————

Accelerated growth from the seventies onwards was due to various causes, first and foremost the general advance in education, especially when the effects of Forster’s Act of 1870 began to tell. Successive amending enactments, down to the consolidating Act of 1892, each removed some obstacle. Thus the resistance of London ratepayers was conciliated by an Act in 1877 permitting them to vote a lower limit than one penny. More libraries were opened as a consequence, but the handicap of an exiguous income militated against their welfare. Many gifts of funds, buildings, or special collections of books were received from time to time, often with a proviso that the municipality should build and maintain a library. The old objection to the public endowment of libraries, that it would discourage private bounty, was thus shown to be against experience as it was against reason; though British generosity in this respect cannot stand comparison with that of rich Americans. It was calculated by an English librarian, Thomas Formby, in 1889, that in the last thirty-five years British libraries had received a million pounds from private sources, and American libraries six times as much.

A stimulus of far-reaching effect came into operation towards the close of the century, when Andrew Carnegie began to make systematic contributions, first to Scottish and then to other British municipalities, for the establishment and extension of public libraries. The benefactions of an English philanthropist Passmore Edwards, though more modest in amount, had relatively a more salutary result, because they were more carefully adjusted to local needs. The policy of Mr. Carnegie was, however, very sagacious. As a rule, he gave money for buildings and fixtures alone, on the understanding that the maximum rate allowable should be raised. The expectation was that, once started, the library enterprise was bound to go on, and that with a building free from debt it was bound to thrive. The sequels were not always so satisfactory. Many places were tempted by the free gift to build more expensive premises than they had the wherewithal to maintain efficiently. Some embarked on ambitious schemes that left them with a heavy burden of debt. Large buildings meant, of course, large staffs and heavy establishment charges; but the income was strictly limited. Hence many libraries were unable to pay their way, and at the same time afford a proper service of books. There was a judicious clause in the Scottish Act which ought to have been inserted in all, by which authorities were forbidden to raise a loan of more than twenty times one quarter of the annual rate income.

The insufficiency of the penny rate was early and acutely realized. It weighed heaviest on places with small incomes. The larger the establishment to be kept up, the smaller the ratio of establishment expenses to maintenance. The limitation had been fixed so low that most towns with a population between 50,000 and 100,000 had to pursue a hand-to-mouth policy, and content themselves with spending on books such sums as happened to remain over when all fixed charges had been defrayed. The main reason for the library books, had to be neglected for the sake of the building, the mere case that held the books. The inadequate staff that looked after both cost still more, yet were overworked and underpaid. Larger towns were better off, not merely through being able to apportion expenses more economically, but also because they had more chances of getting legislative concessions. Furthermore, the civic spirit is usually stronger in big cities: it is one of the reasons why they are big cities. There, in the great industrial centres, the old Mechanics’ Institutes were born. They have been strongholds of educational endeavour; they were the pioneers of the library movement. Thus it is not surprising to find Wolverhampton, Swansea, Warrington, Sheffield, Manchester, Salford, Birmingham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Oldham, St. Helens, Walsall, Preston, Wigan, Sunderland, and several smaller industrial towns obtaining increased rating powers and widening their library provision. Many other towns would gladly have sought the same privileges, but for the cost of promoting a special Act.

For many years before the great war it was borne in more and more to the minds of friends of the movement that not all was well with public libraries, and a series of amending Bills to do away with the obsolete restriction of income and introduce various constructive reforms were brought into Parliament and steadily blocked. The various Acts for England and Wales had been consolidated in the Public Libraries Act of 1892. This harmonized several conflicting enactments, laid it down that adoption of the Acts should be by resolution of the local authority, except in London, and allowed neighbouring districts to combine for library purposes. It left the rate limitation where it was. Some infinitesimal relief came from the Museums and Gymnasiums Act of 1891, whereby the upkeep of museums could be charged to a special museum rate. The Local Government Act of 1894, on the other hand, introduced some complications into library law, and made it even more impossible than heretofore for rural districts to come under the Acts. Amending Acts for Scotland and Ireland passed that year.

In certain points, the Scottish Acts, which had been consolidated in 1887, had advantages over the English. The precaution against extravagant building loans has been mentioned already. Further, committees must contain not less than ten and not more than twenty members, half the number being appointed from the local magistrates or councillors and half from other householders. Many if not most English authorities draw their committees exclusively from their own body. The disadvantages are twofold. The ordinary borough councillor is an overworked person, attending many committees, among which the libraries committee rarely, in municipal politics, counts as the most important. He is apt to regard his duties on that committee in a perfunctory way. The ordinary member of a council, moreover, is elected oftener than not for very different objects from the welfare of a public library, it may be simply to keep down the rates; and his qualifications for these objects may very well tend to disqualify him for enlightened service on the governing body of a public library. A book sub-committee with hardly a single member that reads, has, unfortunately, been no rarity under the conditions that still prevail, with a chairman standing for an obscurantist and reactionary policy towards this despised department of the municipal entity. Hence the peculiar desirability of having outsiders with liberal views, a liberal education, and some familiarity with books and libraries, added to the representatives of the council. This question will arise again when the possibilities of a new regime come in for discussion.

From time to time it was suggested by critics and would-be reformers that public libraries ought not to remain a series of isolated institutions, able to co-operate neither with each other nor with the schools and other intellectual activities. Edward Edwards and also his biographer Thomas Greenwood, one of the wisest and most disinterested friends the library movement has ever had, looked forward to the co-ordination of all these departments of the body politic as a body intellectual under the supervision of a Government minister. The same reform was mooted by J. J. Ogle, a public librarian and a secretary of education, who, in The Free Library (1897), easily disposed of the argument that State inspection and State grants would mean uniformity of method. In 1904 the Library Association at their annual conference, after several sessions had been devoted to considering the pros and cons, passed a strong resolution affirming “That the public library should be recognized as forming part of the national educational machinery.”

Thus the ideas of close interaction promoted by central control and of intimate correlation of libraries and the other instruments of public education had been well-debated, long before they were taken over, along with the more pressing question of the rate limit, as obvious items for the agenda of the Adult Education Committee, which was appointed in July 1917 as a sub-committee of the Reconstruction Committee, to be merged presently in the Ministry of Reconstruction. How this Committee handled the constructive proposals will be shown later on. Two of the reforms they recommended were embodied in a Government Bill, which became law on December 23rd, 1921. Both of these were, in essence if not in form, the abolition of illogical and obsolete disabilities, inherited from the early days of the Ewart Acts. The first grievance to be removed was the rate limit. When even the advocates of the public library thought it would be mainly the working classes that would use it, there was some reason for keeping down the cost, economic reasons as well as reasons of policy. When libraries had been in existence for more than half a century, and every class in the community used them without distinction, it was monstrous that a municipality owning a library should be debarred from keeping its own property up to the mark if it was willing to pay the bill. Bankruptcy was already threatening many library authorities even before the war; before the end of it, some were being shut up, numerous others were cutting down their services to the vanishing point. Councils were forbidden by law to pay the ordinary war bonus to their library staffs, who had before these changes been the worst-paid of their employees. It was a question of life or death. Relief must come at once, or half the libraries in the country would cease to exist. Relief was vouchsafed, and with it a second restriction was ended, that which debarred County Councils from setting up a library service for the villages. Systems of rural libraries were already springing up through the monetary grants of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and were being carried on, legally or illegally it was doubtful which, by the Education Committees. To do something to stimulate an intelligent social life on the land was indispensable, if the dreams of recolonizing Britain and reviving agriculture were to come to anything.

The Bill passed, without an echo of the strenuous opposition that had greeted its many predecessors, which had made much smaller demands on the public purse. It removed two crippling disabilities, but the constructive proposals of the Adult Education Committee it did not touch. Two most formidable obstructions had been cleared away: the forward leap was yet to take. Was it to be deferred indefinitely, or might the Act be accepted as prelude to a comprehensive library charter, to be prepared as soon as the Committee’s numerous recommendations could be reduced to legislative form?

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Adult Education Committee. Final Report, p. 14.

[2] e.g. That at Edinburgh (dating from 1725), London (1749), Liverpool (1758), Manchester (1781), the Newcastle “Lit. & Phil” (1793).

[3] Professor W. S. B. Adams. Report on Library Provision and Policy (Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1915).

II
WHAT IS A LIBRARY SERVICE?

There is an enormous difference between the library service enjoyed in the more progressive municipalities, where public opinion has been properly educated and the authorities mean to do their best, whatever the financial impediments, and have a clear conception of what is the best, and the perfunctory service in places where the library is an unwelcome addition to the municipal family, which cannot be got rid of but must be prevented from becoming a burden on the rates. The most progressive of librarians and library committee-men would freely admit that no public library in this country is doing all that it might for the community, or anything like what it will do when the library habit has been instilled into the average citizen. The most progressive are but leading the way; the goal is still in the future. Accordingly, an account of the best work now being done by the best libraries will serve two purposes: it will show the possibilities that are actually being attained; it will help the reader to build up mentally a complete type of what a library service might be.

Lending Libraries.

“The jug and bottle department,” as it has been cynically called by illiberal critics, is the oldest and, in a sense, the fundamental part of a public library service. There were lending libraries before 1850, but none that could be regarded as its prototype. It was a consequence of the new democratic idea. In earlier times a library simply provided books to be read on the spot. Circulating libraries, such as began to be common in the eighteenth century, were shops that lent out books, chiefly light literature, to subscribers of the leisured classes. The literary and scientific institutions allowed their books to be borrowed, without troubling to divide their stock into distinct collections, or worrying themselves with the standing puzzle of the modern librarian, should this book, which is neither a novel nor an encyclopædia, go on the lending or the reference shelves?

The strongest argument for rate-supported libraries was that the studious person who could not afford to buy books, or the no less meritorious person who wished to enjoy good literature in an armchair but could not pay a subscription, should be enabled to read at home. Access to libraries was an excellent thing, and every seeker after knowledge was entitled thereto, but a supply of books in the home was a greater boon, and one that would have a far deeper effect on the mental life of the nation. Even a Freeman could not work in a reference library, but had to borrow—or buy. Circumstances of a different kind make the library of the British Museum, and even the local reading room inaccessible, or at any rate insufficient, to most busy people. The existence of the London Library—the finest lending library in the world—is proof enough of the most serious kind of reader’s need for a home supply of books.

Catering for all classes, for all ages, and for users having all sorts of motives for reading, the municipal lending library will not admit any petty or restricted purpose to limit the scope of its contents. Costly books, if it acquires such by purchase or gift, and works of the atlas or dictionary type, will for different but equally obvious reasons go into the reference department, however small that may happen to be. Very cheap books, with certain exceptions, it will not supply. College text-books may be refused, on the score that students should have them for their own, unless there are circumstances that justify a different course. Some books may be rejected for reasons of public morality, though a narrow-minded puritanism must not be tolerated. Otherwise, the lending library should develop on the most catholic lines.

The light literature that was the staple of the old-fashioned circulating library will, with the rubbish sternly and drastically sifted out, form a considerable proportion of the stock-in-trade. In the minds of some short-sighted people, indeed, the public library is identified with over-thumbed and dog-eared novels, and supposed to be a purveyor chiefly of books for private amusement at the public expense. The statistics that seem to authorize such a view are misunderstood. Half-a-dozen novels usually take less time to read than does a single substantial work of science, history, or even the other kinds of belles-lettres; and make six times as much show in the record of issues. If allowance be made for this obvious fact, study of the figures will usually reveal that a greater amount of reading having a serious value is going on than of reading for mere pastime. One ought to apply a different kind of calculus; but till a sort of mental foot-pound, a unit of energy expended effectively in self-development, has been fixed, we can merely ask that statistics should be interpreted with a due consciousness of what humane literature is, and with common sense. Over-thumbed novels are no argument against public libraries, but a very strong argument for making sure that the supply of fiction is of the best, and for doubling, quadrupling, and multiplying further the supply of first-rate novels. If there are always enough of these to go round, critics on the one hand and grumblers on the other may be disregarded.

The workshop theory, which is on the face of it a sound guide for the development of the reference library, though by no means a complete statement of its functions, applies also to the lending department. On the one hand, this should minister to our recreations and our æsthetic and spiritual needs; it will be well-stocked with excellent novels, the best poetry, drama, essays, and humane literature in general. On the other hand, it will cater for the student and serious reader in all branches of knowledge, and will provide all the books it can of general use for industrial and amateur craftsmen, shopkeepers and other business people, and the professional classes. The librarian and the book-selecting committee will have a keen eye for the needs of teachers, journalists, ministers of religion, and all who are in any way intellectual leaders. One healthy consequence of the workshop theory is the rule that a library must never be cumbered with dead stock. Books that have been superseded or have outlived their interest must be ruthlessly discarded. The workshop library has no room for any but live books. Such from the first have been the aims of the great bulk of our public libraries, with, naturally, some laxity here and there, and in rarer instances too much strictness in regard to education and mental improvement or the cult of mere utilitarian efficiency.

There are between five and six hundred library buildings under the Public Library Acts in this country, and with few exceptions each contains a lending library, and some hardly anything else. A corollary of this distributing service is the branch library. Liverpool had two branches by 1853, and other towns quickly followed suit. A very large proportion of these buildings are branch libraries, established so as to bring a stock of books for lending as near as may be to your door. To-day, the biggest provincial cities have each from a dozen to a score such district libraries; the average town or metropolitan borough has two or three. Some places are content with delivery stations; some have these and branches as well. The delivery station is a device for bringing books that have been asked for from the central reservoir to the nearest point, and is a convenience to readers who have not the time, or do not think it worth while, to visit the library in person. Given a first-class catalogue and intelligent readers, the delivery station is a useful makeshift. But there are weighty reasons why it is much better to invite Mahomet to the mountain—why a service through district libraries will have more valuable results than one through delivery stations. The best systems combine the advantages of both methods, making the reader free of all the branch libraries in a town, with the right of direct access to the book-shelves, and at the same time bringing books from other branches to the one nearest the reader who is unable or finds it inconvenient to visit the library in person. Manchester and Glasgow, for example, have a motor-service whereby all the books in a score of district libraries are pooled as one vast stock, accessible, with a minimum of expense, difficulty, or delay, to the borrowers situated at any point in the civic area. Make your library area big enough, and you can provide the maximum of opportunities at the minimum cost.

During the last two decades, public libraries have been reverting to that old and sensible mode of working which, on its reintroduction, was styled “Open Access.” Practice varied in former times between letting the reader loose among the books and shutting these behind doors or shutters. When the new era began in 1850, the new race of librarians beheld themselves confronted with an unprecedented and hazardous problem. Here was the multitude of famished readers, who had never experienced the civilizing influence of libraries, who might be dishonest, and who certainly had to be served expeditiously and in large numbers; and there was the stock of books, which must be kept in working order and unpilfered. Hence the closed library—the books on one side of a counter and the reading proletariat on the other. Then, in an ill-omened moment, indicators were invented, and the proletariat could not even see the books at a distance, but must try to find out, first, what it wanted from a catalogue, perhaps an abbreviated form of hand-list conveying little meaning to the unbookish and then, through a numerical system compared to which Bradshaw or a census competition is an intellectual delight, whether there was a chance of getting what it wanted. The library movement would have spread with far greater rapidity, and its results on the national mentality would have been far deeper and more extended, but for the long reign of the closed system.

Very large libraries must keep the main bulk of their accumulations in a place apart; otherwise they could not contain them at all. When the stock begins to approach six figures, a librarian begins to think of having a stack, or some analogous form of magazine, accessible to none but officials and attendants. But in libraries of moderate dimensions there is no reason why the public should be locked out, and the most convincing reason why it should be invited and persuaded to come in. One must be something of a book-expert to know always precisely what book one wants; and then one may fail to obtain it through the mechanism of a catalogue and an indicator. The ordinary person will assimilate more mental food from browsing among the shelves than he would in thrice the time from reading what the chance of the indicator brought him under this discredited system. It may be that more books will disappear; but a certain percentage of losses may be faced with equanimity; it is one of the running expenses of true efficiency, and the results are well worth the cost.

In all the most recent public libraries, and in a very large number of the older, reorganized in the light of this reform, the public have the inestimable advantage of handling the books, and seeing, as it were in a bird’s-eye view, their relations to the other books in the sphere of knowledge or of art, before deciding what they want now and will want later on. This has had an immeasurable effect on the quality of the reading—on the education of the public taste. Only librarians know how difficult it used to be to lift a certain class of reader out of an old rut, to persuade him, or more often her, to try an unfamiliar author. Once get over the difficulties of an introduction to George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, or Tolstoy, and the devotee of Guy Boothby and Charles Garvice, who was stone-blind to the blandishments of the printed catalogue, will march on steadily in the new world that has been opened. It is the first step that counts in his literary salvation, and in an open access library the first step is pretty sure to be taken, if the contents have been well and tactfully selected.

An inducement to read other things than fiction is offered in many progressive libraries. This is a general permission to borrow two books at a time, provided only one is a novel. Teachers and other privileged persons are often allowed as many as half-a-dozen at once. There is indeed no reason except insufficiency of stock why any intelligent reader should not be able to have three or four books together, and a great many arguments for liberality. Three are regularly allowed at Coventry, and in American libraries, generous concessions are made on any reasonable grounds; in some the daring principle of “Take as many as you like” is in vogue, and many libraries lend freely to all comers without the irritating insistence on local residence or local guarantee which rules over here. To a man pursuing a serious course of study it is a manifest advantage to have several works in hand; the habit should be encouraged. The cost will be considerable; but it will be a cost in books not buildings, since the extra books will usually be in the hands of readers and not in need of house-room and larger premises. The cost can and ought to be borne now that library incomes are more elastic, if authorities take a serious view of their responsibilities and the part they should play in the business of education. Look at the empty shelves in almost any popular library, and the nature of the problem will be apparent.

The actual situation is significant. The need is for more books, and better books, rather than more buildings. The one essential to a successful library service exists, a great public demand—wanting more guidance, perhaps, and susceptible of education in the wiser use of books, but still vigorous, spontaneous, and unsatisfied. There is an unprecedented demand for books, fully commensurate with the demand, all over the country, for educational facilities. And there is an unprecedented shortage of books on the lending library shelves. During the war, expenses were kept down, and the gaps due to wear and tear were not filled up. Binding was allowed to fall into woeful arrears. Now, the cost of bookbinding has gone up threefold, the price of books has doubled. Yet under these disabling conditions, many a provincial town and a number of London boroughs have an annual issue of a million or thereabouts. Manifestly, the municipal lending library is a mighty power in the land. One librarian, in a borough where, it has recently been affirmed, the average intelligence is eighty under proof, tells me that out of 690 volumes of Rider Haggard’s various novels, which have to be duplicated over and over again, he would not expect to find more than sixteen on the shelf at a given moment. Sir Henry Rider Haggard is not a classic; he lies on the border between the kind of fiction to be tolerated and the kind to be encouraged. Nevertheless, empty shelves are a powerful argument.

The following paragraph surely speaks with a most convincing eloquence of the work public libraries are performing; it is from the prospectus of the latest London borough to set up a library system, the borough that has the largest population of the lower middle class and the poor. This system is still in its infancy, yet it has achieved an annual issue of nearly a million volumes, and the separate uses of its libraries and reading rooms are estimated, on a count, to number 3,496,000 during the year.

“The cost of the Public Libraries to each inhabitant of Islington is one-fifth of a penny per week. For this outlay each person has at his or her disposal: Lending libraries containing 75,000 volumes; Reference Libraries containing 10,000 volumes; Children’s libraries containing 10,000 volumes; Reading rooms containing all the best current newspapers, magazines and periodicals of importance; and all these resources are constantly increasing.

“A penny newspaper daily costs 35 times as much as this extensive service.”

Books are not the only wares in which the lending library deals. Most of them circulate music in bound volumes, in sheets, in portfolios; some lend pianola records. Ordnance Survey maps are issued to ramblers and tourists, geological maps to students; prints and technical diagrams and other articles of use to the scientist, craftsman, or student are sometimes among the circulating stock.

Reference Libraries.

The lending library is for study and recreation, the reference library for study and information, the latter term covering the sources to be explored by the research student. A reference library is a much more expensive thing than a lending collection of the same numerical extent. Dictionaries, miscellaneous modern encyclopædias, atlases, many-volumed treatises, books having costly illustrations, and the numerous and rapidly multiplying books of inquiry, directories, year-books, and other compendiums of information, bibliographies and other registers—all these find their appropriate home in this department, where also are stored calendars of state papers, Annual Registers, Hansard, bound periodicals, transactions of learned societies, and other long sets, the risk of mutilating which renders them unsuitable for lending out. Such works as the Cambridge History of English Literature and the Mediæval and Modern Histories are usually duplicated, one set at least being available for lending; a host of smaller works, even the expensive ones, are likewise duplicated when it can be afforded.

Photo by Donald Macbeth.
Reading Room in the British Museum.

In the large centres of population, reference libraries were opened soon after the passing of the Ewart Act, and they have grown apace, to no small extent as the result of windfalls in the shape of gifts or legacies of private collections amassed by amateurs and other experts. In the lesser towns, the lending department bulks large in comparison with the reference department, which too often has had perforce to be neglected. The one has been regarded as a necessity, the other as a luxury that must wait for better times. The places in the kingdom where a scholar could live and pursue his tasks with most of his material within easy reach, in public or semi-public libraries, can still be counted on the fingers of one hand: London and Edinburgh, the two ancient university cities, perhaps Manchester, and possibly Dublin. These towns have been favoured by other dispensations than the Public Library Acts. Yet Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow each command at least a quarter of a million books in their reference libraries; and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff, Nottingham, and indeed most towns with over 100,000 inhabitants, possess reference collections respectable in the size and quality of their contents.

To regard this department as merely a luxury is a bad mistake. True, it is not a daily necessity of life to the average man; but there was a time—there still is a time in many parts of the country—when even a lending library is not supposed to be that. Yet the more lending libraries are used to good purpose, the greater will be the average man’s need for a place where he can seek or verify information of every sort; where the student may consult the larger works of which his text-books are but elementary abstracts or expositions, and find encyclopædias, lexicons, atlases, and commentaries to aid and elucidate his reading; where the busy worker, whatever his occupation, may see the expensive technical treatises and illustrated monographs that are indispensable to an intelligent pursuit of his calling. The political and social worker will find here the statistical returns, the inventor the Patent Office specifications, the researcher, if he cannot get all he wants, will discover where it is to be found from a liberal supply of catalogues and bibliographies.

Reference libraries are the obvious complement to a service of books for home consumption. The boundary between their domains is not easy to mark out, nor will any attempt be made here to answer the favourite question of the gravelled examiner in library routine: What distinguishes a reference book from one for the lending library? In most cases the distinction is obvious; in the more difficult, local circumstances may settle the point. Librarians in charge of comparatively small libraries may well shirk a final verdict, and allow much latitude in the use of reference books for lending, and the converse when the lending library book is in. Thus the whole stock of books on the premises is at the reader’s disposal without any pedantic restrictions. As an American authority sensibly puts it, “Obviously there is no book that may not be used for ‘reference.’ A reader who consults one of Anthony Hope’s stories to ascertain the name of a character or to refresh his memory in regard to some incident, without reading it consecutively, is using it as a reference book.”[4] Even a magazine or review may be a work of reference. Back numbers of all that are worth taking in are worth preserving for reference purposes; and these, with the bound sets of past years, should be always available for use. Energetic librarians index all the important articles as they come out; the published indexes to periodicals forming a key to the older numbers. Lastly, the very newsroom has its place in the reference scheme, its contents being a daily appendix to the stores of information in the library. No department of the library economy should work in isolation.

In London, principally through the circumstance that the twenty-eight boroughs now existing were preceded by eighty-two parishes, two-thirds of which had set up libraries for themselves before the present library districts and borough authorities came into being in 1902, there are far too many reference libraries in proportion to lending libraries. Most of these are of indifferent or inferior quality, and, if they were suppressed and their collections centralized in a series of large district reference libraries, few would miss them, and the general gain would be enormous. All the same, more numerous ready-reference libraries are wanted. Every branch library should have a collection of dictionaries, atlases, and general encyclopædias, in short all the books that a business firm, a school, or the like usually provides for daily use. But, since reference libraries are so expensive, it is a vain and wasteful policy to duplicate them at random; and the result is merely a scattered series of middling libraries, far inferior to those open to all the world in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, with a crippling of resources in other directions. This is not said to belittle local effort. The point is that, though Islington, Westminster, or Chelsea may each build up a reference library not inferior to that found in the average provincial town of like population, Islington, Westminster, and Chelsea are, after all, parts of London, and the Londoner ought to be vastly better off than the average provincial—else why should he stay there?

Though to one acquainted with the exacting needs of all grades and varieties of readers the deficiencies of our reference libraries are evident enough, it is none the less true that the richness of their contents and the value they yield to judicious users are realized by only a fraction of the public. Librarians have never been allowed to advertize their wares; a notice in the press such as a university or a State department would not consider beneath its dignity would have called down a reprimand and probably a surcharge from the Government auditor. In a strange town, the visitor may have some trouble to find out, first whether a public library exists, and then where. Advertisements in tramcars and finger-posts in the street are usually looked for in vain. Things being so, it is better to lay stress on what the reference library can and does do than on any delinquencies, since public opinion is sure to learn in time from the books that are there to be read, the immensity of the desiderata. In the cities previously mentioned as possible abodes for a worker among books, one may acquire a competent idea of this immensity. In other large towns and in several London boroughs, one may find reference libraries sufficing for the ordinary demands of all but the specialist and the researcher, and, in addition, one commonly finds special collections that attract readers from far away.

Thus Manchester, besides the ample provision of general works that everybody would expect to find on its reference shelves, and a large mass of works on textiles which would also be anticipated in the metropolis of Lancashire, has a fine collection of English dialect literature, others on music, the gipsies, and shorthand, and in the Greenwood collection the largest library of works for librarians in this country. The magnificent Hornby Library of engravings at Liverpool is as great a pride to the city as its Walker Art Gallery. Birmingham is famous for its Shakespeare Library, and possesses smaller collections relating to Milton, Byron, and Cervantes. The Boulton and Watt collection is also there. Stratford-on-Avon, again, is a depot for Shakespeare literature, having the memorial building and the valuable collection housed at the birth-place as well as the town library. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, owns the Bewick collection, Northampton the library of the poet Clare, Nottingham another accumulation of Byron literature and association books, Kilmarnock a Burns library, Glasgow among its many special sections a vast collection including not only Burns material but Scottish literature in general; Bristol is rich in works concerned with Chatterton, Cardiff specializes in Welsh books, though the National Library of Wales, at Aberystwyth, designed to be a British Museum for the principality, is fast outstripping this as a storehouse of Celtic literature in the wider sense. A library is fulfilling only its obvious duty by specializing in the staple industry. At Stoke-on-Trent, however, the valuable library of ceramics collected by Louis Solon, and acquired after his death by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, has been placed, not in the public library, but in the National Pottery School, where the library of the Ceramic Society is also housed.

Many London libraries specialize in the same useful way, sometimes in response to local needs, sometimes as the accidental result of local associations. At Guildhall is the national Dickens library, at Hampstead the Keats collection, at Chelsea one devoted to Carlyle. The Bishopsgate Institute vies with Guildhall and St. Paul’s Cathedral Library in a huge collection of London books, prints, maps, and other miscellanea. The typographical library at the St. Bride Foundation contains the notable collection of William Blades, biographer of Caxton. But to consider London without taking into account the public and semi-public libraries that are not under the Acts, many of them highly individualized in the nature of their resources, and fitted to fulfil definite functions in the national library machine, would be absurd; and to treat them properly would require a volume. In fact, the volume exists, though it makes only modest and tentative suggestions for the wider application of all this intellectual wealth, much of which is lying dormant or only half-used.[5]

It goes without saying that every provincial reference library worthy of the name has a local collection of some importance. Most county towns collect county literature, and other large places have their regional collections. Regional surveys are largely carried on now by schools and local organizations, often with the library and its local collections as their central depository, and at all events helping and helped by the library. Some public libraries have been made depositories for the local records, and there is a strong case for conferring or imposing this duty upon them by law. A librarian, properly trained in palæography and the treatment of archives, is the right sort of custodian; a well-appointed library is the right place for the safe preservation, calendaring, and public use of documents. The historian, social student, biographer, and genealogist would always know then where to go for local information not to be found in London.

Guildhall Library.

There are many other abiblia which Charles Lamb himself would approve that are rightly supplied in generous measure by a good reference library: modern maps, both of our own country and of the world, those of the neighbourhood within a wide radius, including large-scale Ordnance maps, accompanied by older maps of historical importance; prints and drawings in well-organized series, and lantern-slides for illustrating library lectures, or even to be issued on loan. The systematic collections of lantern-slides at the Croydon Public Library will be mentioned again later on. In this enterprising library numerous other things are collected and made accessible for general use; for example, illustrations, cut out and preserved, not because of their individual merit as prints, but because of the value they acquire in organized sets illustrating definite subjects. They are mounted in uniform style and classified in vertical files; thus they are available for reference purposes, and may be borrowed by teachers to illustrate lessons in class. Croydon has about 12,000 such illustrations, and the stock is constantly growing. Photographs of lace, woodwork, astronomical phenomena, and other subjects are collected on similar lines, and lent in sets to artists, craftsmen, and students. The vertical file in which the Manchester commercial library stores its press clippings and other items of information will be mentioned later; it is an object-lesson in the preservation, classification, and indexing of material which was erstwhile discarded as soon as it had served the moment’s use, a lesson in the value created out of the well-nigh valueless by mere organization; and teachers and business organizers have not failed to bring their pupils and their staffs to study what sheer method can accomplish.

But the whole library should be an object-lesson of high educational value. A large, well-organized collection of books, especially if the public be admitted to the interior, is a graphic example of method and order, not to mention the enormous increment of value given to any stock of material by systematic indexing. The art of classification is not only an excellent mental discipline, but may be applied with advantage in every province of business and life. Though a classification of books is not the same thing as a classification of things, and may depart widely from the exactness of logical theory, there is no better way of inculcating the benefits of system than by allowing the reader to find his way from shelf to shelf, and follow the tracks pointed out for him to other book-cases the contents of which are more distantly connected with his subject. It is superfluous to point out the assistance the library gives in the choice of books, not only to the reader who relies on it for his whole supply, but on the book-lover and the purchaser of books. Of the aid offered to the student and the potential student, over and above the library organism itself as an efficient reading machine, more will be said under the heading of library extension. In American libraries certain members of the staff are told off for “floor duty,” that is, to keep a sympathetic eye on persons looking out books and to offer guidance. It is a duty calling for high attainments and insight into the particular requirements and idiosyncrasies of readers. It would be unfair to say it is a duty unfulfilled in libraries over here, since the more active public libraries are beginning to organize themselves as real bureaux of information; but in the precise form just described it is practically unknown. Our method is to be ready with advice when it is asked for; and in big libraries, such as the British Museum, it is the most useful kind of advice, that of the specialist, which is our particular forte. Yet we still repeat, “The librarian who reads is lost!” More specialism, not less, is what we want.

Newsrooms and Magazine Rooms.

Among the old-established departments the reading rooms where newspapers and other periodical literature are displayed must, to judge by statistics of use, take a foremost place. Hundreds of thousands enter these newsrooms daily, twice as many as come into the lending libraries. Until the question was raised ten years ago by the late J. D. Brown, a librarian who attempted reconstruction in library administration long before the word began to be written with a big R, it seemed the most natural and unchallengeable thing in the world to put a newsroom in every library building and furnish it with a motley array of dailies and weeklies of all denominations. Brown induced the committee of the Islington Public Libraries to reform the reading room in a drastic way. No newspaper except the “Times” was provided for public consumption, though the advertisement columns were cut out from others and posted for the benefit of the unemployed.

This violent departure from routine did bring out the fact that newsrooms, at any rate as they were and as they are at present, occupy a somewhat illogical position. At first sight, there hardly seems any better justification for their inclusion in a library than that they also provide reading matter. But it is reading matter, too often, of a very different and doubtful kind; and the awkward fact that it is not the same people who use the newsroom that use the library, in short that the library proper and the newsroom, but for an inconsiderable overlap, cater for two different publics, gives occasion for thought.

To put it roundly, the proper place in the library scheme for the newspaper and its like has never been thought out. Brown went too far, and the library which was the scene of this experiment is now furnished with a careful selection of newspapers as well as with magazines and reviews of good standing. But he gave the problem serious thought. In the various public reading rooms which were under his care, he saw to it that the right kind of periodicals were provided, and the best of each kind. Among his many publications on library practice was a classified and annotated list of English and foreign periodicals, which ought to have done even more than it has to help provide something far better and more scientific than the mere hotchpotch of journalism with which too many tables are littered. Here again, economy of the baser sort has been the offender; for the poorest journalism is, of course, the cheapest, and a steady provision of the high-class periodicals recommended by Brown is an expensive drain on slender funds.

Reading Room, Stepney Public Library.

The library cannot do without the newspaper any more than it can do without the review, the technical periodical, and the learned society’s journal. All of these are necessary supplements to the books, since they are records of new knowledge; and they require the same care in selection, the guiding principle of which must be a clear idea of what they are there for. The much-debated dictum that history is past politics and politics current history needs no debate as a reason why the leading newspapers and the weekly reviews should be accessible in public libraries. Almost every one takes in a paper suited to his opinions: the public newsroom should give the opportunity of studying other opinions, and also of checking information by comparison of different sources and versions that conflict. The newsroom is to the library as the open-air excursion to the botany class, the laboratory to the lecture-room. Here theory and doctrine are seen in action; applied politics, applied sociology, all the different phases of the science of life set forth in books illustrated, tested, verified, or confuted. Which study is of more importance than the other? Fortunately, that is a futile question: the relevant one is, how incalculably each gains by conjunction with the other.

There is no need to provide the paper that every one buys. Nor are those that deal in police news, divorce cases, spice and sensation, the journals that a public institution is called upon to buy. The most authoritative journals, representing each of the recognized parties, weekly reviews of similar credentials, and the leading provincial organs, are all that need be supplied in this group. Even in a large and prosperous library, it is better to duplicate such than to make too wide a selection. Subsidized journals, sent gratis by political or social cliques or by advertising agents, might as well be rejected altogether; where they are accepted, the approved course is to pigeon-hole them until there is an applicant. The least approved is to employ this worthless stuff to cover serious gaps, and offer the public a stone when it asks for bread. A library committee should feel the same responsibility for a newspaper as for a book. By admitting either, they virtually give it a public guarantee.

But if the newspaper is to be treated as the organ of current history, then the newspaper room should be equipped with every facility for rendering current history real and intelligible. Maps of every part of the world should be hung over the reading stands. The room itself should be in the closest contiguity with the reference library, and should contain a ready-reference collection on open shelves, enabling readers to consult dictionaries, encyclopædias, statistical year-books, compendiums of geography, and other sources of general information as they read. That it should not be separated from the reading room where the periodical magazines and reviews are kept goes without saying. Files of such as are preserved should be close at hand. All this means that the reading room for newspapers will be another expensive department; yet the policy of making it a vital part of the whole library undertaking is in the long run economic. Here, surely, that training for citizenship which so many are preaching may be carried on without the features that make it objectionable to the old-fashioned party man. The existence of public newsrooms where the daily papers are read intelligently and their pronouncements checked and compared, might, in the course of time, react healthily on the daily press itself.

As to the lighter class of periodical, the same discretion has to be exercised in shunning the frivolous and worthless as an intelligent and responsible committee, not devoid of a sense of humour, would display in handling fiction. It is high time that the policy of treating this department as a kind of bait for the unregenerate, something to make the library popular, were abandoned. It is a delusive policy, grounded on two false assumptions—the first, that it is our duty to get people to read, no matter what they read; the second, that if you start them reading and bring them into the library they will eventually proceed to higher things. Every librarian knows that the habitual consumer of silly and pernicious reading-matter never can, without some almost miraculous change of mind, be taught to read and enjoy anything else. If you lure him with rubbish, you are encouraging tastes that are a greater obstacle to library progress than absolute illiteracy; you are putting obstacles in the road you propose to take him. The remark of an American librarian about certain popular novelists, that the people who like that sort of thing would be more sensible and better educated had they never learned to read, applies even more forcibly to the besotted victims of our periodicals of the baser sort. But the mere fact that the public who kill time with this sort of chewing-gum are not the public that borrow books or use the reference library, at once disposes of such a plea. By all means, let us have light literature, but let it be literature, and not an unrecognizable imitation.

Much, however, and far the largest amount of the material in a well-appointed reading room will not be literature at all, but simply information. In the chief London and many provincial libraries a large number of scientific and technical periodicals are taken, including publications of research societies and a good many foreign periodicals. More are required, and, as our public libraries are able to spend more money, one at least in each large area of population ought to be as well provided in this respect as are the science libraries at South Kensington, the university libraries, or, say, the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Institution, to take a good provincial example. These publications are as necessary as it is to keep editions of scientific and technical books thoroughly up to date. Their contents should be fully accessible, and to ensure this every library must subscribe to the Subject-Index to Periodicals. A practice increasing in frequency is that of indexing the current periodicals as they arrive, and mounting the entries in a mechanical guard-book or vertical file. Such libraries as possess a stock of long sets will naturally be provided with Poole’s and the other older indexes to periodicals; even libraries not possessing such long sets ought to have the indexes, for the same reason as they have other bibliographical guides, namely, to show inquirers in what books or periodicals information exists, an intelligent staff being relied upon to point out in what nearest libraries the books or periodicals are to be found.

Special Reading Rooms.

Not much is to be said nowadays in favour of separate reading rooms for ladies; the segregation of the sexes is going out of fashion, even in railway travelling. Yet they are still provided; for instance, the fine library building now all but completed at Dunfermline has a ladies’ room worthy of its scale and dignity. Far more urgent is the need for separate rooms where students can read and write in peace and quiet; children’s reading rooms will be discussed under another head. The Adult Education Committee wisely emphasized this desirability. “It is, in our view, essential that in all public libraries, in addition to the usual reading room where newspapers and magazines are consulted, there should be a room for the purposes of study. It is too often forgotten that many students have no place where they can study in comfort. It is also most desirable that all public libraries should possess a room large enough to be used for classes, lectures, and discussions.”[6] The latter requirement should have been framed differently. A lecture room is not a good class room. Every library should have its lecture room; it should also have one or more small rooms suitable for classes, tutorial or other, of the cosy size and character that help so much to bring out comradeship and intimacy. Whoever has tried to conduct a seminar numbering more than a dozen members will have experienced how difficult it is to break down shyness and evoke a frank and genuine exchange of thought. Rooms that are small and intimate are wanted for reading circles and discussions; at a pinch, the study room can be utilized; but both purposes must be served, and often at the same hour. The need for still other rooms dedicated to special uses will appear when we deal with the various forms of library extension.

The Children’s Department.

During the nineties of last century a good many libraries began to allot separate reading rooms to the children, at first, as a rule, to boys only, but later to boys and girls, sometimes in separation, sometimes together. At first experimental and subsidiary, this children’s reading room, usually combined with a children’s library, has come to be an essential part of the modern public library: those that are without it have no claim to be considered modern. Its relative importance varies according to the views of different committees and librarians, and also according to the local ability or willingness to meet the heavy cost of running such a department on proper lines. When we remember that the children are our future reading public, and when, taking a broader view, we imagine what it would have meant had every man and woman been trained from childhood in the intelligent use of books, we see how impossible it is to overrate this side of public library work. We must treat the child in the library in the most liberal, sympathetic, and respectful way. We must give the child in our libraries and reading rooms, from the outset, all the privileges and dignity of a citizen, and the future of our libraries and reading rooms will be ensured.

Birkenhead seems to have been the first town to become alive to the need of special provision for the youngest readers. Child readers enjoyed the advantage of a special section in the lending library there as long ago as 1865, and a few years later they were furnished with a separate catalogue of the children’s library. At Nottingham, a benevolent M.P., the late Samuel Morley, gave a sum in 1882 to found a separate building for children. These English libraries laid the first stone; but it was in American libraries that most of the building now took place. In the United States, the mere children’s corner rapidly developed into the separate library and reading room, and then gradually into a very peculiar and admirable thing, the children’s room—a distinct department, under the control of persons trained to work with children. It is a sort of autonomous children’s institute, combining something of the kindergarten with a well-planned school library ministering to both teaching and recreation. There are readable books to be read on the spot or taken home; works of reference to help in doing school work and make this more interesting; pictures, statuettes, and miscellaneous exhibits, which have more meaning given them by reading courses, talks, and illustrated lectures; and, finally, there is the story-telling—an art on which the American librarian pins much faith as a mode of awakening interest and evoking the right atmosphere before a child reads books on any given subject.

In this country, the Junior Library at Croydon is perhaps as near an approach as any we have made to the American idea. It occupies one of the largest rooms in the central building, and combines the functions of lending and reference library and magazine room. There is a platform and a lantern screen; ferns and other plants are dotted about. Any child of school age is admissible on the recommendation of a teacher. The librarian in charge and the one assistant do nothing but work for children; the children make it possible for them to carry out an extremely full and varied programme by acting as voluntary helpers, and are trained to serve at the counter, put books back in classified order on the shelves, and act as monitors. Others are drilled in groups for various duties, such as cutting out and mounting pictures for the great cyclopædia of illustrations, lettering posters, writing up bulletins of topical information for their fellow-readers. Lectures are delivered once a week at least, and story hours come much oftener. The children’s librarian takes classes brought from the schools, and explains the value of classification or the use and pleasures of books. Teachers, also, are allowed to use the children’s library at times as a class-room, illustrating lessons from the books and other exhibits there. Sometimes a class is brought and the children are simply allowed to browse at will. The collection of pictures is utilized in many ways. Sets of illustrations are hung on green baise screens to illustrate current events, the seasons of the year, the birthdays of notable men, and so on, with lists of the books in the library on the subjects to which the children have been introduced. A large part of the librarian’s time is taken up with showing the young readers how to find their way about among the reference books, and how to make the easiest and most remunerative use of these in their school lessons and their private hobbies. But the children are also gradually trained to help each other, and eventually to help the librarian in the daily routine of what they soon come to regard as their own library; they grow, in fact, into a sort of union society, running all sorts of affairs on their own account, with the official but not too officious eye directing and assisting rather than controlling their efforts. They might be compared to a group of patrols under a scoutmaster. The library in the children’s room contains about 4,000 volumes, and issues from 1,000 to 1,200 every week; in the period of five months from the report on which many of these details are taken, 1,200 new borrowers enrolled themselves.

Discipline, of course, must be maintained; this is essential to smooth working; but it must be evoked rather than imposed. Only the right sort of person, having had the right sort of training, even if born with the right disposition, is competent to evoke it and at the same time keep the children friendly, happy, and occupied with interesting things. Scores of children’s reading rooms have been a failure from the lack of this well-qualified superintendent. It is a waste of time to try running them as a minor department, to be committed to the hands of each junior assistant as his turn comes on the time-sheet. A mob of youngsters idling their time away and making the pleasant place a bear-garden would be the certain result. One common mistake that has a bad initial effect is to make the junior readers enter the library at a separate door, usually guarded by a special custodian who is a martinet. This preliminary insult to a child’s dignity is, perhaps unconsciously, resented; it strikes a wrong note. The idea that he or she must be segregated from grown-up readers subtly provokes a spirit precisely the opposite of that which needs to be cultivated. It is more fatal than the contrary mistake of pampering and idolizing children. Put him or her on nearly the same footing as their elders; mutual deference is infinitely better than the eighteenth century doctrine that every child is either a limb of Satan or a little imbecile.

To attain full success, librarian, teacher, and parents must learn to co-operate. Few parents take any interest in what their children read, and those few often take too much; they do not understand that coercion, or even a too didactic purpose, is fatal to the true object of an apprenticeship to reading, and will assuredly not lead children to love and enjoy reading, or to discover for themselves the values it can give to their own interests and pleasures. Until parents in general are capable of taking a wise interest, it is better perhaps that they should remain as indifferent as most parents are. In the fulness of time, when our children’s rooms are less markedly inferior to those across the Atlantic, when each has an adequate staff of persons trained for this highly specialized work, and teachers understand how much can be done by suggestion to direct the child’s reading and so lighten their own labours in teaching, by then the parent will doubtless have learned to take a proper share of interest and responsibility. All this cannot be achieved in one generation. We have now had public libraries for three-quarters of a century; but, for the arrears of intelligent use we have to make up, we might have only just begun experimenting with them.

The secret of success is to bring out the child’s own initiative. This, it may be taken for granted, is not a tendency to original sin. Good taste, like good art, is at bottom a natural thing: a misguided belief that it must be painfully instilled has done more than aught else to pervert it. Children perceive as much instinctively; hence their suspicion of well-meant efforts to put them on the right paths. A boy will hate even Robinson Crusoe if he is told he must read it; rather let him discover the realms of gold for himself. All which means that children want handling in matters of taste with a refined skill to which the mere common sense and tact required by the adult reader in a library is nothing. It means, again, that though the children’s librarian is sometimes born, when he, or rather she, has to be made, the making is an important and highly specialized process.

Other obvious points must be borne in mind, by teachers, parents, and librarians. The mere posture in reading, and the need for a good light at the proper angle, are not minor points, for bad habits in this respect are ruinous and alarmingly common. Many children read far too much. They must not be allowed to become bookworms; the parent ought to see that they have a healthy outdoor life, and the teacher that the charms of the book-world do not lead to the neglect of tasks set at school. Steady co-operation with the teachers in leading children to find in books aids to the business and the pleasures of life, is characteristic of those library systems where the children’s department has been given its due place in the scheme, and is not a mere side-show, ignorantly mismanaged and not thought worth spending money on. It is characteristic, for instance, of the admirable group of children’s libraries and reading rooms in the Islington Public Libraries, with its stock of 10,000 volumes set aside for the junior clients. There are numerous others in London and the provinces where co-operation is carried on in some form or another; but differences of opinion on the comparative merits of school libraries and of the library in the children’s reading room make for differences of method. Yet access to a school library does not render the public library any the less valuable to an intelligent child; and there ought to be the fullest mutual understanding and the keenest desire to help each other between librarian and teacher.

The fare provided in the children’s department consists, not only of books, but also of the best juvenile magazines, together with a sprinkling of illustrated weeklies and monthlies intended by the producers for readers of any age. Easy French magazines are sometimes provided. On the reference shelves stand suitable encyclopædias, atlases and gazetteers, dictionaries of several languages, works on local history and topography, illustrated natural histories, the works of the poets, and many other books that are likely to prove useful to children in their home work. The choice of books for children is a different thing now from what it was before the advent of Kingsley, Kingston, and Kipling. With a few exceptions, the didactic trash that constituted the whole stock of children’s literature a century ago may now be jettisoned, along with a still greater volume of more recent lumber depressingly written down to the childish intellect. Any modern author, for children or any one else, knows, if he knows his business at all, that the first thing to avoid is the habit or affectation or process of writing down to an inferior mind. Lewis Carroll, Sir James Barrie, Walter de la Mare conquered the child by writing as children themselves, and writing their best, writing with all their genius and with all the gusto due to things that are high and serious. Didactic writing is always bad. It cannot help being bad. The moment a writer begins to think of his audience instead of his subject, he becomes self-conscious and artificial. Worst of all when he has the effrontery to think of that audience as inferior to himself, and tries to adapt his thoughts to feebler understandings. Children are not slower than those of riper age to detect the false note, and be insulted by the condescension. Thus it is far better to offer children books that have been written for their elders than such as have been manufactured on the plan of mild adulteration. In fact, a very large proportion of the best books in the junior library belong to this higher category. Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver are obvious examples; Uncle Tom’s Cabin is another; Kidnapped will be received as warmly as Treasure Island or The Black Arrow, and if Lavengro has not such a universal appeal there will be no hesitation about The Cloister and the Hearth. Many of the novels of Blackmore and Stanley Weyman, most of Dickens’s, some of Thackeray’s and all of Scott’s are on the shelves of every good children’s library; and Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, and some at any rate of George Eliot’s novels will meet the taste of girls. Many works of travel, some histories, and biographies not a few, such as the delightful life of Frank Buckland, are as much in place here as in the senior library; and among the poets and essayists the same freedom of choice may safely be exercised. Both publishers and librarians are now at one in seeing that there is nothing shoddy in the format of the books provided for children any more than in their contents; good paper, readable print, and illustrations of artistic merit, are becoming the rule. In the last-named particular children’s books at the present day are immensely superior to the volumes of popular fiction that seem to be perfectly satisfactory to thousands who are obviously their elders, but hardly their betters.

The advantages of a closer relationship between education authorities and library authorities are manifest both in children’s rooms in libraries and children’s libraries in schools. The library is certainly part of the educational fabric. On the one hand, the teacher is aided enormously by the child’s work in the library, all the more if that work is spontaneous and enjoyable; on the other hand, the children who find out the vital part a library can play in their work and recreations, who have become familiar with books of reference and periodicals, with the uses of catalogues, the vistas opened by files, albums, and indexes, and the order and intelligibility brought about by a clear system of classification, will have acquired something of inestimable value in the process of self-development to be carried on long after school-days are over. The Adult Education Committee were of opinion that the intimate relationship required could not exist without a common administration; and they would accordingly have placed all our public libraries under the care of the education authorities. There is no need at this point to discuss their proposals, beyond assenting to the argument for the closest bond between school and library. Even if they continue to be managed by different authorities, all library activities in the schools should be worked from the library. Whether school libraries are stationary or circulating collections, they should be administered from the children’s library as the base, and their complementary relation thereto should be an important fact in the mind of every child reader.

In England it must not be hastily assumed that every town or even the majority are blessed with all the facilities described above for the benefit of children. Only a few have faced the problem seriously, and hardly any have faced the expense of a thorough service. A town like Toronto employs twenty-one assistant-librarians in the mere work of supervising the school libraries, and many American cities have much larger staffs engaged on this alone. It is obvious, at all events, that no library authority can be expected to carry on such an undertaking except at the cost of the sister authority, ready though it may be to furnish the knowledge and experience of a trained staff. Common administration, or at least harmonious administration under departments of the same supreme body, seems a logical consequence.

Patent Office Library.

Commercial and Industrial Libraries.

Libraries, like the books they house and distribute, have multiplex reasons for their existence. Their highest aim, like that of education itself, is to promote the mental and spiritual life of the community; they are humanist foundations. But the race must be conserved; our daily needs must be satisfied. National safety, liberty to develop ourselves, the economy of our physical existence, must be assured, or humanism is a chimera. Our libraries must perform their necessary part in the functions we label utilitarian, without, however, omitting or slackening in their higher purposes. A general library, in short, is concerned not only with human knowledge, but also with every human interest and activity; not only with science, philosophy, theory, but with all the practical arts, those which are for the preservation, as well as those which are for the highest development of humanity. In the department of the public library now to be considered these material objects are the main concern. A modern commercial library is something utterly different from any library heretofore considered. Here, as an advocate of more and better commercial and technical libraries puts it, “The humanist will have to give way to the economist and man of science.”

From their earliest years, public libraries have admitted these claims, and they have put forth special efforts to supply the peculiar needs of the working classes. The nature of the industries carried on has been the chief factor determining the directions in which the stock of books should differ in any given locality from what may be described as the standard selection. Text-books on such industries and their subsidiary subjects, illustrated treatises and other expensive works of reference, have been provided as liberally as funds permitted; and the same attention has been paid to the local trades and professions. Certain obvious restrictions must be allowed for, besides limited resources. Few places have been able to provide a law library or an extensive collection of medical books. The solicitor usually has his own book-case of legal literature, and so with the physician and surgeon; they also have access to large professional libraries. Nevertheless, if the public library seems to disregard certain professions, it is rather on the score of expense and of limited demands than that it disclaims its duty. A national system of libraries would certainly have to provide for these classes, probably by organizing a central supply and loans to the nearest library, in the way proposed for dealing with the more advanced and costly technical works for industries.

The working mechanic, the small manufacturer, the factory workman, the technical student, and the tradesman are in a more necessitous condition; they cannot give a standing order for all the newest manuals, they have no professional library from which to borrow. In highly technical industries, only the largest firms can afford to keep abreast of the rapid growth in scientific knowledge; and to do it they must install, not only a costly arsenal of books, digests, and periodicals recording the fruits of research, but also a special staff to extract, register, and index the most recent information. So rapid is the rate of progress in all departments of knowledge that books are quickly left behind, and the proceedings of scientific societies, technical periodicals, and even the daily press, must be systematically ransacked by the information bureau, if a progressive firm is to be sure of utilizing every invention and improvement in the fullest economic way. Andrew Carnegie said that his own firm wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars through failing at first to provide their managers with the fullest information on what had been done throughout the world in their departments. Is the public library to confine itself to the narrower mission of assisting the needy worker, or to launch out on this more ambitious project, and compete with the skilled staff work employed by the wealthy industrial corporation? After all, the wealthy corporation has contributed in proportion to its rateable assets to the upkeep of the library, and has, on the face of it, as good a claim to some return as the meanest ratepayer, unless the original idea that the public library was only for the working classes is still to prevail. If the public library were, in the full sense, a working part of the machinery for national welfare, there could be no doubt about the answer. As it is, only a few of the more prosperous and energetic libraries have accepted the larger obligation; and, even so, no British library can be compared with the great commercial libraries of America, with such a foundation as the Commercial Museum of Philadelphia, with its exhaustive collections of technical and business information and its staff of consulting specialists, or with the Institute of Commerce at Antwerp.

The utter inability of the public library service to cope with the requirements of industry and commerce was growing more manifest before the war. It was true then as now that no single library could satisfy the technical needs even of its own district, and that some system of mutual aid and central supply must be devised to supplement the finest local provision. With the violent awakening to the lack of organization of our resources which the war brought about, the problem came into clearer focus. The Library Association took the matter up with due seriousness in 1916, first inquiring into the best methods of developing the scientific and technical departments of public libraries, and then into the collateral problem of commercial libraries. The dual subject was before the important annual conference of 1917, and strong resolutions were passed in favour of establishing commercial libraries in the chief centres of trade, and technical libraries in all large manufacturing towns, in both cases as an integral part of the public library systems.[7] Since then, the Technical and Commercial Libraries Committee appointed by the Association has put together a mass of evidence on the subject, and has carried on a vigorous propaganda. Their views did not, however, meet with the full approval of the Adult Education Committee, who inclined to the representations of the Committee of the Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research that an independent series of technical libraries should be created in connexion with industries rather than with the existing libraries.[8] The weak point of the Library Association’s case had been a certain vagueness as to the methods by which, and the particular authority by whom, their admirable proposals should be carried into effect. Although they acknowledged that the work could not be done on a proper scale by the public libraries unassisted, or without some measure of co-operation, they hesitated to recommend that the public libraries should be organized into a reciprocating system for the purpose. They declined to say who, in their opinion, should set up and who should control the machinery of co-operation, or precisely what the “measures of co-operation” should be. This, of course, is the essential point of any scheme for concerted action, and the rival project of the Adult Education Committee, unfortunate as it must appear to any one experienced in the working of libraries and alive to the wastefulness of duplication, at any rate was free from this defect.

The question between the rival proposals now lies in abeyance. It is as well that it should lie there, till a more constructive plan is put forward on behalf of the public libraries. The country cannot afford to set up an independent system of libraries at a time when expenditure must be adjusted to strict necessities; it would be uneconomic to do so at any time. Whatever the shortcomings of the nation’s libraries, shortcomings due to the nation’s neglect in the past, these libraries are a going concern, a machine well able to carry a larger load, under which indeed they would run all the better and at a lower rate per output. How absurd to erect new machinery when the old wants only a little oiling! The proposals of the Adult Education Committee are mistaken; those of the Library Association are defective. The theorist failed to call in the expert: the expert suffered from obtuseness of vision. Will they come together now to talk it over?

Meanwhile, the public libraries have been strengthening their collections of technical literature, and commercial libraries have actually been established as an offshoot of the central library at Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Leeds, Bradford, Bristol, and Manchester, whilst at Norwich, Northampton, Bolton, Croydon, and Rochdale parts of the library have been set aside as business sections, and catalogues or guide-books printed showing how their contents may be utilized with the maximum of ease and profit. The advent of the commercial library has done more at a single blow to rouse the public imagination than any other event in the history of public libraries. Business men, who had been indifferent to mere accumulations of literature, found in this new species of library, containing hardly a single volume that Charles Lamb would have dignified with the name of a book, a bureau performing gratis all the useful services that the wealthy business concern obtains at exorbitant expense from its large office library or department of information. Within a year, the Glasgow librarian was able to report that 30,000 visits had been paid to the new establishment by business people, and a large number of inquiries by letter, telephone, or telegram satisfactorily answered. The average daily consultations during the first year at Manchester, by all sorts of persons from managing directors to messengers, was three hundred.[9] In Bristol last year the consultations of books, periodicals, files, and indexes totalled 51,181. Elsewhere the tale is the same.

A more particular account of the Manchester Commercial Library, the latest to be opened, will indicate the distinctive features and functions of these new departments. Its quarters are a large room in the Royal Exchange, in the heart of the business region of the city: here it was inaugurated by the Lord Mayor on October 23rd, 1919. A handbook stating its aims and explaining its uses was issued, in which it is pointed out that the commercial library is there to provide “any and every kind of commercial information that may be obtained from printed matter, and such additional information as it may be possible to procure from public or private sources; and for the collection, arrangement, and cataloguing of such printed matter, so as to render it quickly and conveniently available for inquirers and readers. It is not a technical library; those who want books on processes of manufacture must consult the collection in the reference library in Piccadilly. Its object is to cater for the man who markets commodities, and buys and sells them; not for the man who makes them.”

In the fittings, furniture, and apparatus many new devices have been introduced, such as the contrivance for mounting and storing maps on vertical cylinders, and for displaying them flat on large tables—a method that has certain advantages, especially when a number of different maps have to be consulted in turn. But the most striking and in many respects the most useful piece of library mechanism is the vertical file. This is a vast accumulation of cuttings from newspapers and other sources, systematically arranged, in which any item of information that may be of service to the business man is preserved and made available for instant reference by a subject index. About 100,000 clippings had been laid in, arranged, and indexed by March, 1921; and this home-made encyclopædia, this vast inquire-within, enabled the staff to answer off-hand a large percentage of the miscellaneous queries coming in from hour to hour.[10] The periodicals taken number over two hundred, and include a good many foreign publications. The latest maps are added to the collection as they appear, and the atlases include several that can hardly be found elsewhere, at least in places accessible to the public. Thus the contents of the library are multiform, books, pamphlets, leaflets, charts, tables, as well as press cuttings; all are minutely classified, and graphic methods of subject-cataloguing make it easy to trace the most out-of-the-way information. Here is the summary of the contents given by the official handbook:—

The Contents of the Library.

These may be roughly summarized as follows:

Directories.—These embrace the whole of the United Kingdom, some of the British Colonies, along with other countries of the world, and the principal cities of the United States and Canada. Many important trades are represented by trade directories and year books. There is a Post Office Telephone Directory for the United Kingdom.

Periodicals.—A careful selection has been made of over 150 trade periodicals from all parts of the world.

Parliamentary Publications.—The varied and most valuable publications of the British Government, bearing, either in whole or part, on commercial interests, are received regularly as issued.

Chambers of Commerce Reports.—These include Chambers at home, and in many foreign countries—Brazil, Egypt, South Africa, Australia, India, Norway, Sweden, &c. The collection of Chamber of Commerce year books is of value as illustrating the industries of the different towns in the United Kingdom.

Codes.—A.B.C., Bentley, Lieber, Lieber’s Five Letter, Scott’s Western Union, &c.

Dictionaries.—English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian.

Tables.—Calculating tables and tables of foreign exchanges.

Text-books.—Commercial law, banking, advertising, accountancy, office methods, insurance, business organization, tariffs, salesmanship, transportation, raw materials, and the commercial side of textiles and engineering, are represented on the shelves by the most recent books.

Trade Catalogues.—These are collected purely from the point of view of the value of the information contained in them, or as types of catalogue production. At present a beginning only has been made, many firms not having published catalogues during the war. The catalogues are classified and catalogued in the same way as other books.

Maps and Atlases.—Commercial routes and different countries are well represented, and the best of the new maps and atlases will be added when published.

Parliamentary command papers dealing with commercial matters are received on publication, and liberal assistance is given by the Department of Overseas Trade, Chambers of Commerce both home and foreign, trade societies, business firms, and British consuls and trade commissioners. Bulletins are issued by the library month by month, giving lists of books on accountancy, banking, foreign directories, scientific management, advertising, foreign trade, and similar topics. Even a manufacturer’s catalogue becomes a work of high utility and importance when it takes its proper place in such a collection, often affording valuable assistance to inquirers in search of the manufacturer of any given article.

The Library of Commerce at Bristol is similarly organized, and has met with like appreciation. The following is a return of the consultations from February 1920 to January 22nd, 1921:—

1920 | Books. | Directories. | Maps. | Periodicals. | Total.
Feb.-June | 4378 | 6102 | 725 | 8137 | 19342
July | 837 | 1502 | 172 | 2181 | 4692
August | 735 | 1276 | 261 | 1780 | 4052
September | 823 | 1402 | 172 | 1806 | 4203
October | 986 | 1510 | 158 | 2115 | 4769
November | 1221 | 1256 | 161 | 2079 | 4717
December | 710 | 1155 | 133 | 1739 | 3737
1921 | | | | |
Jan. 1 (1 day) | 21 | 43 | 3 | 81 | 148
Week ending | | | | |
Jan. 8 | 184 | 333 | 34 | 513 | 1064
Jan. 15 | 220 | 326 | 35 | 504 | 1085
Jan. 22 | 220 | 301 | 36 | 518 | 1075
——————————————————————————————
Grand Total | 10,335 | 15,206 | 1,890 | 21,453 | 48,884
——————————————————————————————

Here are some examples of the questions that have been asked and answered—in several instances with the direct consequence that the inquirer has been saved losses running into very large figures:—

What are the means of communication in Bechuanaland?

Was the 1893 vintage good?

What has been the monthly percentage of the increase of the cost of living since July 1914 (retail and wholesale)?

What is the procedure for the winding up of a company?

What is the bank deposit rate?

What is the amount payable for brokerage?

What is the state of the wool market in Australia?

Who are the principal makers of knitting machines?

Can the movements of a vessel be traced through 1920?

What is the stamp duty on a form of contract?

What is the position of trade in the Argentine?

What time would a steamer take to go from Hull to the Canary Isles?

What is the difference in the rate of exchange in U.S.A. in September 1919 and July 1920?

What is the duty on wine and spirits?

What is the position of the Belgian industries?

What is the time-limit for stamping a form of agreement?

Several inquiries for help in coding and decoding cables.

The width of the River Tees from Stockton to Middlesbrough.

Names of Portuguese shipowners trading with English ports.

Owners of steamers sailing between Dover and Calais, and particulars of service.

The latest information re Indigo in India.

The flat rate of pay for seamen.

Price of bunker coal in New York in July, 1920.

At Leeds, the commercial library is combined with the technical library—an unusual arrangement, but one for which there is a good deal to be said as well as against. Technical libraries exist for the supply of information, and also to subserve technical education: a commercial library is for information simply. There are inconveniences attached to the combination; it is not a mere question of logical differentiation. Commercial libraries are open during business hours, and closed in the evenings and on Saturday afternoons, the very time when the technical student would use the library most. The one, again, is arranged and furnished to facilitate rapid consultation, not as a place for prolonged study. Logically, of course, it seems absurd to separate the literature on making a thing from the literature on selling it, the production department from the sales department. Big libraries may some day divide naturally into a modern side and a humanist side, and this might prove as convenient a dichotomy as it is suited to the logic of modern life. At any rate, the experiment at Leeds is worth watching, and public expedience must settle the point.

These commercial departments have enlarged the ordinary province of the public library, and have developed into something like the intelligence bureau of a large industrial firm. The staff is prepared to supply, not only the means of information, but also information itself. Many years ago, in the Cardiff and some other public libraries, a new institution called the information desk came into vogue, where a trained assistant sat at the receipt of questions, oral, postal, or telephonic, which he answered forthwith, or after search in directories, dictionaries, and other compendiums of information, including the file of inquiries already handled. In a commercial town, this departure from old-fashioned practice was welcomed as extremely useful. Public libraries suddenly became popular with a class who had hitherto scarcely noticed their existence. The new commercial libraries perform the same function much more effectively, because they have far larger masses of information tabulated and mobilized, and are ready to lead up their reserves at any moment.

The Adult Education Committee criticize this transformation of part of the library into an intelligence bureau. There seems to be a fear that it may compete with the commercial intelligence department of the Government or with the chambers of commerce. Admitting that the boundary between the province of these organizations and that of the commercial library is not easy to define, they protest “that the function of the commercial department of a local library is primarily to provide books concerned with the theory and practice of commerce and cognate subjects, rather than detailed information on matters of trade.” Here the mind of the theorist, the stern logician, is again at work, making havoc of expediency, and also of common sense. If the commercial library is doing the work so well, and doing it cheaply into the bargain, then if you are going to shut up anything, shut up the Government department: the trade association will be only too glad to be saved doing the job over again. Give the library its proper equipment in money and privilege, give it room and opportunity to develop into an institute of commerce, and the taxpayer and many other people’s pockets will be spared.[11] These outside organizations, whether run by the Government or by the traders, are in fact working under disadvantages so long as they are not lodged in a first-class commercial library and carried on by a staff trained in library methods, the results are less satisfactory and more costly to produce. Every library, in one of its aspects, is an information bureau. Pedantic classification may draw a sharp line between one sort of information and another; experience and expediency point to the library as the right place for the retail of intelligence, whether practical or theoretic.

Photo Pictorial Agency.
Library of the Institute of Actuaries, Staple Inn Hall.

The commercial library or the technical library provided by the municipality will not lead to the extinction of the library belonging to the private firm; rather may it be expected to tend to the multiplication and development of these, just as access to books in public libraries has led to more book-buying by readers, who have learned the value of books, and feel the need to have certain works always by them on their own shelves. The great immediate benefit is to the smaller firms and the individual worker; but even they will no doubt acquire eventually far more books for themselves, and a much better selection of books, as a direct result of access to a public business library, familiarity with its contents, and realization of the enormous advantage of being in constant touch with the latest sources of information. In the United States, which are incomparably better off than this country in all sorts of commercial, technical, and other special libraries provided by public funds, there are now about 2,500 business libraries established by progressive firms.[12]

Books for the Blind.

As long ago as 1857, the Liverpool Public Libraries set the example of providing books in raised type for the blind. At Nottingham, one of the first to follow this lead, I remember many years later visiting the room set apart for the blind, and watching several blind people at work producing new pages in embossed print from another sightless person’s dictation. Along the walls were deep cases enclosing long sets of portly quartos or folios—novels by Scott or Dickens in eight or ten volumes apiece, Macaulay’s History of England in seventy-two, the Bible in thirty-eight, and so on. At that time, the supply of books for the blind had been so far centralized that most libraries relied upon collections at Manchester, Nottingham, London, or other places, run chiefly by voluntary organizations. And now, few if any public libraries provide books for the blind themselves, the National Library for the Blind, in Tufton Street, Westminster, or its branch at Manchester, being a depot for all. This admirable institution, at once a great bookstore and a place for both recreation and educational work, with its reading rooms, music room, and hall for meetings and discussions, was provided by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. Public libraries and other institutions all over the country are entitled to borrow from it for the benefit of their blind readers, on payment of a moderate subscription. “It is closely affiliated with the Students’ Library at Oxford, which is gradually being built up to supply the special needs of University men.”[13]

Stamping machinery is now used for the production of metal plates, from which any number of copies of books in embossed type may be obtained, though the process is costly. The Carnegie Trust has provided funds for the manufacture of metal plates by the National Institute for the Blind and by the Royal Blind Asylum and School at Edinburgh. All copies of standard works thus printed—if the word may be used—are presented to the National Library, and the stereotype plates remain on hand for further issues.

The work of transcribing books by hand is, however, growing enormously, and is of vast importance, as is shown by the fact that during 1920, 431 complete new works of literature running into 1,371 volumes of Braille were produced in this way from ink print by the Library’s voluntary workers (of whom there are some 500) whilst during the same period 89 complete new works were published by the stereotyping houses. It will thus be seen that if the blind of the country depended only on the stereotyped books produced, their choice of reading matter would be exceedingly limited.

Blind copyists are employed to duplicate the books at an average cost of 25s. per volume, whence it is obvious that literary provision for the blind is very expensive, and is possible on any adequate scale only if liberal public support is forthcoming. Recently, alas, there has been a vast increase in the numbers of blind persons. The idea of the old charitable institutions that such readers would be satisfied with books of moral edification was abandoned long ago; nowadays it would be absurd. Books on every subject, serious reading and light reading, educational literature and literature recording recent scientific advances and expressing the latest phases of thought, are in demand among blind readers representing every grade of culture. In short, there is no more limit, except the cost of producing copies in this special form, to the contents of a modern library for the blind than to those of any other general library. At present, the National Library has nearly 65,000 books on its shelves, besides some 12,000 volumes of music.

The public library in any subscribing locality is thus relieved of the serious burden, not merely of purchasing, but also of housing these bulky volumes. A reader sends in his list of books required, which is transmitted to the National Library, and the books are then sent direct to the reader’s home. It is a work of public benefit, yea, of national obligation, that surely cries loudly for State aid. In the United States consignments of books for the blind are carried free to the nearest post office or station. “Of 12,819 books for the blind circulated by the New York Public Library in 1908, 8,558 were sent free by mail.”[14] Our Post Office has made concessions not quite so generous, allowing a book weighing 6¹⁄₂ lbs. to travel for 2d., and one weighing 5 lbs. to be sent anywhere abroad for 2¹⁄₂d. The cheaper transmission of books by post will become an urgent question whenever a national system of interchange between all manner of libraries becomes an accomplished fact; but, even then, the case of the blind will be one calling for exceptional liberality.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] A. E. Bostwick. “The American Public Library,” p. 56-7.

[5] R. A. Rye. “The Libraries of London: a guide for students” (University of London, 1910).

[6] Adult Education Committee: Final Report, par. 5.

[7] A Question of the Day: Public Libraries (Library Association, 1918).

[8] Third Interim Report:—C.—Technical and Commercial Libraries.

[9] The following shows the number of readers monthly:—

Oct. 1919 | 1,316
Nov. | 4,361
Dec. | 4,405
Jan. 1920 | 5,608
Feb. | 5,259
March | 6,166
April | 5,585
May | 4,416
June 1920 | 6,029
July | 5,772
Aug. | 5,936
Sept. | 6,365
Oct. | 6,871
Nov. | 7,428
Dec. | 6,617
Jan. 1921 | 7,043

[10] On the other hand, the complexity and the efficiency organization required in the technical library and information department of a modern business undertaking, may be realized from an article on “The Library at the Ardeer Factory of Nobel’s Explosives Co., Ltd.” (Library Association Record, June, 1921).

[11] American opinion is all in favour of the use of the library as an information department. “The aim of the business library is rather to function as a central information, statistical, or research bureau, or, like other departments, to aid directly or indirectly in profits, in increasing quantity, quality, or efficiency of production, in building up an intelligent work force, or in the general improvement and extension of the business. Only in so far as it does this is the business library justifiable.” J. H. Friedel, Training for Librarianship, p. 115.

[12] “Within the last three years the number of business libraries has more than doubled.” J. H. Friedel: Training for Librarianship (1921), p. 113. See also the chapters on Special Libraries, Agricultural Libraries, Financial Libraries, Law Libraries, Technical Libraries, etc.

[13] Library Association Record, Aug., 1920, p. 258.

[14] A. E. Bostwick: The American Public Library, p. 31.

III
LIBRARY EXTENSION.

Library Extension is closely analogous to the more familiar phrase University Extension. It stands for various activities that go outside, often far outside, the province marked out by the Public Libraries Acts, yet are natural if not inevitable corollaries of the educational and social doctrines that formulated those Acts. They carry the services and influence of the library into other spheres—the school, the home, the voluntary association—and expand its functions from the mechanical disposal of books as stock-in-trade to their treatment as atoms packed with vital force, electrons charged with incalculable energies capable of working great consequences in that susceptible region, human life. A library may confine itself to a passive attitude, and so long as it responds more or less freely to external pressure it may be acceptable and useful to a small proportion of the persons who pay for its upkeep. But it was long ago borne in upon the far-sighted librarian and committee-man that a more active, nay, a positively militant policy was required if the public library was to exercise all its powers for good in the social economy. More books have mouldered away or come to a like inglorious and ineffectual end than were ever worn out by hard use. You can offer your public the finest collection of books—it has been done again and again by profligate philanthropists—and never get them read, or the people’s life and taste improved. It is easy to buy books; it is much more difficult, and far more important, to create readers.[15]

The librarian’s duty, he has found by harsh experience, is twofold: to contrive a library service, and to see that the best use is made of it. Instruction in the art of reading and in the choice of books, it may be objected, is for the teacher, not the librarian. Theoretically, it may be so; but the rejoinder is, our teachers have never succeeded in the task, they have not even addressed themselves to it, and they are not likely to succeed unless they work hand in hand with the librarian: they must, indeed, rely on the librarian, the book-expert, more and more under modern conditions, for guidance in their own reading and in carrying out their own functions according to the newest lights. It is largely owing to the lack of any regular correlation between schools and libraries that the results of the Education Acts have been so unsatisfactory. The mistakes of 1850 might have been rectified in 1870 by bringing the new system of schooling into the closest contact with the public libraries. But, though it was enacted that every child should be taught to read, that children should be taught how to read, and where and what to read, seems to have scarcely entered the minds of those responsible for elementary education. In introducing the Education Estimates for 1917-8, Mr. Fisher said in the House of Commons (April 19th, 1917):—

“I have been impressed by the fact that boys who have been stirred up at the age of sixteen or seventeen to attend the technological classes attached to our new universities in the north of England have so lost the habit of intellectual activity as to cloy and impede the efficient working of the college.... The country does not get full value out of its elementary schools, because so much of the training and instruction is subsequently lost.”

Why had these boys lost the habit of intellectual activity? Because, first, though they had received the usual primary schooling, they had never had instilled into them intellectual habits, interests, or likings; and, second, because, even where libraries and other intellectual institutions existed, they had never been brought inside their doors, or learned that these things were their own and would satisfy their multifarious needs the more they used them. Library Extension aims at the repair of these oversights. The activities which it connotes should be an important part of the library service when this is reorganized on a national basis. In reality, Library Extension is a return to the broader idea of the people’s institutes. The lectures, reading circles, meetings for study and discussion, the co-operative alliances with energetic bodies such as the Workers’ Educational Association, the local field club, scientific society, or the like, the closer relations with schools and all intellectual agencies, are revivals and developments of the social efforts at adult education which gave life to those institutions in the early nineteenth century.

As would be expected, the towns which have taken the lead in such extension efforts as courses of public lectures have been places where the traditional bond between the library and kindred foundations like the museum and art gallery have never been severed. Such a combination is a much more appropriate engine of extension activity than is the library that is merely a library. It usually contains a lecture hall, if not smaller rooms for study and discussion. In addition to the books, which must be available and must be read if lectures are to have any lasting results, the collections in the museum are there for use in connexion with scientific and historical lectures, and the gallery provides the most appropriate illustrations for those on artistic subjects. In some towns, library, museum, and art gallery are housed under one roof, governed by the same committee, and even superintended by the same curator. Sometimes the technical school is one of the group. Too close a coalition may have detrimental results. Administration by one chief officer is hardly justifiable unless the whole establishment is only on a moderate scale. There is always the risk that one department will flourish at the expense of the others. One of the most disastrous instances within my experience was when the committee of a many-sided institute chose a librarian for his qualifications as a college lecturer. In this case, it was the library that went to the wall. In others, it has been the museum, the picture gallery, or the school, when there has been one attached; or the whole has suffered from the lack of close attention or of the special knowledge and experience required equally by each department. But this is no argument against the policy of putting them all under one committee as branches of one corporate undertaking.

Lectures in the Library.

At Liverpool, where library, museum, and art gallery are in the same suite of buildings, and under one general committee, sections of which are detailed to supervise the several departments, there is an example of intimate correlation on the largest scale. Here, in the Picton Theatre under the central library and in the lecture halls attached to the branches, free courses of lectures have been carried on ever since 1865, averaging now some two hundred yearly, with an aggregate annual attendance of nearly 200,000. At Bootle, Salford, Warrington, Wigan, Cardiff, Wallasey, Bristol, Derby, Norwich, Maidstone, Leek, and other places, mostly in the midlands, and at Islington, Croydon, Woolwich, Walthamstow, Camberwell, Kingston, Chelsea, Hampstead, Fulham, Hornsey, Bromley, and other public libraries in the London area, winter series of public lectures were in full swing in the years before the war, and in many cases have not been discontinued or have since been revived. A good proportion of these libraries are of the old composite type, complete with museum and art gallery; others are tending to become such. At Nottingham, where the public library is in partnership, as it were, with the University College next door, among various extension efforts the half-hour talks on books and reading have for several decades been a popular mode of stimulating taste and self-education, both in adults and in children, and have been widely imitated. The Manchester Public Library was the pioneer in this provision of lectures bearing directly on the uses of libraries and the best methods of reading and private study.

A large proportion of the library buildings put up during the last two or three decades are possessed of lecture halls. “It is also most desirable,” say the Adult Education Committee, “that all public libraries should possess a room large enough to be used for classes, lectures, and discussions.” And yet, only in a few spots, such as Liverpool, enjoying the privileges of special Acts of Parliament, is it legal to pay a lecturer’s fee, or indeed to spend a penny on this invaluable and, one would think, indispensable work. Among the principal reasons put forward by the Committee of 1849 for the establishment of people’s libraries was the growing demand for public lectures. Unfortunately, the point was overlooked or dropped out for motives of policy when the Act was drafted, and repeated appeals to have such expenditure legalized have fallen on deaf ears. Thus the work is carried on under the most discouraging and repressive conditions. If a public library is so reckless as to embark on illustrated lectures, it must get hold of a lantern, in forma pauperis from some benevolent donor, or borrow it from a neighbourly institution that is not hampered by legislative taboos. Even to print a programme or post up a placard means surcharge by the Government auditor. In some places, accordingly, the cost is defrayed out of gifts by public-spirited citizens or by sending round the hat for subscriptions. One excellent device, which has obvious advantages over and above the financial expedience, is to enrol the regular attendants at the lectures into a literary society with a small subscription. Another and a very objectionable method is to make advertisements on the programmes pay the printer’s bill. A public institution ought not to be driven to such shifts. And, even in the happiest circumstances, very rarely are funds forthcoming for the engagement of professional lecturers: library committees have had, almost without exception, to fall back upon the volunteer.

Nevertheless, efficient volunteers have been forthcoming: it is indeed surprising how many lecturers of a high order can be enlisted by a librarian who keeps his eyes open for ability and scholarship and no caprice for hiding the light under a bushel. It was the present writer’s duty to organize regular weekly lectures at the central and the two chief district libraries of a large London borough for several successive winters. By the exercise of some vigilance and diplomacy, first-class lecturers on a variety of subjects were secured, without a penny of expense to the borough. The quality of the lectures was witnessed by the attendance, which averaged well over two hundred—hundreds turned away on nights when there were bumper houses not being counted. There is another side to this question of voluntary lecturers, which may perhaps be urged by the Lecture Agency and the University Extension boards, that it is robbing the paid lecturer of his occupation. In the present condition of things the point hardly arises. There is no money for the professional lecturer, so that the amateur cannot be charged with blacklegging; but it will assuredly arise when lecture and other tutorial schemes are properly recognized and financed. When that time arrives, however, there will be such a demand for lecturers that the whole question will be seen to have different bearings. There will be courses of lectures running, or demanding to be run, at every library, including most of the branch establishments; there will be tutorial classes, reading circles, and other groups requiring teachers or at least competent leaders, going on concurrently. The library proper, that is the working collection of books, will have become, or be tending to become, the heart, the functional centre, of a complex organism; it will fall into its place as the analogue of the library in a big college. Thus there will be a wide and importunate demand for lecturers, and demand will create supply only if every possible source is utilized. There will not be a glut of trained lecturers, or even a sufficient supply. Rather, when all the lecturers empanelled by official and commercial agencies are in full employ, there will be keen competition for their spare moments. When public libraries were first mooted, it was prophesied that the bookseller would be deprived of a large part of his market, and every new public library is supposed to be a blow to the trade. The results are in direct contradiction. A better supply has created a keener demand. Access to books has stimulated a desire to possess books. The day of popular libraries was speedily followed by the day of the cheap edition. There are many more bookshops than ever there were before; and since there are more booksellers it may be safely concluded that, in spite of complaints of bad trade, the sale of books has largely increased. Even the commercial circulating library continues to flourish. Similarly, it may be anticipated, the public organization of lectures and teaching for adults, even though every source of supply is tapped, including the amateur and the volunteer, will lead to a greater demand for the trained professional, who will find his occupation not gone but all the more thriving and profitable.

The modern museum and the art gallery in a large town have daily lectures, or perhaps half-a-dozen lectures a day, provided to teach the public how to understand and appreciate the value of their contents. This is one of the main objects of lectures in public libraries, the contents of which are far more various and extensive. But there are other reasons for selecting the library building as the most suitable place for all kinds of lectures for which appropriate illustrations in the form of works of art, museum exhibits, and other material objects are not available. Any lecture that aims at permanent results should provide every member of the audience who wants to pursue the subject with a reading list; better still, the actual books, arranged by the librarian and the lecturer in a graduated course of reading, should be on exhibition, and every facility should be given to the interested person to take home books and commence his studies there and then.

Such are the considerations kept always in view by the modern librarian who runs his courses of lectures, not as a side-show, or as a method of advertizing the library and bringing in new readers, but as an integral part of the library machine. In the Croydon Public Libraries, to take one of several good examples, about a hundred lectures are given annually, some to ordinary mixed audiences, some to bodies of school children or to the young people in the junior library. The halls are nearly always crowded with eager listeners. Most of the lectures are accompanied by lantern illustrations, and the methods of bringing them directly to bear on the stores of books in the library are as thorough as in any place I know. The lecturers, who give their services free, are furnished with lists of the books the library contains on their particular subjects, and are requested to point out any serious gaps. The titles of the books are shown on the screen, and the lecturer makes his personal comments on each. After the lecture, the actual books are exhibited, and any one in the audience, who verifies his or her identity from the local directory or otherwise, is allowed to borrow from these on the spot. Another useful method is to distribute descriptive lists of the relevant books, arranged if possible on a continuous plan of reading, such lists being drawn up in collaboration with the lecturer. It was at Croydon, I believe, that the library reading was introduced as a form of lecture. The librarian or some other person well acquainted with a subject and also with the literature of the subject to be found in the library, reads pieces of description, notable prose, or fine verse, on such a topic as “The Englishman in the Alps;” or “Byron, the poet and the man.” It is a sort of spoken anthology, in short, stimulating interest in the works illustrated.

University Extension Courses, Tutorial Classes, Reading Circles.

Many years’ experience of library lectures from the internal point of view, that is from the point of view of the librarian and organizer, and also from that of an occasional lecturer in most of the public libraries in and near London, as well as careful study of the effects upon all kinds of hearers, has, however, convinced me that the opinion of most educators and other critics is right: the only lectures which are likely to have sound and lasting results are those that have been carefully arranged to form part of a course. Sporadic lectures are all very well in their way, but very much inferior in promoting serious study and developing real knowledge. Reading an occasional magazine article is not to be compared with reading a book. At the same time, even if continuous courses can be provided, it would be a mistake to drop the other sort altogether. The results, if usually ephemeral, are not to be despised; such lectures are as a rule more popular than the thorough-going University Extension course, and may be a stepping-stone to that. And the organizer of such miscellaneous series may, if he gives thought to the matter, arrange the lectures by different specialists into groups on allied topics or aspects of the same subject. He may do still better. The person, whether professional or volunteer, who is qualified to deliver a first-class lecture would usually prefer to deliver several, dealing with the same subject more thoroughly and methodically—it is usually easier, and always far more satisfactory. In nine cases out of ten, the results would be enormously more valuable. To dispatch a serious theme in an hour’s discourse is an effort that usually means a rapid and perhaps brilliant but superficial handling, and does not always mean that surplusage is avoided. It is too much like putting the day’s rations into a single meal.

One invaluable concomitant of the best and most remunerative form of lectures is usually absent at those of the ordinary type, and that is free discussion. This is not always invited, and, when it is, discussion often resolves itself into complimentary speechifying or else passages of arms in which the same orators week after week display their gifts. To have any real success, lectures must arouse debate. If there are no questions, no give and take between the mind of the lecturer and of his hearers, the entertainment is likely to remain barren. A University Extension lecturer will always invite questions and the discussion of points that need elucidating; but he will not always break down the shyness of those who would fain have more light, even though a course going on from week to week tends to make his listeners better prepared, and enables them to save up their difficulties for an opportune moment. Here it is that the tutorial class, which is run on the lines of a seminar, shows its superiority. The tutorial class is a small and intimate circle, so small and friendly that the most diffident are hardly likely to feel that asking a question is like making a speech; its head is a leader and moderator rather than a lecturer, and its methods are devised to call out individual thought and initiative, and ensure that the subject shall be viewed from every side and all difficulties of comprehension cleared away. The members of the class do as much work as the teacher: the better he is the more he gets them to do. Reading circles are usually conducted on a very similar plan, the preparatory work of course being done by the members at home. When instead of formal lectures papers are read or discussions opened by members of a literary society, fairly satisfactory results are usually obtained; but whatever scheme be adopted, it is far better to split up into small groups than to be ambitious of large attendances.

Many public libraries have wisely supplemented their own lecture schemes by co-operating with University Extension. Even where the library has not been able to offer a lecture room on the premises, such co-operation may be very valuable, and a reciprocal advantage to all concerned. The library can provide books for the students, issuing reading lists which have been drawn up in consultation with the lecturers; useful exhibitions, also, can be organized, from the library’s own stores or from other sources. The tutorial classes organized by the Workers’ Educational Association have been aided effectively by such co-operation, which always reacts beneficially, in more ways than meet the eye, on the libraries themselves. When there is intimate association between libraries and technical colleges, polytechnics, and the like, half at least of the real work will be done in the library or through the books supplied by the library. Nor is it only the urban libraries that are able to assert their true place in adult education thus; several of the new rural repositories are working hand in hand with the Workers’ Educational Association and its tutorial classes, which have not failed on their part to utilize machinery so apt to its purposes. Besides the ordinary stock of miscellaneous books for the general reader, the wise rural librarian lays in a good selection of the works required by reading circles and tutorial classes, if necessary duplicating until there are enough copies for all demands. But for this special call upon his resources, he would rely upon the Central Library for Students to meet the requirements in works of this class.

But public libraries as yet do not appear to have instituted tutorial classes themselves, or indeed to have taken on their own shoulders the financial responsibility of University Extension courses. Though they have their own lecture halls and smaller rooms suitable for the various purposes here enumerated, even the best and most active library authorities have not done much more than hold such series of miscellaneous and disconnected lectures as are, admittedly, not the best.[16] That so much should have been accomplished, even whilst the public libraries were toiling under the yoke of the penny rate limit, is to their enduring credit; but it is little to what ought to be done, under less hampering conditions, and to what the progressive among them will assuredly do ere long. But the Act of 1919 merely restored the right of every community to spend as much as it liked on certain library purposes; it did not restore its natural right to spend money on what objects it liked, as for example, library lectures or library classes; still less did it infuse an eagerness to do so where no such desire had previously existed. The removal of an unreasonable and effete restriction can hardly be delayed much longer; but even when there is no legal ban upon expenditure the cost of a paid university teacher will often be prohibitive. Why then should not the alternative be taken of appointing a volunteer? This is continually being done by reading circles all over the country, organized in connection with or in imitation of the National Home-Reading Union, and the results are highly encouraging.

The fact is, our resources in private ability and willingness to serve in such functions as these have never yet been fully explored: they will have to be explored. Men of high academic attainments are expensive items in a tutorial scheme providing for the intellectual avocations of perhaps not more than a dozen zealous students; and, as was hinted before, there will not be enough of them to go round—there would not be enough now if a serious attempt were made to ascertain actual wants and provide for them adequately. Vast numbers of continuous courses, of multifarious kinds, are required everywhere in these days of intellectual keenness. Let us try then to run some of them at least on the lines of mutual help that have served so well in the past. There has never been in this country any dearth of one kind of personal ability, that of clear and racy exposition, in the sphere, for instance, of local politics and lay preaching. It does not exist, though appearances may be deceptive, in the sphere of intellectual activity. It should not be more difficult to find leaders for reading circles and study groups, or lecturers competent to deliver a short course, than it is to find chairmen for parish councils, political meetings, or local committees. Nor, if we proceed with common sense and lay no stress on artificial difficulties, will there be any dearth of discussion. The part of the leader will rather be to direct the spontaneous flow, and prevent the study circle from degenerating into a mere talking-shop. But even loquacity can be controlled and kept to the point if there is a definite subject, and a course of reading clearly marked out. A well-informed, tactful, and judicious leader will work wonders if he observes the golden rule not to overwork himself. The librarian himself and chosen members of any large staff should be able to run at least a reading circle, if not to deliver public lectures. The success of all such undertakings will depend of course on his personal competence and insight; if he can take his own share in the work with credit, he will be in the more intimate touch with the mental attitude and potentialities of his public.

Dramatic and Other Circles.

Lectures and classes by no means exhaust the modes in which the public library may carry on useful extension work; in truth, the ways are almost unlimited, except that some forms of study, teaching, or entertainment may cause inconvenience, unless the building is very large and special accommodation arranged. Thus a small library is not a suitable place for musical performances, although many public libraries cater on a lavish scale for students of music. It is not an uncommon thing, however, for dramatic readings and even full-length plays to be introduced into the scheme of lectures, or for the library to be the headquarters of a dramatic society. There is no better method of imparting a real understanding and appreciation of our best literature than to induce people to study a classical play dramatically. To begin with, simple readings should be attempted, each member of the class or study group taking a distinct part. As soon as the readers have a grip of the action and plot, they should proceed to act, still keeping the book before them. A few properties may be introduced, such as a table and a chair or two and a flagon, in the revelling scene in Twelfth Night, or a screen, in The School for Scandal—there is no need for scenery or costumes. At some libraries, properties—and even gestures—are entirely suppressed, and the reading is a reading pure and simple.

Mention of these two plays brings to mind several incidents when this rudimentary kind of acting brought out as fine and penetrating an interpretation of the dramatist as any performance by professional actors, with the usual lavish apparatus, that I have ever witnessed in a West End theatre. Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Maria and the Clown, were people I knew very well, attired in their ordinary dress. The stage was a bare platform, and there was nothing on it but a table and a few chairs. The performers had the book in their hands; but, evidently, they were word-perfect in their parts. The scene went with a verve and a naturalness that could hardly be bettered; and—best of all—it was Shakespeare, interpreted by intelligent and well-educated persons, who were the last people in the world to cut or rewrite or recreate a part as they thought Shakespeare ought to have written it. Another Sir Andrew Aguecheek is still more memorable. This gentleman would probably have been a failure or a very indifferent success in any other character: he was Sir Andrew Aguecheek in the flesh—the wonder was how we had never noticed it all the years we had known him. A still more delightful proof of the latent genius that may be revealed by such modest performances was a certain Lady Teazle. She was a plain and not a very youthful person; the stage was as unfurnished and void of decoration as her get-up was plain and ordinary. Yet, by dint of dramatic instinct that any much-beparagraphed actress might envy, she easily conveyed the sense of youth and charm and beauty—she was the finest Lady Teazle I have seen, on or off the regular stage.

The London County Council and other educational bodies have thoroughly recognized the untold possibilities of the dramatic study of drama. It is undoubtedly the right method. Charles Lamb, in a famous essay, propounded the doctrine that in the theatre we see the actors but we may entirely fail to see the play. The plays of Shakespeare, he paradoxically argued, “are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever.” The actor gets between us and the dramatist; and if that was so in the days of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, how much more is it so in these days of sophisticated stage-display and mannered acting. But put the student of Shakespeare on the stage, however rudimentary the stage may be, and let him find his way into the mind of the great playwright by himself, so far as he may: that is how to study Shakespeare, and that is the mode of approach sought in such dramatic readings or more elaborate interpretations as are recommended here. Even the modest group of readers will probably go on from strength to strength. One group which I first set on this track were content at first with a series of readings, which were given in public, after many rehearsals, at the various district libraries of a London borough. Then they embarked on the complete presentation of The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, with scenery and costumes; and even ventured on a tragedy, all without discredit. Ultimately, a troupe of experienced players, they gave a series of Shakespearian plays at the Town Hall and other places, not only clearing all expenses, but realizing a handsome sum for an important charity. One of their number later on wrote a comedy, which they produced with some success. Here, surely, is a piece of library extension work having high cultural value; it is indicative of what may easily be done by apt suggestion and cultivation of the group spirit; and there are innumerable directions in which similar results may be achieved.

Relations With Work Outside.

The principle to be kept in view is that the civic library is a most natural home for all the intellectual activities of a social kind going on in each community. Even if it is not convenient for all such bodies to have their headquarters there, the library should entertain the most friendly and active relations with every one. In the United States, the public library in most cities performs a large part of its most remunerative work through the medium of public and private organizations outside. It may be likened to a nerve-centre, with a network of efferent and afferent fibres and a series of ganglia throughout the social organism. Thus the New York Public Library has a long and miscellaneous list of clubs, leagues, musical societies, classes of all sorts, business and other associations that hold their meetings in its various branches. Many American libraries are ready to plant a delivery station, dispatch a travelling library, or a collection of special works, anywhere that it is asked for, or even to provide an industrial firm with books, so long as accommodation and an acting librarian are supplied. They will prepare select lists of books on any given subject, get up an exhibition to celebrate any event or help on any deserving movement: there is no end to the ways in which they are prepared to put their services at the disposal of the common weal. British libraries have laboured too much in isolation. The future depends upon, more than anything else, its coming into the closest touch with every intellectual and social agency in the body politic. It should be a matter of course for the local scientific and literary societies, the field club, the local branch of the Workers’ Educational Association and the National Home-Reading Union—to name only two out of many—to make their home in the library building. The antiquarian society should deposit its collections and books and maps here, the natural history society its specimens and apparatus, thus laying the foundations of a local museum to be housed in the situation most favourable for study, both by themselves and by other inhabitants. Local historical and regional surveys are rapidly developing, whether as pieces of research aiming at the extension of knowledge or as a practical form of education: the library, with its local records, maps, and other historical material, should always be the base.

The Croydon Public Library is the centre from which the Photographic Survey and Record of Surrey operates. Surrey took the lead in this important branch of topographical history, and the photographic records of buildings, scenery, and miscellaneous objects of interest now collected in the library comprise some 8,000 prints and lantern-slides, all elaborately classified and indexed for instant reference. Housed along with these is the Regional Survey of Croydon, consisting of maps prepared from actual surveys of the district within fifteen miles’ radius, showing the geology, vegetation, surface utilization, industries, etc. This also is accompanied by photographs. Further, an artist has been commissioned to paint faithful records of architectural or natural features that are likely to perish or be disfigured by modern changes—a thing that will be of priceless value to future generations. This logical extension of the work of preserving local records, minute-books, newspapers, and various fugitive material is being carried on elsewhere, notably at Coventry, Brighton, Northampton, and Nottingham. It deserves the attention of the many local societies that have not yet thrown in their lot with the local library.

Library Exhibitions.

Libraries may themselves get up exhibitions or grant hospitality to those organized by kindred bodies. The more the library takes a hand in the preparation, the more can the series of exhibits be related to the appropriate books, and the more effective will such efforts be as aids to popular enlightenment. There is a wide choice of suitable subjects—book-production and its various branches, engraving and other arts, local history and geography, the sciences. The library will be able to supply many of the exhibits from its own stores; usually it is not difficult to borrow useful material from commercial or private sources; and loan exhibits from the State museums are available as nucleus, supplement, or even as forming the whole display. Such exhibitions are placed under the care of keen and intelligent members of the staff, and lectures or demonstrations are given illustrated by the actual objects; the results are enormously ahead of those achieved by the ordinary static exhibition. Lines of reading are pointed out, and books brought into juxtaposition with their subject realities, in a way that even the trained conductor in a museum or picture gallery can hardly compass. Actual experience in organizing and running a number of such exhibitions has left me with no doubt of their popularity or their educational value. When an exhibition illustrating such a subject as the production of a book goes on for three months in the libraries of a London borough, and the average attendance during that period exceeds a thousand a day, we may feel that we are beyond the experimental stage.

Even our rural libraries, when they are located in the village hall or have a suitable building of their own, need not hesitate to attempt an exhibition. In many ways, they have exceptional opportunities. To begin with, there is nothing to compete with them; the novelty would be absolute. And then there is suitable material of some sort or other in abundance, botanical, geological, horticultural or agricultural, or such as illustrates local history, local industries, or any subject having strong associational interest. Differences of scope being allowed for, the rural librarian would probably find he had much less to do with his own hands than if he were getting up a show in the town. Such places as rejoice in the possession of museums and art galleries as well as libraries are specially favoured; but it does not inevitably follow that these departments of public culture do combine forces so effectually as do the places where the work is on a more frugal scale but comes at any rate from one and the same fount of activity.

Relations With the Schools.

The chapter before this concluded with some account of library work with children. The correlative of the children’s library and reading room is the school library or the periodical loan of books to the schools—sometimes it is the alternative. Under the Act of 1919 the library authority in places newly adopting the Acts will be the local education committee, and elsewhere the control of existing libraries may be handed over voluntarily to that body. Long before this Act, certain education committees had acted jointly with library committees in establishing school libraries and other modes of bringing school children into contact with good books. The aims and interests of library and school in large measure coincide. Recent legislation virtually admits this sound principle. Into the question whether it is wise to vest the control of libraries in the education authority, a question canvassed both for and against in the United States as well as in this country, there is no need to enter at the moment. Everybody agrees that children must be taught, or at least encouraged, at a fairly early age, to read books for themselves and to have some idea of the uses of a library. Most teachers and librarians would also agree that every school should have a library of its own, and that at some stage or other each child should be introduced to the public library. Perhaps this is as far as we need go in the direction of agreement: uniformity is surely not advisable, and local circumstances, relative situation in particular, may have to determine the nature of the interaction of library and school, and the more important point, how soon should the school child shift the centre of his reading interests from the school library to the public one, the one that is there to be his intellectual mainstay throughout life? From the point of view of a public librarian, it might be undesirable that a school library should be so efficient and amply sufficing that elder children were deterred from finding their way into the wider realm of the public library. The school library should be but a tributary flowing into that main stream.

There are three modes of dealing with the problem of books for the school child, and these may be variously combined. (1) There may be a permanent collection, stationed in the school, consisting of graded sets of reference works required to illustrate any of the subjects taught or studied in the school; and further, a collection, large or small, of such books, mainly of a recreational kind, as it may be thought fit to provide for home reading. Such a collection may be built up by the school itself or by the staff of the public library, who would act, as a rule, in close consultation with the teachers. One great advantage of having all the books permanently located at the school is that the children look upon it then as really the school library, and the teachers are able to familiarize themselves with the contents, and thus can influence the children’s reading to the maximum. If there are funds enough, a fairly large and representative collection can be provided—one that the most voracious boy or girl is not likely to exhaust till he or she is old enough to join the public library. The best books become household possessions; children talk about them to their chums, and not to have read them is a lapse that must be wiped out. If, on the other hand Westward Ho! or Little Women is merely a loan and has gone back to the central library, how can the young reader get even with the luckier ones?

(2) To save the expense of a number of permanent school libraries, an education authority may arrange with the public library to organize a series of travelling collections or merely boxes of books to circulate among the schools. This system may be combined with the other, the reference collection being regarded, most reasonably, as always indispensable and therefore permanent, and loans of books for recreation supplied at fixed intervals. There is one unquestionable boon attaching to this arrangement—the children enjoy the stimulus, as the date comes round, of choosing and rejoicing among a fresh lot of books. Many teachers too, no doubt, are not averse from a change.

(3) The third method implies suppression of the school library, at any rate so far as it is anything beyond the indispensable collection of volumes required for use in the school; it is to send the young reader to the public library. If this is not far away, and especially if it has a first-class junior department, where suitable reference books can be used as well as books for entertainment borrowed for reading at home, there is nothing to deplore; but to children in distant schools the loss will be serious. The value of this third solution of the problem, when it is a real solution and not an evasion, is that the child is introduced early to a large collection of books, and also comes into a different atmosphere from that of school. Its danger is that the child may come unchaperoned to a library where there is but a perfunctory service for the juniors, and will be turned adrift in a pathless wilderness.

This third method may be seen at work in the schools of Poplar. One of the poorest among the metropolitan boroughs, Poplar has been a leader in many library movements, such as the scheme of interchange between adjoining boroughs whereby all the books in a large group of libraries are made available for borrowing by dwellers in any part of the area. The libraries have long co-operated with the schools as actively as the teachers would permit. Nothing is more essential to the mental life and the economic efficiency of the future citizen than that the gap between schooling and maturity should be bridged over. Poplar has realized the fatal nature of that gap, and has long been doing its utmost to fill up the chasm. School children come to the public library to do their preparation and spend their leisure in the enjoyment of books. Classes are brought by teachers during quiet hours, and sit in the public rooms doing “silent reading.” For a long while measures have been taken so that no single boy or girl in the schools shall go out into the world without being introduced to the public library, and made acquainted with all that books and libraries can do to help them in life and the pleasures of life. Twice a week, the upper classes from schools in the borough, coming in regular rotation, attend at the nearest library to hear an address by the borough librarian, Mr. H. Rowlatt, or one of his chief assistants, on the libraries of their own borough and libraries in general, what they are and what they contain, and how freedom and ability to utilize the manifold services they afford is an invaluable part of the individual’s equipment for life.[17] The librarian and his coadjutors have always thrown themselves heart and soul into the work of co-operation with the schools; the children listen eagerly, and the results are seen in the statistics of reading.

The vital importance of this work has now been recognized by the London Education Committee. Similar schemes are being introduced in the boroughs of Islington, Greenwich, and Hackney, and it may be hoped that they will become general. This is by no means all that the Poplar libraries are doing for the school children. Attempts are made to help the older children in making up their minds on the occupation they would choose. Sets of books illustrating various trades are put before such children, from which they can gather an intelligent idea of what is the real nature and interest of some craft or trade which was previously a mere name. This has proved a real help in the critical moment of many a child’s life. All formalities, such as monetary guarantees against loss or damage, have been reduced to a minimum or abolished for the benefit of school children, who are admitted to full privileges on the bare recommendation of the teachers. Thousands avail themselves of the opportunity thus held out, and many thousands of books have been borrowed as a result without the loss of five shillings’ worth of books per annum. The help given to the children in general has likewise proved to be indirectly of inestimable value to the teachers. They admit that the introduction of the library habit among their young pupils has opened their own eyes to points they had never realized. One head master volunteered the statement that it had done away entirely with surreptitious reading of trash among the girls. Poplar cannot afford a regular system of school libraries; yet, in spite of poverty, it is signally doing yeoman’s service in moulding the minds of our future citizens: it is a shining example to boroughs of far superior resources.

On the whole, my own preference is for the stationary library, when the school can afford a good one; but one’s preferences may be modified, or even reversed, in altered circumstances. Whichever plan be adopted, supervision, or rather sympathetic guidance, is essential. Such guidance will, of course, be entirely of a positive, not a negative kind, and will consist of tactful suggestion, suggestion as unobtrusive as possible, by means of story-telling, illustrated talks, and personal help. There is not the slightest need for attempting to fit the book to the child. Let children read books for grown-ups if they have a mind to, let boys read girls’ books; the girls will read the boys’ books whether you want them or no. It is taken for granted that the whole library will be well-chosen, and everything in it worth reading. Alarmist nonsense, emanating from English justices or militant New England moralists, about boys led into crime by stories of brigands and pirates, are not likely to upset parents or librarians with all their faculties about them, including a normal sense of humour. If you listened to these people, Stevenson and Dumas would have to be put into a strait jacket, and Michael Scott, Aimard, and Mayne Reid burned by the hangman. It is the last expiring gasp of the prudery and lust for chastening the young which made the old-fashioned library for children a byword. Far more important than any anxiety about moral or immoral influence is an anxiety about good literature. Edification is thrown away if the well-meaning author is unpossessed of charm. The first requisite of a spell is that it shall work. Happily, the charm of fine literature can hardly be attained but by the fine personality. Good literature is healthy literature. Among the books a child will read with delight, it is doubtful indeed whether a single example can be found of a work of true literary worth that could lead a child astray. Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and Lytton’s Paul Clifford perished from the catalogues of junior libraries, not because they were wicked books, but because they were bad literature.

The best books should be duplicated over and over again, especially in libraries that let their young readers roam along the book-shelves and choose what they like—as all libraries should; and duplicated as far as possible in various editions, especially illustrated editions. This is a far wiser policy than aiming at a very comprehensive selection, which means that quantities of second and third-rate stuff will be introduced. After all, if life is short childhood is much shorter, and if every child had the opportunity of reading all the books that are fit, there would not be much time left before the date arrived for migrating to wider spheres.

A bibliography of ideal works for children would not, however, be a voluminous affair. The children’s librarian should form something of the sort for use, and the books starred in its pages as superlative should never be out—there should always be copies enough to ensure this. The young reader will find it hard to resist the appeal, if he sees one attractive copy and next week another staring him in the face: it will assuage disappointment for the absence of something else, or charming pictures may tempt to a second reading of a classic already familiar. By such careful management the taste of a healthy child will remain unspoiled, and in later life sound judgment and appreciation of the best will show the results of this novitiate.

In America, the question of circulating versus stationary libraries has been well thrashed out, though not to a unanimous verdict. At Buffalo, the respective spheres of the library and the education authority have been carefully defined. School libraries are limited strictly to the works of reference required in school work, the public library acting as book-selector. For all further requirements the school and the school children rely on the public library. In New York City, the public library deputes this branch of its work to a special department, under a supervisor of work with schools. The city is divided for the purpose into districts, in each of which there is a branch library and a group of schools. A school assistant, usually a woman, is appointed by the library to look after the work in each district, to make herself personally acquainted with every teacher, to give advice, and keep the machinery running smoothly. Formal regulations are kept down to a minimum. Teachers are allowed to borrow books in large quantities, and to keep them six months at a time if they need them; they are expected and assisted to make themselves reliable counsellors and guides to their pupils in the choice and use of books. Assistants in the libraries are told off to address groups of teachers and assemblies of school children on the objects and the resources of the libraries; children are brought to the library in classes to have its working and its benefits explained; and, finally, they are encouraged to do their home lessons in the children’s library, and are provided with a reference collection adapted to the purpose.

In this country, the relationship between the school and the public library remains undetermined. Many of our primary schools are destitute of a library worthy of the name, and if a census were taken it would probably be found that the secondary schools are even worse off. Many school libraries have attained a musty and precarious existence through some passing gust of philanthropy, and maintain it in a more or less accidental fashion. This is not the fault of the public libraries, many of which have done more than their share in providing schools with books, and most of which are ready with the expert services needed to put school collections on a proper footing. The failure is due more to lack of a clear realization of the function of school libraries than to mere neglect or oversight. The work already described as done in the junior department at Croydon, where as at Coventry and divers other places, separate collections of books on education and teaching are provided, from which the teacher may borrow and which the public may use for reference, may be taken as representing the kind of endeavour put forth by the more active library authorities. Loan collections for schools are organized by some authorities, stationary school libraries by others. But in a vast number of places, though many if not all of the facilities enumerated above are held out by the library, the saving propensities of education committees or the indifference of teachers have left things as they were. The need for a comprehensive treatment of the problem is still more apparent now than when the Library Association in 1904 urged that the nation’s libraries were, or ought to be, an integral part of the national machinery of education. It is a vital part of the educational problem and of the whole problem of public libraries; and, whether there are to be two sets of machinery, working side by side or in reciprocation, or one set controlling both schools and libraries, the library service for the schools and the school children must be put on a proper basis, or the future of adult education and of public libraries also will be in jeopardy. Here, surely, Ruskin’s saying has a particularly forcible application—“It is open, I repeat, to serious question, which I leave to the reader’s pondering, whether among national manufactures, that of souls of good quality may not at last turn out a quite leadingly lucrative one.” (Unto this Last).

FOOTNOTES:

[15] The modern public library believes that it should find a reader for every book on its shelves, and provide a book for every reader in its community, and that it should in all cases bring book and reader together. (Bostwick, p. 1.)

[16] The Adult Education Committee attribute the most obvious defects of adult education to-day, to the discontinuity of much of the work done, the tendency to rely unduly on lectures and to neglect classwork, and the inadequate supply of books to the students attending lectures or classes. “It is, in our judgment, essential that whilst regularity of attendance and seriousness and continuity of study should be insisted upon, there must be freedom of teaching and freedom of expression.” (Final Report, par. 146.) The Committee are strongly in favour of continuous courses of lectures, and of that grouping in classes of moderate size that makes for “the frank interchange of thought and experience which is essential to adult education,” and without which “the work carried on will lose its vitality or change its character.”

[17]

METROPOLITAN BOROUGH OF POPLAR.

Lectures to Boys and Girls attending at the Libraries from Elementary Schools.

Synopsis.

How knowledge is handed down by books. During school-life advice and help can be obtained from the teachers: after leaving school guidance in reading and study can be obtained at the Libraries. Public Libraries, their ownership and the right to use them. The contents of the News and Magazine Rooms. Lack of home accommodation, and how the Reference Rooms can be used for quiet reading and study. Books in Lending Department on all subjects, elementary, intermediate, and advanced. Assistance given by staff. How to use the Libraries in conjunction with Continuation Schools and Evening Classes: also when learning a trade, business, or domestic arts and occupations. Children are urged to retain the knowledge gained at school and to supplement it. Wisdom of acquiring General Knowledge, and how to acquire it: with special reference to time-tables, directories, atlases, and dictionaries. The lighter side of Libraries:—Use of holiday guides; books of travel, manners and customs; music; home interests, such as gardening, poultry-keeping, pets and hobbies. The care of books. (Syllabus of one of the lectures described above).

IV
RURAL LIBRARIES.

Before the Act of 1919, more than two-fifths of the population of these islands, which means practically those living outside the towns and urban districts, were entirely without a library service. A few attempts had been made, with various degrees of success, to found small libraries or contrive methods of circulating collections of books in the villages. Such were the library of the Lancashire and Cheshire Union, inaugurated in 1847, the scheme of the Yorkshire Village Libraries Association, in 1856, and the Coats Libraries supplying many parts of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Besides these, there was an odd village library here and there, such as the excellent miniature institutes given to the inhabitants of East Claydon, Middle Claydon, and Steeple Claydon, in Buckinghamshire, by the late Sir Edmund Verney, or the library founded in a Hampshire village by the unaided efforts of the villagers themselves, which is described by Miss Sayle in her little memoir Village Libraries. Many other rural libraries have flourished for a time, and then decayed, leaving no history. Professor Adams found that of the total population of the United Kingdom in 1911 not more than 57 per cent. resided within library areas. He contrasted the library provision in different parts of the country in the following table:—

—————————————————————————————————————
| Total | Population in | Percentage
| Population, 1911. | Library Districts. | of Total Population.
—————————————————————————————————————
England | 34,194,205 | 21,103,317 | 62
Wales | 2,025,202 | 938,303 | 46
Scotland | 4,760,904 | 2,403,283 | 50
Ireland | 4,390,219 | 1,245,766 | 28
—————————————————————————————————————
| 45,370,530 | 25,690,669 | 57
—————————————————————————————————————

“These figures,” he remarks, “would in themselves suggest what is an outstanding feature of the present situation, the fact that libraries are chiefly in the larger town areas, while the smaller towns and country districts remain to a great extent unprovided for.”

The reason for “this partial and unequal development” was the absence in the early Public Library Acts of any clause providing for concerted action among bodies competent theoretically to become library authorities, but unable practically, because to furnish an adequate income out of a parish rate would have required an Aladdin’s lamp.[18] If the county authorities had been permitted long ago to establish systems of public libraries for the villages, and the product of a penny rate throughout the county had been spent on the upkeep, there might by now have been a rural library service not inferior in quality to that in the towns. But before 1919 the potential library authority in country districts was the parish council; and, even if parish councils had been persuaded to combine, the unit of organization would have been too poor to support anything but a miserable apology for a library. In his report of 1915, Professor Adams observed that there was a growing consensus of opinion that the county authorities should be empowered to adopt the Acts and impose rates, and that the rural library systems so established should be closely linked up with the educational system. By this plan the financial difficulties would be overcome, and, since “common thought and common action” are hard to attain in a dispersed population, it was only reasonable that a more widely representative body should be authorized to take the initiative. “It is part everywhere of the rural problem that there needs to be an organizing centre for the concentrating and directing of rural thought and action.”[19] Professor Adams outlined “a public State system” of rural libraries, “supported by the rates, and, like the educational system, universal.” It would be closely associated with, if not under the control of, the county educational authority. “It would radiate from one or more centres, according as the county is large or small.” “There would be ample room for voluntary organization and effort within this framework, and a good village and rural library system must depend largely on voluntary co-operative work. But the framework of the system must be strongly knit, and must secure especially at the centre a library institution, well equipped, and with expert management and supervision. A new corps of librarians, in the form of county library superintendents, will be required if the movement is to be progressively developed.” I have quoted an important passage in the actual words of Professor Adams, since it must be always borne in mind that he proposed something far more substantial than the mere circulation of boxes of books among villages or small country towns such as asked for the privilege. One of the primary requisites of each local library, even in the initial scheme which, he suggested, should be experimented with in a few select areas, was “a permanent collection of certain important reference books and standard works.” That, indeed, must be the minimum foundation for the most unambitious kind of library service, as distinguished from a mere book service. This latter may be furnished by a circulating system, centering in a repository at some distance; but the permanent collection must be there, in the village, or the book service will be bereft of most of its educational value.

The Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, at whose request Professor Adams had carried out his investigation, adopted for the sake of experiment his suggestion that the Trust should take over the Coats Libraries in the Highlands and Islands, which had been initiated by Sir Peter Coats of Paisley and at that date numbered 186 on the mainland, 59 in Shetland and Orkney, 33 in Lewis and Harris, and 37 in the other Hebrides. A repository was established at Dunfermline, from which these local centres were supplied with periodical batches of books. This was the beginning of the Carnegie rural library scheme, which during the next few years offered the public and the Government an object-lesson in the methods of supplying the neglected two-fifths of the population in the four kingdoms with a library service.

The first county scheme to be set on foot was in Staffordshire. In 1915 the Trust offered £5,000 to this county council to be expended in five years on a central repository, a stock of books, travelling boxes and other equipment, and the costs of administration and carriage, asking in return for “reasonable assurances that, at the conclusion of the period and after the expenditure of the grant named, the scheme would be maintained and supported on funds other than theirs.” From 54 centres at once established in Staffordshire schools the scheme gradually spread in four years to 206. The county councils of Gloucestershire, Cardiganshire, Somerset, and Wilts undertook similar schemes under like financial conditions, and the Trust made grants to the public libraries of Perth and Grantham to organize a service in the neighbouring country parishes. These rural systems were given a statutory basis in Scotland, under sec. 5 of the Scottish Education Act of 1918; but it was not till the Public Libraries Act of December, 1919 that the position in England and Wales was legalized. That Act gave an immense stimulus to the rural library movement. Library schemes have now been prepared for nearly half the rural area of Great Britain, and a large number are in actual working order.[20] The Trustees in 1920 set aside a sum of £192,000 for grants to county authorities during the six years 1920-5, such grants to be employed on the initial expenses of the stock of books, boxes, shelving, and similar accessories for the central repository. From that date they ceased to pay for the erection of buildings or for running expenses. The premises used are mostly temporary buildings, such as Government huts, or else rooms in schools. These central repositories look bare and insignificant to the uninitiated, since they are furnished with little but a few tables or benches for packing books on and enough shelving to hold a fraction of the working stock of books, most of which are out in the villages and when they come home are off on another journey almost at once. A few stout boxes, with simple fittings countersunk to avoid damage in transit, lie about, full or empty. These are sent out, each carrying fifty or a hundred volumes, by rail, carrier, or motor-van, to the village schools or perchance the village club, to be handed to the readers by volunteer librarians, who are in most cases the schoolmasters.

In a typical county, where the population is mainly rural and the repository is quartered in a borough of moderate size without a library of its own—where indeed the local inhabitants, hungering for books which their own borough council will not consent to provide, have to be kept at arm’s length by warning notices—some three hundred villages are each at present receiving about two hundred and fifty books a year. It is not much; it is not much more than an experiment; but anyhow it is a beginning; and, remember, until the rural scheme arrived the labouring man never saw a new book, from year end to year end, unless his child won a Sunday School prize. The circulating stock consists of books for children and the class of books commonly defined as for the general reader—that is to say, works for entertainment primarily and in the second place for knowledge or information. Further, there is in this particular centre a strong collection of educational works for the use of teachers, and a numerous and sound selection of sociological literature for the special benefit of the Workers’ Educational Association, who have many tutorial classes in the district, most of them studying economics, social philosophy, or the science of politics. The teachers are allowed to borrow several books at a time, to further their work; and in addition, the requirements of modern methods in teaching reading are met by the allowance of perhaps fifteen or two dozen copies of certain select books, to enable every child in a class to have a copy—the reading-circle system applied in the school. If any studious person should ask for a book not in the printed catalogue, a book obviously in advance of the general demand and costing rather more than the average price bargained for, the librarian sends for it to the Central Library for Students, in Tavistock Square, London. Even the newest and least-developed rural library aims at an ideal that the great commercial circulating libraries have given up as unattainable, to enable any reader to have access to any book, of unquestioned value, that he applies for—and few failures to achieve this end, by one means or another, have to be reported.

The librarian superintending another county system, a lady who has built it up from the foundation stone, has, after three years been able to announce an average circulation of two thousand books a week. This, in spite of difficulties of transport, and the absence of facilities for reaching the adult readers directly. The work here is done entirely through the schools, and of the eighteen thousand and odd borrowers recently on the register not much more than eight thousand are above school age. Nevertheless, she reports, even if the parents have “to snatch the books from the children or to wait patiently until they are all in bed” ... “the people will read if they get the chance.”

“In one Cotswold village there are seventy readers, forty of whom are adults; among them are several farmers, a painter, a butcher, a sadler, domestic servants, railwaymen, builders, labourers, many mothers, and the postmistress. Forty books were sent there in January, and by June these books had 389 readers, an average of 9.5 readers per book. One teacher reports that his male readers include a carter, a cowman, a rivetter, farm-labourers, the policeman, a workhouse attendant, the night watchman, the schoolmaster, and the vicar. Another writes: “Our readers are chiefly as follows—cloth-workers, carpenters, clerks, plasterers, house-decorators, tailors, gardeners, printers, engine-drivers, ironworkers, chauffeurs, railwaymen.” When one looks at lists like these one realizes that to pack a box to meet all tastes is no easy matter. In Stroud there is an old lady of seventy-nine who borrows books regularly from the school, and at Coln St. Aldwyn, in the Cotswolds, a disabled soldier read, in three months, nineteen out of a possible twenty-six books. One of our former borrowers who came in by train every day left her book in charge of a porter in the evenings. It was some time before she discovered why he was so surly at times, and then she found she had changed her book before he had finished it!”[21]

Here are samples of the letters received from imaginative school-children, who had been told about that inexhaustible treasure-house, the Central Library:—“Please send me a book on carpentering and oblige.” “Dear Sir, Could you kindly send me on one of your nature study painting books as you spoke of in our schoolmaster’s letter from you and oblige, Yours sincerely.” “Dear, Sir, I should be pleased if you would kindly forward me a book on the study of knitting a Jumper.” And here is an extract from a teacher’s account of her library centre:—

“We all feel greatly indebted to the Carnegie Trustees, it is impossible to over-estimate the boon that the Library is in these country districts. If the Trustees could see for themselves the excitement and pleasure when the books arrive, and the rush to see them and choose, I am sure they would realize afresh how well-spent their funds are. Our only difficulty is that there are never enough books for all who want them, but that, without doubt, is a difficulty common to all Carnegie rural librarians.”

The Carnegie Trustees calculated their grants on the understanding that purchases by the rural libraries should be restricted to the cheaper books in general demand (averaging 3s. 6d. new or second-hand), and that when other or more expensive books were required they should be obtained on loan from the Central Library for Students. To this library, which forms a central store of technical, scientific, and other high-class works, for supplying both the rural systems and those urban libraries that pay a small subscription, the Trustees are now making a subsidy of £1,000 a year. It may eventually develop into an invaluable auxiliary to all the public libraries in the kingdom, and money spent on increasing its stock is a thoroughly economic expenditure, since it saves an incredible amount of overlapping among the different units of the nation’s library service.

Different counties have employed different modes of distribution. Rail and carrier are the usual medium where the centres are not far from the railways, and some counties have secured half rates for conveyance of books by passenger train. Experiments have however been made with hired motor transport, with a saving on costs and a much more important saving in time and trouble, since more than a score of boxes can be delivered and the time-expired boxes collected in a single day’s trip. The Perthshire authority have acquired a motor-van of their own to be used for conveying books and also for the librarian’s tours of inspection. This will no doubt be the plan adopted elsewhere when the systems reach a further stage of development. More miscellaneous and more picturesque methods have had to be followed in the North of Scotland service, which feeds the Islands, including St. Kilda, with much-needed books. After many abortive attempts to reach St. Kilda, it was found that a trawler was going there from Fleetwood, and in this roundabout way the first box of books from Dunfermline arrived there last year. In the Orkneys, Shetlands, and Hebrides, crofters, fishermen, and cobblers, we are told, look eagerly for books on natural history, science, and philosophy, from the Central Library for Students. How many people passing the drab house in Tavistock Square have the remotest idea that from this centre, unmarked by anything more grandiose than a small brass plate, mental and spiritual light is being steadily radiated to the inhabitants of utmost Thule. In the island of Foula, where the grown-up people cannot leave their crofts in the scanty summer, the school-children are enlisted as carriers. A schoolmaster describes how in the winter he carried the books himself until he fell in with the sheep-dogs sent out to bring them to the distant croft. On this island a population of 175 borrows 1,300 books a year. Guiberwick, with a population of 200, calls for 700 every six months. Minute records are kept at Dunfermline of the kind of reading that appeals to various kinds of readers. “For the fiction,” says the librarian, Miss Thomson, “taken on a whole, they read very good novels. The general works are of a varied nature, but I have noticed that books dealing with the literature, fauna, flora, and topography of each island are much in favour. We also supply books in Gaelic, which are widely read both by adults and juveniles.” Anyone who has wandered in the lonelier parts of the Highlands will know what are the difficulties of a service to the remote glens and the foresters’ stations in the deer-forests, and what a priceless gift a handful of books always is.

It must be evident from this short account that the rural problem has been tackled on the cheapest lines. The maximum cost of any county scheme has in no instance exceeded the yield of a halfpenny rate; and until there are centres throughout a shire, or until supplementary means are employed, such as the establishment of stationary libraries at accessible points in certain areas, it is not likely to increase appreciably. The following typical examples of county expenditure are given by the Trustees in their report on the year 1920:—

| | Total | School | | | |
| | population | population | | | Cost |
| Age of | of area | of area | Total | Rate | per | No. of
County. | Scheme. | served. | served. | Cost. | equivalent. | head. | Centres.
Staffordshire | 4th yr. | 246,000 | 35,000 | £525 | ¹⁄₁₈d. | ¹⁄₂d. | 206
Gloucestershire | 2nd “ | 212,000 | 30,000 | 500 | ¹⁄₈d. | ¹⁄₂d. | 303
Cardiganshire | 3rd “ | 60,000 | 6,500 | 440 | ¹⁄₄d. | 1³⁄₄d. | 45
Wiltshire | 1st “ | 181,000 | 34,000 | 435 | ¹⁄₁₂d. | ¹⁄₂d. | 90
Notts | 2nd “ | 100,000 | 13,421 | 580 | ¹⁄₆d. | 1¹⁄₂d. | 164
Somerset | 2nd “ | 335,000 | 52,000 | 450 | ¹⁄₁₈d. | ¹⁄₃d. | 223

It was a wise stroke of policy to make a beginning through the schools and the children. A reading public is in process of manufacture, and through the books and the readers thus introduced into rustic households even the stubborn bucolic mind can hardly fail to receive some impression. But the risk of beginning in a small way is that people will be content with small results, or, even worse, that the service may have such insignificant consequences that nobody will mind if it declines into something like the old-fashioned school library or disappears altogether. The country districts are being supplied with boxes of books; they are not being put into contact with libraries—they are not yet supplied with what Professor Adams laid down as the first essential, “a permanent collection of certain important reference books and standard works.” Such a permanent nucleus is in truth the essential basis of a library service; a rotation of book-boxes is, in reality, but auxiliary to this. Unless it be firmly realized that what has been done is only a very small beginning, and that enormously more remains to be done before an adequate library service is provided, a fatal mistake will have been committed, as paralysing to future progress as the blunder of 1850, which made public libraries a failure on the whole throughout the first period of their existence. The warning ought by now to have been taken to heart. In their manner of dealing with the rural library, the county education authorities are on their trial. If the wonted errors of bureaucratic management are committed, if there is a lack of vision and of sympathy with the villager, especially the villager who will not be hustled inside the fold of organized adult education, failure to come to grips with the thorny problems of rural psychology, and, above all, a one-ideaed zeal for economy and a cheap sort of efficiency, not much can be hoped for until public opinion, when our new readers have grown up, imperiously demands more.

So far, little has been attempted, except in one or two counties blessed with an open-minded and energetic librarian, to secure the personal contact and the insight into local needs and local avenues of approach that are the indispensable preliminaries to success. For the extension work that has proved so lucrative in urban libraries there is doubly and trebly a need in the country, if libraries are to play any vital part in the rural economy. During the last few years, fortunately, many agencies have come into being or have acquired a new lease of life through which missionary enterprises can be carried on, granted the necessary intelligence and driving-power at the centre. Rural conditions have changed profoundly since the war. There is a keen desire to make life in the country interesting, to open the stagnant backwater into the general stream. Here there is a village club or a women’s institute, there a branch of the W.E.A.; the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A. have both identified themselves with these and other local activities and initiated fresh projects themselves, including small libraries, reading circles, and educational programmes; one place has a field club, another a musical society; almost everywhere there are boy scouts, girl guides, and other elements of social life, to all of which the library movement should come as an aid and a stimulus. Some of these may form a natural home for the village library; others will provide materials for reading circles and similar enterprises on the part of librarians having some insight into the rustic mind and a determination to break down initial barriers. But to make such efforts effective, the policy of the rural library authority must be pushing, adaptive, and not a parsimonious one, and the staff of librarians must be something more than machines for distributing books.

The directors of education and the county librarians who are in charge of rural systems might learn a good deal from the district organizers employed by the Village Clubs Association. This organization was founded during the war, with Government assistance, to stimulate social life in the country, and counteract the tendency of the villagers to migrate into towns. It works principally by encouraging the formation of village clubs and institutes, and assisting these with advice and practical help, especially by getting them to co-operate in schemes for lectures, classes, entertainments, sports, competitions, and the like. Several hundred thriving clubs are affiliated to the Association, and the staff of officials—men chosen for their experience of rural conditions and insight into rustic mentality—are in touch with everything that goes on throughout a radius extending over two or three counties. Many clubs have through local benefactions acquired large and beautiful village halls, which are obviously the destined home of the village library—in point of fact, they are not yet the actual home even where the village has a library centre, bureaucratic authority much preferring the school, official routine and discipline to mere human nature.

The Village Clubs Association takes an active interest in the intellectual side of rural life; it promotes the formation of village libraries, very sensibly urging every club to make itself the owner of a small reference collection, to buy some books for lending, and borrow from the Central Library to satisfy demands beyond the average. The Association, further, busies itself in promoting study circles, lectures, and evening classes, official or otherwise. It has its own library and education committee, whose activities coincide in large measure with the work that the county education committees and directors of education are doing, or ought to be doing, in carrying out the rural library scheme. Yet the Village Clubs Association and the educational authorities, even in counties where rural libraries exist and both are ostensibly engaged in furthering the same purposes, have done nothing yet in concert, have not availed themselves of each others’ services, and so far as a person who is not a Government official can make out, do not know of each others’ existence. In short, this is another notable instance of our national gift for doing things twice over and at the same time leaving them undone, of paying twice for the same job and declining to do it properly because of the expense. This too, in days of anti-waste campaigns and niggardly economy. The education committee and the director of education in each county work under the Board of Education; the Village Clubs Association is foster-mothered by the Board of Agriculture. It is, apparently, not official etiquette that the Association should recommend the village clubs to seek the benefits of the education authority’s library scheme—their pamphlets of information and advice do not mention the new possibilities opened out by the Act of 1919—or, on the other hand, for the education authority to utilize the organizing experience and fit its own schemes into the framework which the Association could put at its disposal.

If the education authorities ignore official or semi-official work such as this, it is to be feared that they will be slow to recognize and co-ordinate the thousand and one activities, the libraries and institutes founded by private effort, and the numberless bodies that are trying hard to infuse a new spirit into rural life. Will they take over or work in any kind of partnership with the library schemes of the Y.M.C.A., the village library association working in Worcestershire, or that centred in Barnett House, Oxford? Will they make the various field clubs and other local societies their coadjutors? Unless they do, all the elements of a real social and intellectual resurrection in the villages will be left just outside their radius. It was a good thing to begin with the schools, but the work must get beyond the school at the first opportunity. The village school is only a makeshift base for the great intellectual and civilizing crusade in which all available forces must be concentrated. It is very difficult indeed to evoke in a schoolroom the congenial atmosphere of the library, the reading circle, and the village institute. The very word education, with its narrow associations, is unpopular and repressive. Adult education will have to get rid of the second term before it can become an inspiration. The sooner, therefore, the rural library can leave the school and schooling behind the better. To do so everywhere, in most places perhaps, is not yet possible; but where it is possible, directors of education must not be allowed to frown upon the suggestion. Freedom and initiative, spontaneous personal development, are the chief things to aim at, and they will be attained most easily in regions outside the range of our present educational machinery.

Salvation will probably come to the rural library movement from such counties as are enlightened enough to form leagues between villages, with real not perfunctory libraries in convenient centres, or combinations of borough or urban district libraries with neighbouring villages. Only when a growing proportion of the rural public has the opportunity of direct contact with libraries, and not merely with small batches of books sent them at stated intervals, will they realize what a true library service can do. Only then will there be much hope of co-ordinating all the miscellaneous local efforts into active schemes of library extension. Incidentally, unless events have meanwhile hurried on the process of linking up all our public libraries into a national system, such combinations may furnish a suggestive example to the towns. But to achieve all this, it is doubtful if we should make heavy demands upon the county education committees, unless they depute this side of their work to a strong sub-committee, reinforced with co-opted members from outside. Representation of other interests than those of schools and education, representation of the many voluntary bodies who are striving to reanimate the countryside, representation, above all, of the people who read or whom we want to read the books, is a radical necessity. To this point there will be a return in the next chapter, where the general question of who shall manage our reconstituted libraries will arise.

In the United States, where the obstacles to a rural library service are still more formidable, the town population being only 45 per cent. of the whole, various plans have been tried, and a different method than that recently adopted in this country has met with most success, the method of expansion outwards from a library at the centre, freely open to the public. The State library commissions do not flatter themselves that they have completely solved the problem, for only 794 of the 2964 counties in the United States have as yet one or more libraries of not less than 5,000 volumes; but they are apparently on the highroad to success. At all events, they are fully aware of the extent and value of their opportunities. All the states in the union have State libraries, and most have library commissions, which operate in different ways, some with exemplary thoroughness, and some, it must be confessed, rather perfunctorily. Many states have systems of travelling libraries, that in New York being the most extensive and flourishing. Yet comparing this with the rival county system now to be described, a well-informed critic says, “The few people reached compared with the great rural population of the state of New York, wherein the travelling library under the direction of the State Library Commission seems to be more widely used than in any other state of the Union, indicates the futility of trying, by means of a travelling library system operated from the capital of the state, to supply farm homes with library privileges.”[22] Municipal libraries have reached their highest development in Massachusetts, which has on its public shelves more than six million volumes, about two to each inhabitant; but in the absence of a county system the rural population is neglected. Indiana also has an admirable township law, empowering townships to combine and work in concert; yet only one rural inhabitant in each eleven enjoys library privileges. A very different tale is told in those states where the system of the central county library has been set up, though the system is even now but in its infancy.

The pioneer county library was established in 1901 in Van Wert, Ohio, in a state where the library movement had hitherto made but indifferent progress. Funds for a building had been left to the county town by a self-made banker, J. S. Brumback, and his heirs decided that it should be a library for the whole county, whereby 30,000 people would enjoy benefits that would otherwise have been restricted to 8,000. The county is small and compact, measuring 405 square miles, and is predominantly a rural area, 16,300 persons at that time living on farms or in out-of-the-way spots, and the inhabitants of the towns depending largely for business on the rural population. The county spirit is strong. There are county parks, a county fair, a county hospital, a county Chautauqua, agricultural shows, sports, singing contests, and other county affairs. Hence the tree was planted in the right soil, and took hold at once. A county tax was sanctioned, a large initial stock of books was acquired, and has been continually augmented; and when the stock had increased to 25,000 the whole library service, which is threefold, dealing with the town of Van Wert, with fifteen branches, and with the schools in town and country, was run at an aggregate cost of $7,000 per annum. The staff is divided into three departments corresponding to the three divisions of the service, besides the custodians at the branches, who receive an honorarium for their attendance at certain hours. An equal if not a greater circulation of books is attained through the schools than even through the branch stations. Sunday schools are pressed into the work, and the extension activities are multifarious. Collections of 125 books are sent to each branch every three months; in addition, supply boxes of a hundred books go regularly to some branches, and when required to others. Every inhabitant of the county it must be understood, is entitled to borrow direct from the central library. This is an important point, and, observes the librarian, it would be still more important if the central library were worked on the open access system. In 1920, the total number of agencies in operation was 142, comprehending, besides the central library, five city stations, six city schools, fifteen branches, and 115 school collections. The registered borrowers comprise nearly sixty per cent. of the whole population, three-quarters of them using the central library, whether they live in the town or in the villages. Though weeding-out is a regular practice, obsolete books being ruthlessly discarded and the library supplied with the latest books so as to be a real workshop, the total stock is now 30,597,[23] which is rather more than one volume per head of the population.

Van Wert is a small county, and the compactness of the area served gives it an immense advantage over areas of the size of most English counties, which would have to be divided into library districts to be put on the same footing. But the superiority of the county system, with its facilities for direct access as well as its service through the branch stations and the schools, over the mere travelling library, was so manifest that the system rapidly spread. Among the states that have adopted county library laws, following Ohio’s example, are Wyoming, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, California, Maryland, Washington, Nebraska, Oregon, Iowa. Canada, also, has welcomed the system. California has the largest number of county libraries, and is not far from covering the whole area of the state with a library service. It has a state board of examiners in librarianship, and only certificated persons are eligible to county library posts. One laudable social object is clearly realized as a motive behind rural library policy in the United States, to encourage the people to live as far as they can from the heart of the cities, in spots where they can own a little ground for cultivation, and enjoy pure air and a wholesome environment. If the practical American looks at it in this way, we may be sure that there is much force in the contention that a first-rate library service in the country would be a real attraction and help materially in the movement back to the land.

Here it is worth while mentioning a different class of library that is multiplying fast in the United States, greatly to the furtherance of the same movement—agricultural libraries. There are three varieties of these, the library of the agricultural college, that attached to the experimental station, and the agricultural library formed by a private individual or a farming corporation. Their are sixty-five agricultural colleges in the States, maintained by state or federal funds. Primarily, such libraries serve the college students; but the colleges have adopted a strenuous extension policy, running short winter courses for farmers, organizing agricultural clubs, sending out instructive groups of exhibits, batches of books, reading lists and reading matter, in the form of pamphlets, cuttings, and answers to inquiries. The University of Wisconsin distributes books by parcel post and issues bibliographical bulletins; the Massachusetts Agricultural College has a system of travelling libraries; Purdue University prepares select libraries of agricultural literature and takes steps to sell these to farmers. “Through the farmers’ papers, on the special trains, at fairs and at institutes, the work was carried on.”[24] Agricultural libraries are an essential auxiliary to the experimental station, where the work is forwarded materially by the services of an expert librarian skilled in searching out information. The experimental station and its library play a part in answering queries from working agriculturalists, similar to that played by our commercial and technical libraries for the benefit of manufacturers and men of business.

The advantages of basing a rural library service on a central library to which the readers can resort if they desire are manifold. Foremost is the supremely important point that the users can come if and when they will to see and handle the books and make themselves familiar with the library’s contents. Open access in town libraries has been, not merely an educational factor, but an inspiration. The box of books doled out from a repository that the reader has never seen, and to which he would not be admitted if he applied, is better than nothing, but it is a library service only to those who have hitherto had nothing. A town takes a pride in its library; the villager would have the same personal interest in the collection of books housed in the village hall. An inaccessible repository is not likely to excite the feelings of county patriotism which have been a valuable element in the success of the Brumback Library, Ohio. Such patriotism is needed, if the unanimous social effort required of this new experiment, much more than it was required in the towns, is to become a reality.

Library of the South-Eastern Agricultural College, Wye.

The ideal plan would be to divide the large counties into sections, each centering in a town or regional library. The town libraries exist, and if proper financial conditions were arranged the towns would probably not be averse from coming into a well-planned scheme. They would gain, not lose, by the change, since the available stock of books would be enlarged indefinitely and there would be a wider apportionment of overhead charges. At present, Somerset is worked from the little watering-place of Burnham, which has no library service for itself, and books are actually sent across the width of the shire into the suburbs of Bath, a town rejoicing in a large collection of lending-library books used mainly for desultory reference purposes. How much better were Somerset mapped out into districts served from the existing public libraries at Radstock, Weston-super-Mare, Taunton, and Bridgewater, with new ones established at Glastonbury, Wells, or other places, unable singly to afford a library. Why should not Sussex be supplied from the chain of admirable libraries in her south coast towns, with a new one in the hinterland at Horsham? Kent has public libraries at Maidstone, Gravesend, Chatham, Bromley, Canterbury, and Folkestone; Maidstone, with its Bentlif Institute comprising library, museum, and art gallery, would form a central magazine hardly to be surpassed, and with subordinate centres at the other places it would be easy to cater for the whole county. Wiltshire is served from Trowbridge, where the bookless inhabitants have to be sternly repulsed from the sacred repository, whilst Calne and Salisbury have libraries of their own that might co-operate in supplying this large agricultural area. Similarly, the Gloucestershire repository is in the county town, and has no dealings with the Gloucester Public Library. Examples might be multiplied; but the reader need only open the map of the United Kingdom to see how easy and natural a thing it would be to adopt the American county library system and centre our rural service in an accessible library building, with its reference collection, its reading rooms, and above all, its lending book-shelves thrown open to all comers. The Librarian of the National Liberal Club, Mr. C. R. Sanderson, prepared a scheme for Middlesex, one of the latest counties to accept the Carnegie grant, for organizing a regional service worked from a central library established within the joint boundary of Southgate and Friern Barnet, which have between them a population approaching 60,000. The alternative to this proposal is the usual travelling library system, and it remains to be seen which will be ultimately adopted. Middlesex, most of which is mere suburb of London, is in circumstances very different from those of the average county. It already has a score of public libraries in its towns and urban districts, many of which would be anything but worse off if they were linked into a county scheme. Failing that consummation, towards which, however, it may be hoped that future events will lead, there seems no reason but timidity and short-sighted frugality to hesitate in choosing the American pattern.

The more rapidly the method of the travelling book-box spreads into counties in which efficient urban libraries are already working, the sooner will its radical defects appear; common sense and obvious convenience will presently call for the abolition of such anomalies, and insist on a proper utilization of existing resources. The earlier this happens the better, for such utilization will be far more economic than an ineffective system, however cheaply run. The outcome will be something much nearer the goal indicated by the Adult Education Committee in their Final Report.[25]

“The hope lies in the recognition of the county market town as the natural centre for the surrounding villages and the gradual development of transport facilities radiating from the market towns.... The development of transport and the extended use of electric power will tend to the decentralization of industry and the movement of firms from the town to the country. It is improbable, however, that town workers will be prepared, in any large numbers—even when the housing shortage is remedied—to exchange urban life for life in the country so long as the latter is without the counterpart of the many and varied activities to which they have become accustomed in the towns.... The rural problem, from whatever point of view it is regarded—economic, social, or political—is essentially a problem of re-creating the rural community, of developing new social traditions and a new culture. The great need is for a living nucleus of communal activity in the village, which will be a centre from which radiate the influence of different forms of corporate effort, and to which the people are attracted to find this satisfaction of their social and intellectual needs. We conceive this nucleus to be a village institute, under full public control.... The institute should contain a hall large enough for dances, cinema shows, concerts, plays, public lectures, and exhibitions. At the institute there should be a public library and local museum. If arrangements can be made for games and sports, so much the better. The institute, in a word, should be a centre of educational, social, and recreational activity.... As the institutes will be used more and more for public and quasi-public purposes, it seems to us that they should be established out of public funds. In the main, the establishment of village institutes should be a national charge. The complicated social and economic questions which we call collectively the rural problem are a matter of the greatest national importance. They do not admit of any simple solution. They need to be approached by many roads; one of the most important is through direct encouragement to the establishment of a new communal organization and to the development of corporate activities and social institutions in harmony with modern social ideas. The State cannot create a new social spirit; it can but provide opportunities for its growth and expression. One of the chief of these opportunities is the village institute, and we can think of no more profound or far-reaching piece of rural reconstruction than the provision of buildings expressly designed as a focus of the social activities of village communities. Whether such institutes become active centres of social and educational work will depend largely upon the degree in which voluntary organizations of various kinds co-operate in utilizing the opportunities which the institutes present. It is clear that a village institute can never become the mainspring of organized life in the village unless the organized activities of the village centre in the institute. The success of village institutes in the future rests upon an appeal to groups of people with common interests, rather than to individuals. It is because they have, in recent years, begun to flourish that we look forward hopefully to a vigorous life within the village institutes.”

Only let the library hold the central position in these rural institutes that it held in the Mechanics’ Institutes before the Public Libraries Acts, and let the numerous libraries—and institutes—be knitted together in active fraternal union, and the Committee’s dreams may easily be accomplished.[26]

FOOTNOTES:

[18] The Adult Education Committee may have been justified in laying the blame for this state of things on “the want of foresight of the original promoters of the movement, who assumed that the institutions would appeal only to the artisan classes of the large centres of population”; but they were hardly right in going on to ascribe it more particularly to their mistake in allowing the legislature “to restrict the expenditure of public money to the product of a penny rate.”

[19] A Report on Library Provision and Policy, by Professor W. G. S. Adams (1915), p. 15.

[20] “Prior to 1920, pioneer rural schemes had been financed or assisted by the Trust in the counties or areas noted in column ‘A’ below; column ‘B’ shows the counties to which grants have been sanctioned this year; column ‘C’ shows the counties whose Authorities are in negotiation (preliminary or advanced) with a view to a grant.”

A
Perthshire
Caithness
Montrose District
Nottinghamshire
Staffordshire
Wiltshire
Gloucestershire
Buckinghamshire
Dorsetshire
Somersetshire
Yorkshire Village Library
Cardigan
Carnarvon
Brecon & Radnor
Denbighshire
Montgomeryshire
Grantham District
Westmorland
Warwickshire

B
Sutherland
Clackmannan
Renfrewshire
Forfar & Kincardine
Midlothian
Berwickshire
Peeblesshire
Dumbartonshire
Kent
Pembrokeshire
Glamorganshire
West Sussex
Cheshire
Inverness

C
Flint
Carmarthen
Anglesey
Middlesex
Hampshire (Isle of Wight)
Hampshire (Southampton)
Worcestershire
Northamptonshire
Cumberland
Durham
Northumberland
Kirkcudbright
Nairn
Fife
Bedfordshire
Surrey
Linlithgow
Shropshire
Cambridge
Isle of Man

(Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, Seventh Annual Report, 1921; p. 9.)

[21] Library Association Record—“The Gloucestershire Rural Library Scheme,” by Miss A. S. Cooke (Feb., 1921).

[22] S. B. Antrim and E. I. Antrim, The County Library (1914), p. 238.

[23] Total number of vols. accessioned (Dec. 31, 1920) 37,302; number in the library 30,597.

[24] J. H. Friedel: Training for Librarianship, p. 106.

[25] pp. 141-5.

[26] The character of the best type of village institute may be judged from the following account of the Nettlebed Working Men’s Club and Institute:—

“Perhaps the most original feature of the equipment of the hall is the provision of a cinematograph apparatus. The provision of picture palaces in all English villages would be a doubtful advantage, if they showed the baser sort of ‘cowboy’ and other sensational films. Given some restraint in the choice of subject, however, moving pictures make winter evenings more changeful. During 1918 the cinema was used very little, but it is now running every Saturday evening, and draws full houses. Mr. Fleming’s main idea in installing a cinema at Nettlebed was to make use of its educational possibilities. The Oxfordshire Education Committee welcomed the provision, as also did the Inspector of Schools, the more so because it extended advantages to the school children of six parishes near Nettlebed. The Education Code permits teachers to take the whole or part of a school for rambles or visits to places of educational interest during school hours, and films have been shown at Nettlebed on certain afternoons to a concourse of children. The subjects of the pictures were chosen to illustrate geography, history, English, and nature study. A village club can conduct its ‘cinema department’ by joining a lending library of films, so that the subjects can be duly varied.

“The higher aspects of village life have not, however, been neglected at Nettlebed. Concerts, lectures, and dances are held in the men’s hall, which is laid with a special dancing floor of oak, famous throughout the district, and this is protected in the ordinary way by a cloth covering. Dancing classes are held weekly for children in the afternoon and for adults in the evening, and are conducted by a lady resident in the village. An instructress, under whose care the young girls in the village and district are taught cookery, laundry work, and housekeeping, lives in a house near the hall. Across the road is the school garden, divided into some fourteen plots, each cared for by one boy. At the back of the playground is an old building converted into a carpenter’s shop, in which another section of the boys work under the supervision of the village schoolmaster. All of these branches are under the control of the County Education Authority. Altogether, it will be seen that in these various ways instruction as well as amusement is provided.” Sir Lawrence Weaver, Village Clubs and Halls (1920), pp. 82-3.

V
A NATIONAL LIBRARY SERVICE.

Centralization proved to be the only way of extending a library service to the rural districts. No village, unless through the largess of a plutocrat, could build up and maintain anything worth calling a library for itself. Given a centralized system, some sort of service can be run cheaply, and a first-class service can be run economically. Does it not follow that some measure of centralization would be good for urban libraries, enabling them to save in certain directions, and making their resources go a great deal further than they go at present in the direction of widest utility? The largest libraries have managed to be self-sufficing, not merely because they have more money to spend, but rather because their service is organized on the principle of a centralized group. There is a point beyond which it does not pay a library to provide from its own resources all that its users may possibly require. Each library must determine this point for itself. The everyday wants of its readers ought to be satisfied on the spot and at the moment; but to go far beyond that point even should a local Crœsus provide the wherewithal, would be extravagant, entailing surplusage, overlapping, and waste. Spending money on books only in occasional request is to spend too little on books in continual demand. The library of moderate means cannot pretend to satisfy both daily and exceptional wants, unless it is able to call upon outside resources, such as a Central Library for Students developed to such a capacity that it forms a sufficient reservoir for supplementing all the moderate-sized stocks in the country. If most of the urban libraries were brought into a co-operative network of libraries, with mechanism for interchange by which the book lacking here would be supplied there, or else from a larger regional library or a clearing-house at the centre, obviously a service equal to the pooled resources of the whole system would be provided without the present waste on overlapping.

Central organization exists in the big provincial cities; that is the reason for their superiority, and they are superior in a degree far beyond that of mere size. It does not exist in London; that is why serious readers must have recourse to the British Museum or the big special libraries, to satisfy their requirements; or if, like the great majority, they can rarely do this, they must go without. London is the most glaring illustration of the vices due to mere parochial methods; it suffers, not so much because its library resources are limited, as because they are not mobilized. For certain purposes, it has already been noted, both London and provincial libraries acknowledge the economic value of some centralization. Thus every municipal library has given up buying books in Braille type for the blind, and relies for this branch of its service upon the National Library at Westminster. A great many subscribe to the Central Library for Students, and draw upon that for books required by specialist readers. A large number help to provide the funds for the great Subject-Index to Periodicals, which makes the contents of reviews, magazines, technical and scientific journals, filed in their reference departments, available for instant use. This may not seem much compared with the results of joint effort or of State supervision in America, where they have co-operative cataloguing, co-operative publication of bibliographies and aids for readers, and elaborate facilities for professional training; but it is a beginning. The Adult Education Committee can think of no way to endow the industries of the country with an adequate series of technical libraries except by centralization. Although many librarians, represented by the Library Association, do not approve of the particular scheme put forward, they are at one with the Committee in admitting that co-ordination of the separate libraries and the establishment of a central supply is the only way to solve this problem.

Although, however, the partial and unequal development of public libraries which the Adult Education Committee by a slip in their logic put down to the rate limit, is due, as the report conclusively shows, to their having had to struggle along in isolation, it would be disastrous to take the control of the local libraries entirely out of the hands of the local authorities. This would stultify all efforts to inspire public opinion and evoke local pride. No institution in a civilized society is more sure to be an expression of corporate life and local individuality than a communal library, in the building up of which the actual users have had a hand. A system, however complete and efficient, bestowed by a Government department, however benevolent, would be sure eventually to stifle all such aspirations. The local communities in both town and country must have a decisive voice in the management of their libraries. They must have a larger voice, not a smaller, than they have had hitherto. Local initiative has never had free play. Why is it that public libraries rarely excite that interest and enthusiasm in which the promoters hopefully confided? The answer is obvious. Libraries have suffered from official repression, and have not had even the doubtful advantage of official tutelage. If a town wished to spend liberally on its library, it was pulled up by the rate limit. If it wanted lectures, the Government auditor put in his veto: he does so still. And so with any of the excursions from the programme prescribed from above that would have helped to realize a higher ideal. Library authorities have been confined to the unimaginative duty of exercising circumscribed and inadequate powers, and the library committee has enjoyed the least prestige of all the council’s departments. More local control, more powers of initiative, and more representation of the actual users of the library are needed, if a vigorous and useful life is to be maintained.

But this is fully compatible with healthy co-operation between the different authorities under the guiding supervision of a central department. Some authorities may require a stimulus; they should not be allowed to victimize those among their constituents who crave the very necessities of civilized life. Cases are not unknown where borough councils have failed to carry out, or have deliberately emasculated, a library scheme approved by a majority of the ratepayers. Education is compulsory: it is a question whether one of the chief instruments of education should be at the mercy of a local body to grant or withhold. For, so inconsiderable a place does the library take at present in local politics, the average borough council, elected to manage the trams, the streets, water, electricity, and other mundane affairs, seldom represents the views of the citizen on such a different matter as libraries; and the committee appointed by such a council hardly ever represents or is fully cognizant of the views of the people who actually use the library.

Fortunately, the times when a policy of rate-saving at all costs, or the selfishness of a leisured class enjoying their subscription libraries and not in favour of too much education for the lower orders, or the interested opposition of the liquor trade and the music hall proprietor, were able to keep out or keep down public libraries, are gradually passing away. They have not gone altogether; but it would be invidious to name the two or three distinguished boroughs where these influences are still rampant. The problem now is to bring the great crowd of under-developed and under-nourished libraries into line one with other, to assist the halt, help the blind to see, and by schemes for concerted action enable all to reach the same level of efficiency as the big towns have attained without undue exertion. A simple licence to spend more than a penny rate will not secure this by itself. Reorganization on a co-operative ground-plan will do as much as the mere expenditure of money, and money will not be spent lavishly in these frugal days. The merit of such a reorganization is that so many and so great values will be secured at a minimum cost. The material is in existence for an enormous improvement of the services.

Had not the sweeping proposals of the Adult Education Committee for making the local education authority the library authority been negatived before the late Bill came into Parliament, the heterogeneous units that constitute the library service of London would after the Act of 1919 have come under the unifying influence of the London Education Committee. It was such a near thing that we may pause to consider the probable results. As already noticed, library development in the metropolis has been unequal in the extreme. Certain boroughs are still destitute of a public library system. The total number of books in the remainder is about a million and a half. All these metropolitan libraries are established under the same Acts; till recently they drew their income from a uniform rate (except in certain boroughs where a high rateable value allowed the penny to be reduced to a halfpenny); the governing bodies are in each district a committee of the borough council. Yet each group of libraries is a distinct entity. Each authority is a law unto itself. A ratepayer in one borough is not permitted to borrow from the library in the next though interchange of privileges would have been, not merely a logical but a great economic advantage. There has been no consultation between the authorities to avoid overlapping in neighbouring reference libraries, though correlative specialization would have been easy and remunerative.[27] Every reference library develops on individual lines, perhaps as a British Museum in miniature, with the result that, out of a number much larger than the total number of boroughs, not one is above the standard of a second-rate library in the provinces. Some committees offer a cordial welcome to students at school or college in their boroughs. Others repulse such students unless they are ratepayers or at least residents in the borough.[28]

The immediate advantage of combining all the local libraries of London and Greater London into one system, all available to any one living or working in any quarter, and supplementing each other by a simple method of interchange, is manifest. The majority of the reference libraries should be shut up at once, and the space used for library purposes that have hitherto been neglected. Provided that every branch has a good collection of quick-reference books, there is no need for most of these—many of them are legacies of the still more parochial government of London before the present boroughs were formed. A proportion of the contents should be used to augment the stock of the Central Library for Students, which is now, in a small way, a central depot for the lending libraries of both London and the country. The remainder, after all useless and obsolete material had been sent to the destructor, would be brought together to form the initial stock of some six or eight really excellent reference libraries, so placed that every potential reader would be within the radius of a tram-ride. Six or eight large central libraries might be selected for the purpose, and would require little alteration beyond the removal of the lending department, for which room would have been found elsewhere.

Whenever the present haphazard library service of London is superseded by a unified system, there will be a possibility of incorporating into it, or associating as auxiliaries, various public or semi-public libraries not belonging to the municipalities. London is not poor in its bibliothecal possessions, though badly served. In 1910, Mr. R. A. Rye calculated that in the public and administrative libraries and those belonging to various institutions, Greater London had a total of eight and a half million volumes, of which one and a half million are inaccessible to the general public.[29] This gave a supply of one volume per head, which may be compared with Berlin’s two volumes, Dresden’s three, and the four per head in Paris. Such comparisons, it should be observed, are not a matter of simple arithmetic. A larger community may find its account in a smaller relative stock, be that organized for use. A family of five with ten books would be badly off. A town of 50,000 with 100,000 volumes would be opulent. London, with a system of centralization and distribution comprehending all these varied resources, would probably be as well off as any city in the world. It is largely a question of realizing the intellectual capital that is now paying such poor dividends. Special libraries, such as that of the Patent Office, the National Science and the National Art Libraries at South Kensington, the Public Record Office, and others, like the various economic and sociological, historical, medical, legal, and other libraries attached to technical or scientific institutions, would continue to stand apart, but would stand in a definite relation to the general service.

Reading Room of the General Library, University of London.

The proper balance between local control and the superintending departments—and sub-departments, if the nation’s libraries are reorganized as several great territorial systems—would not be difficult to contrive, so as to preserve and foster the rights of each community to self-expression. It is not proposed to work these out in detail here. Briefly, the functions of the central board would be:—(1) to install and operate the machinery for interchange and central supply, the latter ultimately superseding the former altogether; (2) to see that the local libraries and more especially the selection of books are maintained at a proper level; (3) to undertake such wholesale services as cataloguing and the compilation of aids to readers, work which is now done over and over again by individual library staffs at great expense, or else is neglected; (4) to organize and finance the training of librarians, and see that they are properly paid. Ultimately, librarianship might be organized as a sort of civil service; at any rate, librarians ought to be as carefully looked after by the State as are the teachers.

Many other enterprises of vast public benefit could be, most appropriately, engineered by the central office; for example, the publication of large editions of non-copyright books in a form suitable for lending library use. Bookbinding is another item of local expenditure that calls urgently for mass treatment. It is not proposed, however, that the central library authority should set up a binding factory in opposition to the trade. This would be unnecessary, for it would be in such a commanding position, as by far the largest purchaser in the market, that it could dictate its own terms to publishers, printers, binders, and even to paper-makers. The fact is, the rebinding of books in public libraries might, for the most part, be done away with, if paper, covers, and binding were originally designed to stand the wear. As a leading authority on the subject, Mr. Douglas Cockerell recently said, “Publishers still design books to meet the fancy of the casual buyer, and very largely ignore the requirements of the libraries, which are for many books their largest customers.”[30] Light, fluffy paper is selected by publishers solely to bulk out books; the thicker the book the higher the price. “Now the public may like to pay for fluff and wind, but the librarian’s interests are directly opposed to this. Increased bulk means more shelf-room, and the use of this paper means that the books will fall to pieces after a very short time.” But our central authority would surely see to it that a book produced for library use should be printed on paper of good quality and cased in split boards, which “should last in ordinary library circulation until the librarian is forced to discard it on account of the dirt it has picked up.”

Another need of paramount importance to all engaged in the pursuit of knowledge is that the contents of the numerous periodicals produced throughout the world, registering advances in all branches of science and research, should be abstracted and indexed, so that the material should be rendered accessible or at any rate its existence fully known.[31] Mention has already been made of the Subject-Index to Periodicals, in which some hundred and fifty periodicals are systematically indexed. This important undertaking was initiated some years ago by Mr. E. Wyndham Hulme, late librarian to H.M. Patent Office; it has been carried on successively under the auspices of the “Athenæum” and of the Library Association. It is at present a heavy burden upon a few devoted shoulders, although a very large part of the labour is performed by volunteers; yet its scheme is susceptible of indefinite expansion, if all the requirements of scientific and technical workers are to be, even approximately, met. It is eminently a task pertaining to the library, the university and college library, the special library, and the research department of all types. Were there a central library department in existence, it would undertake this as part of its ordinary routine. It would also undertake the collateral task of preparing and publishing a union catalogue of the long sets of periodicals of all kinds to which the Subject-Index gives the references, and it would indicate where these sets are to be found. Besides the indexing, it would perhaps carry out the further but hardly less valuable work of drawing up and issuing systematic digests of important new knowledge contained in the learned periodicals. It has been recently proposed that the British Museum should carry out this necessary piece of national work, the cost of which, sales being allowed for, would not be excessive.[32]

Such results, however, invaluable as they would be to the whole nation, through the services rendered to several classes of workers, would be only a by-product of the centralizing and systematizing process, the immediate object of which would be the betterment of our libraries. Let us return then from this digression. In the middle of last century and towards its end, Edward Edwards and then his biographer, Thomas Greenwood, both stated their conviction that central control was necessary, and that one of its most useful instruments would be systematic inspection. Greenwood quotes the following from Edwards:—

“If every Library in this country on which the public has any fair claim, could be brought distinctly under public view, by a precise and periodical statement, comprising at least three particulars: (1) what it is; (2) what it has; and (3) what it does; a long train of improvements would inevitably follow. But the systematic inspection of Public Libraries to be effective must be national.”[33]

He goes on:

“The present writer is convinced that there will never be a full measure of health and vitality in libraries generally until some central control of this nature is established. The largest and best of the public libraries do not need it, but would welcome it to secure the welfare of the library body politic. But there is a class of libraries, and it is to be feared that it is not a small one, which seriously need to have light from the outside brought to bear upon their administration. Such libraries are managed in a narrow, illiberal manner, with rules which hamper rather than help the public. The staff is selected without regard to conditions of suitability, training, or merit, and every method adopted is of the tamest and least efficient kind. Only national and systematic inspection can alter this state of affairs. His Majesty’s inspectors of public schools perform an efficient and salutary work without curbing local aspirations, and similar inspectors of public libraries would be able to carry out an equally useful task in connection with the municipal libraries. But it is plain that no form of public Government inspection would be agreeable to existing library authorities, unless accompanied by some kind of substantial State aid.”[34]

Government inspection of libraries is not unknown in other countries, on both sides of the Atlantic, and appears to cause no friction but a spirit of good feeling and mutual help. It is carried on, for instance, in Canada, and it is one of the functions of the State library commissions in the United States. The libraries accept it in the spirit which Edwards saw would animate the efficient library authority, and, further, welcome it as a potent means for extending their benefits into regions hitherto unreached. In Ontario the Minister of Education is responsible for the administration of the Public Libraries Act, and assigns this part of his duties to the Public Libraries Branch, of which the Inspector of Public Libraries is superintendent. But in Ontario the local authorities are so whole-hearted in their zeal that the energies of the Branch are mainly confined to general work in the interest of libraries, to routine inspections, the collection of statistics, and the payment of grants. Yet, it is admitted, the majority of librarians and library trustees would welcome a demand for a minimum standard of efficiency.

The American State commissions usually include the State librarian, other professional librarians, prominent educators, literary men, library trustees, and business men interested in the work. “Instead of regarding with jealousy the assumption by the State of powers like these, librarians generally welcome the increase of systematic work fostered by State aid and control. They are active everywhere in efforts to establish State commissions, where such do not exist, and the opponents of their efforts are usually persons unfamiliar with the modern library movement, or politicians who see in such action no benefit to themselves. In some cases, where legislatures have refused to enact a proper State library law, State library associations, voluntary bodies of librarians, have agreed to initiate and carry on, at their own expense, some of the activities usually supervised and financed by the State.”[35]

“A former agent of the Massachusetts Free Library Commission won for himself the title of ‘the travelling bishop,’ descriptive both of the estimation and affection with which he was regarded.” “State library commissions exist at present in thirty-seven states. In a few states such as in California, New York, and Utah, the State library or the State board of education, in lieu of a library commission, exerts the functions that such a commission would have.”[36]

The question of State grants to local authorities is perhaps important, but certainly not so important as some critics would make out. Equalization of burdens would of course have to be arranged. Yet, on the other hand, there should be nothing to prevent a very enterprising authority from spending a great deal more if it chose on further developments of its library service. Progress would ultimately come to a standstill if there were not this liberty; uniformity, at any level, is ultimately stagnation. The Adult Education Committee speak of State grants to local exchequers; but, apparently, these were to have been calculated on the measure of a local authority’s zeal in co-operating with educational work in the narrow sense, and not made a handle for beneficent central control. It might or it might not be advisable to assist local effort or reward enterprise by a policy of grants in aid. Anyhow, it should be borne in mind that the material benefits of such a scheme of centralization as has been roughly outlined would be tantamount to a large financial contribution by the State, though it should cost the State nothing. Apart from equalization of burdens[37] and, perhaps, rewards for noteworthy efficiency—or the converse, fines or refusal of grants for failures in efficiency—there seems to be little use in discussing what proportion of the cost of our systems of libraries should be defrayed by local rates and contributions from local authorities and what by the State. Both rates and taxes come ultimately from the same source, and, so far as that source, the rated and taxed individual, is concerned, he might as well spend his time debating which pocket he should keep his purse in. Inspections and grants from the local exchequer would, obviously, go hand in hand; but the allotment of grants would certainly not be the sole or the principal end of the system of inspection.

If all the libraries in the kingdom were linked together in a national system, the division into urban libraries and rural systems would to a large extent disappear. A large number of the urban libraries would be absorbed into groups of town and country libraries, analogous to the American county groups; and large rural areas, with small village libraries and a service of boxes, would have their focus in new central institutes easily accessible to readers in the vicinity and available for occasional visits by students at a greater distance. Many populous areas would remain much as they are at present, with some increase of facilities. But, instead of one Central Library for Students, there would have to be, sooner or later, several large supplemental libraries in convenient spots, forming magazines supplying, not individual readers, but the scattered libraries; and, probably the British Isles would have to be divided for library purposes into several provinces, each centering in one of these. Supervision of library activities in such provinces would devolve upon regional committees, elected by the county and borough authorities in each province, the central board exercising co-ordinating functions and carrying out such work as is for the general welfare.

These central supplemental libraries would be built up largely by a careful redistribution of existing resources. There is hardly a library of any size that does not contain many books which are very seldom used, books, however, which no librarian would dare to jettison, because he knows that some fine day a reader is sure to come along to whom one volume or another will be of priceless importance. There are many other books so infrequently called for that it would be an immense convenience to store them elsewhere, and utilize the valuable shelf-space for books in continual request. Books of this sort should be kept at the supplemental library, duly catalogued, and ready to be sent to any library throughout the area served, when readers require them. The supplemental libraries would, of course, be always buying more books; they would have to keep abreast of the latest advances in all subjects; but the works just described would form an important part of their original contents, and would be transferred to them free of cost. Local libraries are constantly put to the expense of buying books for one or two users; such users are, no doubt, among the most deserving of all their clients, and it is but just that their urgent wants should be satisfied. But it is a tax upon the capacities of small libraries that should be met somehow else; they would be spared it by the new system, and the cost of the supplemental library would be saved over and over again, the local library then having more funds to maintain the stock of books in regular demand.

The present Central Library for Students is a step in the right direction, but it is only a step; the work will have to be done on a very large scale. This library was an outgrowth of the efforts to supply students attending university tutorial and W.E.A. classes with books to carry on systematic reading. At the end of 1915, the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust undertook to provide £600 to assist in the establishment of the library, £2,000 for additions to the stock, and £400 yearly for five years, if £320 were raised by subscription. The subvention was afterwards raised to £1,000 a year, and in 1920 the issues of books numbered 15,500. The Adult Education Committee were deeply impressed by the exceptional value of the work performed by this library, and proposed that it should be made the nucleus of a central circulating library to supplement the local library service all over the country. With an assured income of £2,000 a year for ten years, they calculated that an annual circulation of at least 40,000 volumes would be attained; their estimate being based on an estimated cost of 1s. per volume issued. The actual cost of each issue, under our present benevolent postal regime, is considerably more. The figure is now probably not less than 1s. 6d. Add return postage to this, and you will see that, after borrowing a book two or three times, you might as well have bought it outright. The method of sending out books singly is too expensive. And a circulation of 40,000 a year would be a mere drop in the ocean; any small provincial library has an annual circulation of at least 40,000; a large borough library system in London expects an annual circulation of about a million. The thing must be done on a vast scale to be worth doing at all, and then it can be done cheaply, even if, as might reasonably be expected, the Post Office declines to grant a large rebate on the transmission of books issued from the national libraries. The proper method is to make our central library or libraries an integral part of the whole machine, supplying to all other libraries all, or nearly all, of the books that are not imperatively necessary on the spot for everyday purposes. Then the issues from the central library will not be in twos and threes, but in large batches, and the average cost will be reduced to an economic amount.

Mr. John McKillop produced a workmanlike scheme in 1907 for such a supplemental library in London as would have provided all the students and other hard working readers throughout the twenty-eight municipal boroughs with all the books required in the most exacting course of study. He proposed that it should be established by the Education Committee of the London County Council, since its greatest immediate effect would be to supply students with expensive works not now within their reach.

“With eighty-five municipal libraries already established in London, it would be useless duplication for the Education Committee to undertake all the work of registering borrowers and issuing volumes to them and safeguarding their return. It is suggested that the contents of the Council’s collection should be lent on application to the public libraries and the libraries of educational institutions which could then lend them to their clients. This method would avoid the necessity for a very large staff. The central collection would have as borrowers merely the eighty-five libraries and branches already established, and those which may be added from time to time by the boroughs in the future, together with the fifty or so polytechnics, and such other of the institutions for higher education as may care to avail themselves of the facilities offered. In any case its borrowers could not exceed a couple of hundred, and though each of these might daily draw and return large numbers of books, the clerical labour required would be but a fraction of that necessary in a smaller library, where a large number of borrowers withdraw and return one or at most two volumes each.”[38]

Mr. McKillop based his estimate of cost on the number of volumes contained in the Patent Office Library, viz., 105,000 volumes, which comprehend a very large proportion of modern scientific works. “If we take 35,000 as the number of volumes required for a modern working science library of reference (i.e., excluding the smaller text-books and class-books), and if we allow four times this number for the needs of departments other than science, we get a total of 165,000 volumes as the size of the collection. As a basis to calculate the capital cost of the collection probably 5s. is too little and 10s. too much per volume. Taking 7s. 6d. as a working figure the total cost would be about £62,000 (one penny rate in London produces £171,000). But it would be impossible to spend for this purpose wisely and economically such a sum as £62,000 within less than ten years, and the collection could be got together with reasonable rapidity by the expenditure of not more than £10,000 in any one year. The average expenditure would probably be nearer £5,000. In regard to administration the cost would be probably easily covered by £5,000 a year when in full working order, but would be four or five years in getting up to that figure.”[39]

If the cost of Mr. McKillop’s scheme was to be £5,000 a year in pre-war money, we can hardly expect much from £2,000 a year now, especially when the whole of the United Kingdom, and not London alone, is to be supplied. Further, it is hardly too optimistic to conjecture that the number of students and other serious readers in the population is a great deal higher now than it was in 1907, and, accordingly, that the demands upon our supplemental libraries would be proportionately more exacting. No, the Adult Education Committee have not looked far enough: a much bigger scheme is required, and the expenditure of much larger sums than they contemplate. But there is no need to be frightened by the cost; one may safely affirm that the general economic saving will be in direct proportion to the outlay on the establishment and upkeep of the experimental libraries. Whatever is spent at the centre, will be far more than made up by savings at the circumference.

Mr. McKillop put the case of the student of science and technology, for whose difficulties he felt most concern, although there are numerous others whose state of destitution is no less pitiful, with a cogency that cannot be bettered.

“These students may be either those whose means enable them to pursue courses of study in the splendid laboratories of University College, the Royal College of Science, the City and Guilds Institution, and other schools of equal rank, or they may be young men and women whose circumstances compel them to earn their living by daily work, and have only access to the culture and improvement offered by evening study. While the former presumably have access to the best literature of their subject in the libraries of the institutions in which they work, the latter, although, it is suggested, showing probably greater devotion and sacrifice in the pursuit of knowledge, are debarred by the hours of opening and closing from the use of the magnificent collections in the British Museum, Patent Office, and other public libraries of reference. The polytechnics, it is admitted, do make great efforts to supply the books required by their students; but it cannot be contended that at present they can compete in this respect with the other institutions named, which provide for the student who has all his day for study. It is precisely for this latter class that the public rate-supported libraries of London ought to provide, and it is a well-established fact to those who know something of the inner working of the public libraries in London, that it is one of the great sources of discontent among London’s public librarians that insufficient funds, and sometimes also unsympathetic borough council committees, prevent their doing more than is done for this class. But there are inherent difficulties which have to be taken into consideration. London is not a unit; it is twenty-eight independent units without even a semblance of federation, and it would impose an insupportable financial burden on the ratepayers if every one of the twenty-eight boroughs were to attempt to supply, through the public libraries, the books required by advanced students in science, technology, history, literature, art, and other domains of study which can be pursued in London.”

... But why should London provide twenty-eight sets of all these works? There is no probability that one student in, say, Bermondsey, and one in, say, Finsbury, will require the same volume of the Philosophical Transactions at the same time, and, therefore, it is not necessary that both Bermondsey and Finsbury, and every other library in London, should possess a set. But there is a probability that more than one student in the same borough might require the same volume at the same time; for instance, a teacher at the Battersea Polytechnic might recommend the half-dozen or so students in his advanced class in chemistry to read some classical memoir; and Battersea Public Library, to meet this demand efficiently, would require two or three sets of the Philosophical Transactions, which would be an obviously absurd arrangement. The absence of any system of co-operation between the metropolitan libraries renders it impossible for them at present to co-operate in any way in meeting this difficulty.[40] Mr. McKillop went on to show that it might be possible for the local libraries, trusting to the central collection for an adequate supply of what may be called students’ works, relatively seldom used, to work with a standard collection of popular works which would be the same in all boroughs. “When this point is reached, it might be possible to have a common catalogue for all the libraries.... The way is, in consequence, easy for a local authority which decides to establish a collection. It can procure for a very small sum the catalogue of all its collection ready made on the best lines, and all it has to do is to purchase the books, etc.”[41] Without endorsing this idea of stereotyped libraries, an idea which is obviously contrary to the vital principle that a local library, if it is truly alive, will by the predominant character of its contents show itself to be the expression of local individuality, we must admit that it opens up suggestive possibilities.

Another proposal of the Adult Education Committee lies open to more severe criticism. This was a project for assisting industries and technical students and research workers by setting up a great chain of industrial libraries forming “a technical library system for each industry,” independently of the municipal library system. Side by side with the latter, not yet, and perhaps not even then, organized as a reciprocating system, there would be erected a complex and highly expensive series of special collections, open, apparently, to members of the particular industries alone. “In the case of general libraries the unit of organization and administration is the local authority, in the case of the technical library system it should be the industry.”[42] The amount of costly and unnecessary duplication, both of contents and of machinery, in such a cumbrous scheme dumbfounds the experienced librarian, especially when he reflects that all the libraries in the kingdom could be put on a scientific basis, and all the wants of both the general public and the special industries amply satisfied, at much less the price. Such a scheme must obviously have been framed by persons having but a rudimentary idea of the library arts, or they would have thought out a much more practical and economical plan. The extravagant cost and the impracticability of the proposal have been exposed in a special Memorandum by the Library Association, representing the trained librarians of the country, who, strange to say, were not consulted before the scheme was evolved. The gist of their criticism is contained in the following paragraphs:—

“The Library Association is not prepared to admit that this policy is sound or economical. Clearly, extensive overlapping cannot be avoided, because a large number of industries require general technical libraries and not special technical libraries. For example, the motor industry is special, but a library for that industry must contain books special to many other industries, on metallurgy, chemistry, physics, and other subjects. An industrial library should comprise information, not only on the industry itself, but on subjects and industries in contact with the industry for which the library is intended. As a rule the industrial and technical student, unless he is a beginner, needs information just off the line of his special work. Hence, libraries formed round an industry will tend to become general technical libraries. Few industries are confined to one area. Birmingham is usually regarded as the centre of the hardware trade, which, however, is spread widely over the country. A technical library for an industry must have a centre and branches with all the machinery of inter-communication and exchange. Even so, the books could not be so readily accessible as by an extension of the present library service, which has developed naturally in response to the people’s demand for information. A better plan, therefore, would be the proper organization of the existing libraries of technical societies, and an extension of the present service of public libraries, the technical collections of which (so far as funds have allowed) have been selected to aid the industries of the locality. The public library service is already extensive; improvement on it is essential; but to organize another parallel service would be a regrettable waste of money in view of the great need at this time of obtaining the best technical library service at the least cost.

“The Library Association is strongly of opinion that scientific and technical information should be freely available to people who are not yet enrolled in or who are outside an industry; otherwise that industry would tend to be impervious to new ideas, except from within. They earnestly press for the efficient equipment and expansion of the existing public technical collections, and for the foundation of technical libraries, in large provincial cities, on the lines of the Patent Office Library in London.”

The Oratory Library.

The all-important question remains to be discussed: If a centralizing authority is required to enable the libraries of this country to take their proper share in reconstruction and in carrying on civilized life in an intelligent and orderly way, who is to be this centralizing authority? What Government department is fit for such a charge? Unless a new one is to be created, the Board of Education obviously has sole claim. This was the unhesitating conclusion of the Adult Education Committee. The Library Association, the membership of which is made up principally of salaried officers or elected representatives of the present municipal authorities, took alarm at this proposal, and especially at the corollary that the library authority should be the local education committee. The objections are, briefly and summarily, two: That the interests of the libraries might tend to be subordinated to those of the schools, and that bureaucratic control would stifle local interest and local initiative. But, as was urged in the chapter dealing with the interaction of libraries and schools, if the Board of Education undertook this wider responsibility, it should, and doubtless would, become a board of something more than scholastic education. Libraries must not be allowed to take a second place to the schools, the work of which at an early period of life they are destined to transcend. Let the local education committee attend, as now, to the schools, which will be, and should be, its first consideration. But let another body, appointed definitely for the purpose, partly no doubt from the same personnel, but well seasoned with co-opted members representing the wider intellectual interests of each locality, be responsible for managing the public library.[43]

American librarians, who have had experience of administration of both libraries and schools by boards of education, are not in favour of vesting the control of libraries in the education authorities. “Too close an administrative connection ... has not been beneficial to the library ... it has generally been found that when the control of a public library is vested in a body created originally for another purpose it is regarded as of secondary importance and its development is retarded. It is better that the library should have its own board of trustees, and that the two institutions should co-operate in the freest manner. Such mutual aid is, of course, founded on the fact that the educational work of both school and library is carried on largely by means of books. That of the school is formal, compulsory, and limited in time; that of the library is informal, voluntary, and practically unlimited. It is greatly to the advantage of the scholar, and of those informal processes of training that are going on constantly during life whether he wills it or not, that he should form the habit of consulting and using books outside of the school. When books are thought of merely as school implements their use is naturally abandoned when school days are over.”[44]

Similar views were submitted by the Library Association to the Adult Education Committee. Part of their resolution ran as follows:—

“The aim of the library as an education institution is best expressed in the formula ‘self-development in an atmosphere of freedom,’ as contrasted with the aim of the school, which is ‘training in an atmosphere of restraint or discipline’; in the school the teacher is dominant, but the pupil strikes out his own line in the library, which supplies the written material upon which the powers awakened and trained in the school can be exercised; furthermore, the contacts of the library with organized education cease where the educational machinery terminates; but the library continues as an educational force of national importance in its contacts with the whole social, political, and intellectual life of the community....”

“In speaking to the resolution, Mr. L. Stanley Jast, formerly Secretary of the Library Association, developed the argument—“The work of the librarian is sharply contrasted with that of the teacher. The teacher deals with human material, the librarian with the written record, and only incidentally with the people who come to consult and use it. But not only is there this wide difference in the nature of the material upon which the teacher and the librarian respectively work; there is a difference of immediate aim of so basic a character that one is almost the negative of the other, and therefore are they perfectly complementary to one another.... The library and the school supplement and complement each other. And the virtue of each is that it is not the other.... The material of each is different, the aims are different, and the administrative machinery of the one has no real relation to that of the other.... The resolution has a second thesis, which is that it is after all only a portion of the library field which touches education.... We outgrow the school; we cannot outgrow the library.”[45]

“We have examined these arguments with the care to which the policy of the Library Association is entitled. The first argument, however, rests upon a sharp distinction between the library and the school which should not, in our opinion, exist. A school is a more complex and many sided institution than the argument would appear to assume, and its functions are too narrowly confined by the phrase ‘training in an atmosphere of restraint or discipline.’ The class-room is but part of a school. Other institutions—the workshop, the gymnasium, the playing field, and the library—are essential features, each of them making its peculiar contribution to that self-development which is claimed to be an end of the library. The school in fact, is a community which fulfils its end through a variety of agencies of which the class-room is one and the library another. The ideal school is one which seeks to aid self-development through the medium of ‘discipline’ on the one hand, and by providing opportunities for the pupil ‘to strike out on his own line’ on the other.

“The antithesis between the teacher and the librarian is also, in our judgment, too sharply defined. Powers are trained by their exercise, and the printed book is an integral part of the equipment of the school. If the librarian deals with the written record, it is but as a means to self-development in the scholar. In other words, the library is part of the educational fabric, just as much as the art room or the school clinic. The school and the teacher will perform their true function only in so far as they enter into the closest co-operation with the library and the librarian. The latter will fill their real place only through co-operation with the former. Both school and library will be immeasurably strengthened when the artificial line of demarcation is obliterated.

“It is sometimes argued that the libraries would lose by the process and become subject to an over-rigid systematization, to which librarians are rightly opposed. This attitude of mind appears to us to be based on a want of knowledge of the strong trend towards greater freedom and initiative within the publicly provided schools of the country. This movement, we believe, would receive a valuable stimulus from closer association with the libraries, without necessarily imposing a mechanical organization upon the libraries.

“The provision of children’s rooms in libraries, the assembling of books bearing upon the work and interests of students, library lessons and other developments and proposals will forge strong and necessary links between the school and the library; but it is difficult to see how this intimate relationship can be generally established unless there is an organic connection arising from a single policy based upon the complex needs of the pupil. Under certain circumstances the frank interchange of experience and inter-relation of interests may be possible with dual control. But it is at least open to doubt whether they will be generally and permanently attained without a common administration.

“The second argument in support of independent administration for libraries is, in the words of the resolution referred to above, that ‘the contacts of the library with organised education cease where the educational machinery terminates.’ The Education Act, 1918, provides for compulsory continuation education up to the age of 16, and ultimately 18. Further education of this character must lead to a growth of both technical and general education beyond these ages. There is certain to be an extension of technical education after the war, and there will be a growing demand for non-vocational education to be met. With the latter question we shall deal at greater length in our Final Report. A greater call than in the past will undoubtedly be made upon our educational resources, and the necessity will arise for that close co-operation between educational institutions and libraries which is admittedly desirable in the case of school pupils if the school and the library are to fulfil their functions.

“It is true that we cannot outgrow the library: but it is equally true that we cannot outgrow the school, in other words, that we cannot outgrow the need for systematic education. The whole purpose of our inquiries into adult education has been directed towards formulating recommendations based upon this truth. Our inquiries, further, justify the view that there is a growing recognition of the need for education and an increasing desire for it on the part of men and women.

“But though the public library has an important function to perform in relation to educational institutions, its activities travel beyond assistance to formal education. It exists to serve the needs of a public with varied interests. It must satisfy the requirements of the serious student; but it must also cater for that large class of people who are ‘general readers,’ and those who go to books for recreation. The unsystematic and recreative reading which the libraries have stimulated do not, however, it seems to us, provide any argument for maintaining the public libraries as an independent municipal service.”[46]

In the present writer’s opinion, the distinction drawn by Mr. Jast is a sound one, and is corroborated by the reluctance of American librarians to placing libraries under an authority primarily appointed to administer schools. But, since there remains so much in common in the aims of the two sets of institutions, if the supreme authority were entrusted with a scheme of education in the larger sense—call it culture, humanism, or personal development, since the term education smacks too much of the school and college—then it would be logical and salutary to put our public libraries under a department of that authority, making this responsible, side by side with the education department in the narrower sense, to the supreme Board—which may or may not continue to be called the Board of Education. Dread of bureaucratic control has become almost instinctive with thoughtful people. The habit of working in watertight compartments, and repressing every spontaneous activity that cannot be forced into the strait-jacket of official routine, inspires observant critics with distrust even of rural library schemes conducted on strictly official lines under education committees. To put the control of both urban and rural libraries in the preoccupied hands of those whose attention is centred in schools, discipline, and organized education, would be a blow at the freedom and elasticity of the library. After all, the problem of the young person is much the same everywhere, and education may for the most part be reduced to a system. People who have grown up and developed personality, however, will not submit to have their intellectual nutriment doled out on a system. They must have a say in managing and developing their own libraries, and in choosing the books they are to read.

The notion of a Libraries Board side by side with and independent of the Board of Education would find no support in this country. Nor are we likely to see State library commissions on the American model, though we may as well digest the lesson from the United States, where they certainly know how to manage libraries so that they bulk large in the social consciousness. Co-operation, but not subordination, must be the watchword. The department of the general Board of Education charged with supervision of the national system of libraries would contain, besides those who are educators in the widest sense of the term, representatives of those versed in the government and the actual administration of public libraries, from the British Museum and the university libraries downwards. Such a combination would be less likely than the mere education committees of to-day to negative the proposals of those who understand the needs of libraries and of the people who use them. The local committees would likewise be well-seasoned with co-opted members representing all the varied intellectual interests of each locality, and, above all, representing the actual readers, the people most concerned in each library’s well-being. Local initiative must be welcomed, not merely tolerated: it is the vital element of progress. In between would come the regional committees, charged with the maintenance of the central supplemental libraries, and with all the general activities carried on throughout each great library province. Thus, surely, the proper equilibrium between the central co-ordinating body and local volition would be safely established.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] cp. America:—“In towns where there is more than one library accessible to the public, these should reach as soon as possible some modus vivendi that will prevent the useless duplication of any class of literature. This may usually be done by agreeing to specialize. For example, in Chicago such an agreement has been made by the Public Library, the John Crerar Library, and the Newberry Library. The Public Library specializes in general literature, the John Crerar in science, and the Newberry in history, economics, and so on. In pursuance of this policy, the Newberry Library has even transferred to the John Crerar its medical collection, which had reached a considerable size. Such action is evidently a long step toward the complete understanding between civic institutions that is so much to be desired; and it deserves the highest commendation.” Bostwick: The American Public Library, pp. 73-4. Similar specialization has been effected in the Astor, Lenox, Bar Association, Academy of Medicine, and Columbia University Libraries in New York.

[28] There are great irregularities in the distribution of these libraries; for instance, the ratepayer in Holborn has to walk on the average 540 yards to get to a library; in Camberwell he would have to go 1,030 yards; in Wandsworth 1,400; while in the huge borough of Woolwich, if it were all built up, he would have to travel about 2,400 yards. The majority of the boroughs, however, only expect their readers to walk between 500 and 1,000 yards.

If we consider the provision of libraries in proportion to the population, we find that the extreme variations are that Hampstead supplies a library for every 14,000 inhabitants, while 75,000 inhabitants in Stepney share one between them.

But the demand for library facilities is not the same in all the boroughs, for we find that while in Hampstead 125 out of every 1,000 of its inhabitants are registered as using the library, in Shoreditch only 29 per 1,000 avail themselves of the facilities which exist in that borough. The effect of this is that the number of readers per library varies considerably, for while Poplar and Hammersmith share a library or branch between 1,200 readers, Stoke Newington and Chelsea are satisfied with one establishment for 4,600 readers.

(John McKillop: “The Present Position of London Municipal Libraries with suggestions for Increasing their Efficiency,” in Library Association Record, Dec. 1906.)

[29] Rye, R. A., The Libraries of London (1910)—“Preliminary Survey.”

[30] In a lecture at the School of Librarianship, University College, London, on May 23rd, 1921.

[31] “Sometimes a discovery of vital moment lies concealed for many years in a little known periodical; the most striking recent case is that of Mendel’s experiments, now the inspiration of the most productive school of modern biology, described in 1865 in the periodical of a natural history society in Brünn but buried until 1900, when a happy chance revealed them.” Times, June 29, 1921—“Indexing of Technical Literature.”

[32] “A union catalogue of the current periodicals preserved in the German libraries, published in 1914, comprised some 17,000 entries. A similar list for the periodicals filed in the libraries of the United Kingdom, prepared in 1914-15 by some English State and copyright librarians, was submitted for publication to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, but the proposal met with no encouragement. Yet the compilation of such a list is an essential preliminary to the proper national organization of knowledge. For a union list indicates the relative strength and weakness of our national libraries in respect of their periodical collections: it enables the librarian to correct the latter without unduly increasing the expenditure of the library in that department of literature.” Nature, June 9, 1921—“Co-operative Indexing of Periodical Literature.”

[33] Edward Edwards, by Thomas Greenwood, p. 137.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Bostwick: The American Public Library, p. 28.

[36] Friedel: Training for Librarianship, p. 176.

[37] “The amount produced by the penny rate varies from borough to borough within very wide limits. The wealthy City of Westminster receives nearly £23,000 for every penny of its imposed rate; Kensington comes next with £9,500, and the others fall gradually till we find that Stoke Newington receives only £1,400. But to estimate the burden it is necessary to consider the produce of the penny rate in relation to the number of inhabitants, and in doing this we find that while every 1,000 inhabitants in Westminster can raise for library purposes £128, in the over-burdened east and south-east, Poplar and Camberwell can only raise £20, while Stepney comes lowest on the list with £19 per 1,000 inhabitants. But this does not express the whole of the burden, for while 1,000 inhabitants of wealthy Westminster have the power to spend £128, they find that their five libraries, well stocked with books and liberally staffed, cost them only £65, while Poplar, which finds six [actually four] establishments too little for its needs, must perforce expend the whole of the £19 per 1,000 citizens that it is enabled to raise.” J. McKillop: The Present Position of London Municipal Libraries. These figures were put down in 1907; the present situation may be understood from later statistics. The areas and populations are similar.

From L.C.C. London Statistics, 1913-4.

| | Charge falling |
| | on Rates. | Amount
Poplar | 4 Libraries | .99 | £3,080
Kensington | 3 ” | .61 | £5,905
Westminster | 4 ” | .43 | £11,784

From L.C.C. Statistical Abstract, 1920.

| Assessable Value. | 1d. produces
Poplar | £835,583 | £3,482
Kensington | £2,451,335 | £10,214
Westminster | £7,011,845 | £29,216

Current estimate at Poplar, £8,318 to 2.17d. in £.

Poplar, it should be noted, has one of the most efficient library systems in London, though the buildings are not pretentious and the furniture is for use and not ornament. To provide and work this admirable system something like an economic miracle had to be worked, for so narrow was the financial margin that as the borough librarian picturesquely put it, if a few slates fell off the roof the cost of replacing them had to come out of the book fund.

[38] J. McKillop: Present Position of London Municipal Libraries.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Adult Education Committee: Third Interim Report, 20.

[43] “The public libraries and museums should be remitted to special committees of the education authority. On each of these committees it would be desirable to co-opt representatives of voluntary organizations and societies specially interested in the work of the committees, such as local educational bodies, scientific societies, and art clubs. Librarians and curators should, of course, have direct access to their respective committees and the fullest possible scope for their powers and special knowledge.” Adult Education Committee: Third Interim Report, 56.

[44] Bostwick: The American Public Library, p. 95.

[45] Adult Education Committee: Third Interim Report, 19.

[46] Adult Education Committee: Third Interim Report, par. 9-12.

VI
TRAINING IN LIBRARIANSHIP

The pioneers of our municipal libraries were mostly men who had had no experience of library administration, and learned their craft and coached their assistants after studying the best type of older libraries, improvising new methods to suit new circumstances. In 1876 the American Library Association was founded, and in 1877 the Library Association of the United Kingdom. Their objects were first, educational, through the medium of personal intercourse and the exchange of information; and secondly propagandist, the furtherance of the library movement. In some of the larger towns classes were carried on for the instruction of the staff; and in 1884 the Library Association drew up an examination syllabus, which was a first step in defining the proper qualifications of a librarian. Classes open to any assistant were held at various centres, and in 1893 an annual summer school was started. The Association next appointed an Education Committee, which before long co-operated with the London School of Economics in holding courses of lectures, conducted correspondence classes, elicited similar efforts from provincial branches, and held yearly examinations. Certificates were granted in the separate subjects, Literary History, Bibliography, Classification, Cataloguing, Library Organization, and Library Routine; and when an assistant had taken these seriatim he might obtain a full diploma, after he had shown some knowledge of Latin and of a modern foreign language, and written an original thesis on an appropriate subject. The weak point of this admirable programme was that it did not provide for systematic training or even for continuous study. Perhaps it was an initial mistake to award certificates in single subjects, for the majority of those gaining such certificates never approached the final stage, and in a dozen years less than a dozen candidates won the diploma. But the standard of the qualifications had to be adapted to the educational level of the ordinary library assistant, and to the extreme disadvantages under which he laboured. His hours were long, his pay was low, and, penny rate libraries being uniformly understaffed, he could not be spared to attend many classes, even if any were held in his neighbourhood. The diploma scheme of the Library Association is still in being, and provides an alternative method of qualifying for professional certificates to working assistants who are unable to benefit by the training system next to be described.

During the war, whilst the Adult Education Committee were trying to find a place for libraries in a comprehensive plan of reconstruction, the Carnegie United Kingdom Trustees were in consultation with the Library Association on the question of a more thorough system of training. The University of London School of Librarianship came into existence as the outcome of these conferences in 1919, a few months before the new Act. This was a momentous event in the history of the profession. The School is a department of University College, the largest school of the University; its curriculum fits into the scheme of the Faculty of Arts; the students participate in the social and intellectual life of the college. Thus it is not a separate vocational institution, like the majority of the American library schools, but part of a great foundation dedicated to the liberal arts and sciences. The normal course of training occupies two years, and students must devote their whole time to lectures, private study, and practical work; but for the benefit of assistants who cannot throw up their occupation, and also of booksellers, publishers’ assistants, and others desirous of knowing something of library economy and useful subjects like classification and indexing, part-time attendance is allowed, by which the training is spread over a period varying from three to five years. But it must be continuous. This and the thoroughness of a college training, coupled with the initial requirement of a general education of matriculation standard, make the advent of the school a great stride forward. In time, the training may develop into a postgraduate course, and instruction may be given in a series of advanced subjects, such as Historical Bibliography and the Bibliography and History of Scholarship, Latin, Greek, Biblical, Celtic, Romance, Teutonic and Scandinavian, courses which the present writer was able to introduce as possible subjects for study and research into the Library Association’s syllabus, when he was Hon. Secretary of their Education Committee.

Photo by Langley & Sons
University College, General Library.

The growing complexity and diversity of library work and the multiplication of technical and other special libraries call for new types of librarian. The administrator of a large urban or rural system must be a highly educated and many-sided person. Knowledge of the relative values of books on an immense range of subjects is hardly more necessary than ability to help other persons, not only to select the right kind of books, but also to read, not at a venture, but methodically. The able librarian must have a wide comparative acquaintance with the contents and the technique of many libraries. He, or perhaps she—for women are at least as well-fitted as men for almost any kind of library work—must be a competent organizer, a good judge and controller of others, and one who can infuse keenness and interest. It is a tradition that he should be a master of the superficial, a compendium of second-hand learning, knowing something about everything; but that it would detract from his qualifications as a kind of walking index to universal knowledge, if he knew too much about anything in particular. This is an inhuman and impossible ideal. The oft-quoted dictum of Mark Pattison that the librarian who reads is lost, unless it be wantonly interpreted that we have lost the well-read librarian, is a mistaken warning. One must have a hobby for mere vitality’s sake; and, unless we specialize in something, we shall not even know what knowledge is about anything.

The corner-stone of the edifice is the science and art of book selection. The librarian must be a first-class judge of books, and of books for definite use. He is to be the guide and counsellor of innumerable readers; the inspirer of untold thousands more. He should be ready at a moment’s notice to deliver a lecture on the art of reading, and, with reasonable time for preparing his notes, to conduct a tutorial class or at any rate lead a reading circle. Some specialization will give him a good start on either run. A mere smattering is not of much use in this branch of library extension work.

Thus the desideratum is an appropriate blend of general and special accomplishments, and there is no question as to which should be acquired first. Entrants to the School of Librarianship are expected to have matriculated beforehand: if they aim at academic honours, they should take their degree before they specialize in professional subjects. Many of the present students are pursuing librarianship as a postgraduate course: this may become a general rule as the programme of studies is enlarged. The University has recently allowed the course to be taken as the final stage in a degree course, under certain regulations. Some American library schools have highly specialized curricula; the Carnegie Library School of Pittsburg, for instance, has courses in Library Work with Children and School Library Work; and at Washington, in association with the School for Secretaries, there is a Training School for Business Librarians. High school or college graduation is usually required for admission, and in the library schools at Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin there are courses leading to a degree. Too much specialization in the library school itself is not desirable. The best librarian for a technical, scientific, historical, or other special library is one who has taken the B.Sc., B.Eng., or honours Schools, and then followed a course in Librarianship. Librarianship is not a science, notwithstanding the fact that a number of the American library schools call themselves schools of library science, and that a baccalaureate is granted in this, but an art. It is the application of knowledge, knowledge which must be attained first; education must have preceded training. That is a rough-and-ready way of putting it; but such is the main principle that should guide us in drawing up a course in librarianship.

Both in England and in America, two orders of librarians and library assistants are tending to become clearly differentiated, on the analogy of the two orders in the Civil Service. On the one hand are those who enjoyed a liberal education and have supplemented this with a first-class technical training; on the other, those who had a poor start educationally. The latter may by intelligence and perseverance catch the former up; there will be no watertight partitions between the classes. But the difference between them will become more and more accentuated as library activities become more complex and more specialized. In one way, a school of librarianship forms a medium between the two grades; it may enable an energetic man or woman to overcome the disadvantages of a poor start in life; in another way, it helps to differentiate the classes, those persons who proceed successfully through the courses and win diplomas going automatically into the higher class, and those who fail to attain more than a few odd certificates, into the lower grade. The main determining factor is to have enjoyed or to have missed a good preliminary education, comprising a knowledge of languages and fair general culture.

The present curriculum of the School of Librarianship is as follows:—

(i.) | English Composition.
(ii.) | *Latin or Greek or Sanskrit or Classical Arabic.
(iii.) | *A Modern Language other than English.
(iv.) | Bibliography.
(v.) | Library Organization (including Public Library Law).
(vi.) | Library Routine.
(vii.) | Cataloguing and Indexing.
(viii.) | Literary History and Book Selection.
(ix.) | Classification.
(x.) | Palæography and Archives.

In the purely technical subjects, the instruction is partly theoretic and partly practical. The students are set to work, under expert supervision, cataloguing sections of a library; they classify masses of books, and perform upon them various routine processes; they are given mediæval English, Latin, and Norman-French documents to decipher and translate, mediæval manuscripts to catalogue and calendar. They watch bookbinding demonstrations, and are shown, not only how a book is bound well, but also how the job is done in a shoddy way by dishonest binders. Skins of the finest quality and other bookbinding materials are hanging up in the school, and all sorts of library apparatus and equipment are on exhibition. During the long vacation the students are expected to work as voluntary assistants in libraries of the most modern type, and no opportunity for practical experience or for seeing things actually being done is neglected. Lectures on such phases of the prescribed subjects as library architecture, rural library systems, library work with children, technical and commercial libraries, and library extension, are continually being given by special authorities not on the regular staff. The student who is not a graduate must pass examinations in all the ten subjects set out above, before he can receive the diploma; the graduate may be exempted from the first three. Those candidates who have not held salaried offices in approved libraries do not receive the Diploma until they have done at least one year’s work in such capacity. It is apparent, then, that the course is partly general and partly technical; and, whether the entrant is a graduate or not, there is no escaping the basic requirement, a good general education, or the other essential, practical experience.

America had library schools thirty years before Great Britain; there are now eighteen library schools in the United States, several requiring a college degree before admission, some qualifying their alumni for a degree in library science. Other agencies for training librarians are apprentice classes and summer schools; and the training these last provide is more continuous and thorough than is afforded by the same kind of institution in this country. Certain general colleges, also, hold courses in bibliography, palæography, and kindred subjects, useful not only to the librarian but also to the research student. Germany, Italy, and Sweden preceded us in the establishment of library schools, the first-named in 1861. France exacted technical qualifications from candidates for university libraries in 1879. Holland has a library school, and 1920 saw one started in Czechoslovakia. All these are Government or university foundations. If our libraries become a national concern, training in librarianship will necessarily be an affair for the community to regulate and finance.

Old-fashioned library committees and librarians still exist who are well content with the library assistant that, as they put it, “has gone through the mill,” in other words, a person without any education worth mentioning and without training in any real sense, who has learned his work by having had to do it and never studied the why or the wherefore of library practice. There are still librarians who regard librarianship as simply a job like any other job, which has got to be carried on and incidentally find some one a berth; and who feel aggrieved if called upon to furnish anything beyond the most rudimentary service—lending and reference library and reading room—and regard any sort of library extension as incipient bolshevism. Committees and librarians of this stamp actually prefer the uneducated junior, the youth, that is, who has enjoyed nothing more liberal than primary schooling; whereas the intelligent and progressive committee or librarian would rather appoint, even to a senior post, a well-educated person who has to learn his duties, than one poorly educated yet having had a great deal of practical experience. The former would have to spend some time in picking up the ways of a new post, but, given equal abilities, he would show himself the better man in a brief space of time.

Perhaps a more insidious danger than this survival of the obsolete is the view, to which all administrators of systems are apt to fall a prey, that high mechanical efficiency is the be-all and end-all of library economy. Perfect and smooth-running machinery is an admirable thing; it will certainly be one of the characteristics of every library system that achieves complete success. But there are elements still more essential, which cannot be secured by the pursuit of mere mechanical perfection. To put mechanism and mechanical organization first, knowledge and ideas second, is as bad a mistake as crass content with the old, inadequate service. The danger of being dominated by mechanism is, in truth, as real a danger in the world of libraries as ever it was in Erewhon. “True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that those thrive best who use machinery wherever its use is possible with profit; but this is the art of the machines—they serve that they may rule.”[47] This very danger is already apparent, it has been noted, in some of the rural systems superintended by bureaucratic directors of education. Their criterion of efficiency is uniformity, in method and results. But uniformity is of no value except as a mark of excellence or fitness. When uniformity is sought for its own sake, it is bound to stultify aspiration and suppress spontaneity. In the earlier days of the public library, there were librarians who thought that they had achieved immortal fame by inventing that surprising piece of mechanism, the indicator. Library progress for decades was checked by the indicator and the repressive form of organization of which it was the symbol, the closed library. To infuse a new spirit into the reading and the non-reading public will do infinitely more for the future of libraries than any amount of mechanical efficiency. That is the reason why the School of Librarianship has erected its course of professional training on the broad base of a liberal education. This is no slight to the technique of librarianship; but means that technique must be the servant, not the master, and that machinery will be used best if those who control it have intelligence and vision.

And why should training in librarianship be confined entirely to librarians? It has often been urged that bibliography should be taught in schools. Book selection, indexing, classification, in short, most of the professional subjects, are elements of a general training in organization and in methods of study and research. When there comes about a thorough correlation between libraries and schools, young people will, as a matter of course, acquire the rudiments of the library arts. Since the child, as soon as he leaves school, will have to pursue his intellectual activities chiefly through the medium of books, he should be taught something about bibliography, at any rate the maxims and methods of book selection. Self-education to-day is rendered more difficult and uncertain by the very multiplicity of books that solicit attention. Even advanced university students are surprisingly ignorant of the means for ascertaining the nature and relative value of the literature of the subjects they are working on. A thorough grounding in book-selection and certain other of the library arts might work a reformation in the newspaper world: it is a point for the attention of schools of journalism. Imagine the results if there were a reference library of high quality in every office and every reporter and sub-editor had been trained in using it accurately. No one is competent to be a guide in intellectual matters or a dispenser of knowledge who is not engaged in a continual process of self-education. The value of a knowledge of librarianship to the layman is recognized in the United States: in 1914 ninety-one American colleges gave courses in what is there called library science.[48]

One result of the library extension work described in an earlier chapter is a wider diffusion of the library arts. When the Education Act of 1918 comes into force throughout the land, and the school-child becomes a “young person”; when intellectual training is carried on right through the plastic period of mental development, the opportunity for cultivating the library arts will be laden with profound consequences. If elementary schools and continuation schools then work in due co-ordination with libraries, the new curricula will in large measure comprehend what we desire: instruction in the art of reading and the enjoyment of literature, guidance in the use of scientific and technical books and in the methods of research. Every young person should be shown how to make himself master of the multifarious contents of a library, to acquaint himself with other library resources that are within reach, to become his own bibliographer, map out his reading to the best advantage, and be able to choose books wisely, whether he is buying for his own shelves or making use of the public library.

The vital importance of the library arts to the researcher and to all whose work is among books, pamphlets, or records, needs no expatiation. Mr. Sidney Webb, in lecturing to young librarians some years ago, depicted the infinite pains with which he constructed his own bibliographies of social science. He had to acquire the library arts in the hard school of experience, when manuals of bibliography and guide-books to books were fewer than they are now; and, no doubt, the fine library at the London School of Economics may be regarded as in no small part the result. Modern specialization has extended the field of knowledge so enormously that the finest education is, in a large sense, only elementary—only a preparation of the individual to use human knowledge and exert himself in extending it.

Exact classification is making its way in all directions. The art of classification is not only an invaluable mental discipline, it may be applied with advantage in every province of work and business. It stands for order and method in all sorts of affairs. Though a classification of books is not the same thing as a classification of things, and may depart in many respects from the exactness of logical theory, there is no better way of inculcating the usefulness of system than by illustrating it in a well-classified library, where the reader can find his way from shelf to shelf, and follow the tracks pointed out for him to other book-cases the contents of which are more distantly connected with his subject. Commercial firms have learned the value of systematic filing. Representatives of business corporations and parties of students from schools and colleges visit the Commercial Library at Manchester in order to examine the vertical file and have its principles explained. It is in the research departments of the technical firms that classification, filing, and indexing are pursued to their furthest reaches. It is to be wished that the librarian’s near relations, the publisher and the bookseller, would make more use of system. When the bookshops are arranged on an intelligible plan, there may be less romance in the Charing Cross Road, but it will be better for business. And, though some might think there was more lost than gained in the second-hand shop if “Americana” were shelved according to Dewey and “Book Rarities” placed in their proper decimal order, there is at any rate no sentimental objection to the scientific arrangement of new books. But, with the notable exceptions of two or three large firms of publishers and the university presses, no one seems to think it worth while to issue classified catalogues of new publications. Booksellers and publishers prefer to arrange their wares and compile their catalogues by the sizes of books, by binding, or by prices—by anything except the subject. Both are sadly in need of a course in librarianship. Publishers have declined to take the expert advice of the Library Association, or to learn anything on the materials, printing, format, or even the kinds of books that are wanted. The fact is, their books, their catalogues, and their methods of marketing are adapted to the momentary satisfaction of a public having no acquaintance with the library arts. When we are each our own bibliographer, these perfunctory ways will have to be dropped, or the reader and book-buyer will want to know why.

Photo by Langley & Sons
Reading Room of the Goldsmith’s Library, University of London.

Classification is the natural basis of indexing, or rather classifying and indexing are complementary to each other, the object being to have everything in its place and to show how it can be found. Every author, every one who uses or dispenses information, every one who keeps so much as a commonplace book, ought to be an efficient indexer; yet ignorance of what constitutes a good index is almost universal. There has been a slight improvement of late in the proportion of books indexed; but the general standard of precision and scientific arrangement is still very low. Apart from inaccuracy, which is a common defect, our methods, in regard to thoroughness and ease of reference, are painfully inferior to American methods; [49]the fact is patent even in some of our big co-operative treatises, which have no excuse for their slovenliness on the score of economy. Yet the public seem to be content. They are used to taking what is offered them, and have never considered what minimum of efficiency in book-production they are entitled to expect. A review here and there makes its protest against a bad or omitted index, or against inadequate or forgotten maps, or illustrations that do not illustrate, and to this may be attributed the slight improvement noticed. Yet the importance of indexing, in all the affairs of life, is so obvious that, apart altogether from its function in books and libraries, it ought to find a place in any well-planned scheme of education.

But the most important and fundamental of the library arts is that of book selection, which is best defined, not as choosing the best books, but as choosing the right, the appropriate books. The student of librarianship is taught literary history so that he may be a safe and discriminating selector of books, and be qualified to see that the library contains the right sort of material. The object of library lectures and reading circles is to direct readers to the right books to read. In her account of a very interesting experiment,[50] Miss Sayle describes how the Hampshire villagers were allowed the casting vote on every book purchased by the simple expedient of eliminating those books that failed to attract readers. The results sound lamentable. Whole sections went under the hammer. Autobiography, Gardening, Lives, Travels, Poetry, are one and all reported “Abolished, owing to lack of readers.” Waverley, Kidnapped, Barnaby Rudge, and Pierre Loti’s Iceland Fisherman, were among the classics discarded in one year in order to make room for the works of Mrs. Henry Wood, Miss Worboise, Baroness Orczy, and Gene Stratton Porter. Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare seldom left the children’s cupboard. Now Miss Sayle is undoubtedly right in extolling the principle of giving her village readers the initiative in the choice of books for their own library, the library they founded and maintain out of their own pockets. But her story is not creditable to those who might, had they gone the right way to work, have guided the tastes of these village readers, so that they would have chosen and enjoyed the very books that had to be discarded. One can hardly imagine a reading circle finding much to discuss in books by the luminaries mentioned as chief favourites; but it is quite as difficult to imagine that a paper or a reading or an intimate talk about Stevenson, Scott, Dickens, and a few of the poets, would have failed in opening many eyes to the charms of the writers abolished. To prescribe what people shall read is impossible; it is foolish to present any public, in town or country, with a well-chosen library, and tell them to take it or leave it. Coercion would be as fruitless as it is impossible. But to leave the choice to the untrained and unguided initiative of the villagers, without some attempt at training and assisting their powers of choice, is hardly less absurd than it would be to let the children in a school decide what lessons they should be taught.

This is the real inwardness of the great fiction question, on which so much wordy argument has been expended. There is no need to deplore the high percentage of fiction that is read; if this is of any literary value, the percentage is so much to the good. The innuendo underlying the Adult Education Committee’s sneer at “unsystematic and recreative reading” betrays an illiberal conception of the cultural value of belles-lettres, of which Meredith said:—

“Light literature is the garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view; the view within us as well as without. The Philistine detests it, because he has no view, out or in. The dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled and sapless, when they condemn it. The vulgar demand to have their pleasures in their own likeness—and let them swamp their troughs! They shall not degrade the name of noble fiction.... Shun those who cry out against fiction, and have no taste for elegant writing. Not to have a sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a mind.”

The question is not whether public libraries ought to provide novels, nor simply whether they should provide only the best novels and reject the bad. The important problem is, how the general reader is to be led to choose and enjoy the best. To spend public funds on the public provision of feeble and enfeebling reading-matter is indefensible. True, there are librarians who defend it: one head of a large system has recently pleaded for fiction of the Charles Garvice and Ethel Dell type, because the charwoman and the overworked housewife find it restful and soothing, and cannot afford to subscribe for it to the circulating library. But public libraries are not a sort of poor relief: their mission is not to provide, even these unhappy folk, with opportunities for mental dissipation; but, the very reverse, to introduce them to higher pleasures. Would apologists for bad novels recommend our public art galleries to adopt similar standards of taste? Or our museums? No doubt, if we turned them into a kind of Madame Tussaud’s or sensation-mongering picture-house, these would be much more popular with a very large and a very important class.

This kind of argument hardly needs confuting: but many committees and librarians have been led astray by the specious doctrine that by giving people the inferior stuff they like they will eventually be led to prefer something better. The present writer, who has devoted years of hard work to shepherding the general reader into the right way of appreciating good fiction, would be the last to deny the humanizing value of the novel and its right to an honourable place in the public library; but he would be the first to deny that to get people to read any kind of novel, or to bring them at any cost into the public library, is a sure way of inducing them to read something better. Than much of the reading done at the expense of the library rate it would be better if no reading were done at all. A kind of mental dram-drinking, it is stupefying to the brain and soul, and thoroughly anti-educational. Homœopathic application of continual doses of the hair of the dog that bit you is a futile mode of treatment. The time has come for saner methods, and the only sane method is to refuse to recognize the stuff as having anything to do with the literature which a public library has to supply. Earlier pages have dealt with the various methods by which the standard of fiction reading can be raised—duplication of the best on shelves to which the reader has free access, descriptive catalogues and readers’ guides, lectures, talks, and reading circles. Our crusading efforts at raising the level of popular taste must be as strenuous as those of a revivalist mission.

Future progress depends on a wide diffusion of the library arts; it depends on the attitude of that much-abused person the general reader. When the general reader uses public libraries wisely and well, and finds them indispensable to a full life, their position will be assured. The largest body of readers will always be composed of this class: the object of education is to turn out intelligent general readers.[51] The Adult Education Committee expressed too narrow a view of the library’s function in the social organism when they insisted on the paramount claims of vocational and non-vocational education, and spoke slightingly of the general reader, the vast multitude who are guilty of “unsystematic and recreative reading.” It is only fair to notice, however, two passages in which the Adult Education Committee did not overlook the claims of the general reader and of imaginative literature:—

“The Lending Department is the main feature in the smaller libraries; it provides such books as are suitable for continuous reading or study and in convenient form. The books cover the whole range of knowledge, physical and metaphysical, ancient and modern, philosophy, religion, sociology, language and literature, science, fine and useful arts, history and travel. The recreative element in reading bulks largely in the statistics of this department. Very much of what is best and most elevating in English literature takes the form of fiction, and selecting this with care and discretion the library gives valuable impulse in the direction of broadening the mental outlook, enlarging the sympathies, and elevating the tastes and feeling of readers. Any estimate of the cultural work of the library which omits the effects, more or less unconscious, of the reading of the best poetical and imaginative literature is gravely incomplete and inadequate.”

“It is clear, however, that local education authorities may neglect the ‘general reader’ in their desire to obtain from the public libraries the maximum of assistance for more serious students. This is a danger which must be guarded against. It is part of the problem of how to retain the freedom and elasticity of the library with the more organized administration of the system of public education. It is with no desire to subordinate the libraries or belittle their importance that we recommend the union of educational and library administration.”[52]

It will not do merely to tolerate this large section of those who use libraries, on condition that its interests are made secondary to the “serious students and trained readers.” This would be fatal to the true purpose of the public library, which should minister to intellectual life in all its fulness. The general reader must be put first, not second. A clear conception of what is best for the general reader will ensure that the interests of education shall not be neglected. It is on the growth of a new consciousness, a new attitude towards the institutions subserving humanism, that we must pin our faith in the great library system of the future.

A FURTHER COURSE OF READING.

Public Libraries, Past and Present.

Bostwick, Arthur E. The American Public Library. Appleton. 1910. 8vo. illus.

Brown, James Duff. A British Library Itinerary, Grafton. 1913. 8vo.

Brown, James Duff. Manual of Library Economy, ed. by W. C. Berwick Sayers. Grafton. 1920. 8vo. Illus.

Greenwood, Thomas. Edward Edwards, the chief pioneer of municipal public libraries. Scott Greenwood. 1902. 8vo.

Greenwood, Thomas. Public Libraries: A history of the movement, and a manual for the organisation and management of rate-supported libraries. Cassell. 1894. 8vo. illus.

Ogle, John J. The Free Library: its history and present condition, edited by R. Garnett. Allen. 1897. 8vo. [The Library Series.]

The Library Question of To-Day.

Adams, Professor W. G. S. A Report on Library Provision and Policy, to the Carnegie United Kingdom Trustees. Edinburgh. Neill. 1915.

Bostwick, Arthur E. Library Essays: papers related to the work of public libraries. New York. H. W. Wilson. 1920. 8vo.

Bostwick, Arthur E. A Librarian’s Open Shelf: essays on various subjects. New York. H. W. Wilson. 1920. 8vo.

Hardy, E. A. The Public Library: its place in our educational system. Toronto. William Briggs. 1912. Illus.

Library Association. The Library Association Record. 8vo. 1899 in progress.

Library Association. Public Libraries: their present position and future development in national reconstruction. Library Association. 1918. 8vo. Illus.

Library Association. Year Book for 1921; edited E. C. Kyte. Library Association. 1921. 8vo.

Contains statistics of existing libraries and their work.

McKillop, John. The present position of London Municipal Libraries with suggestions for increasing their efficiency. Reprint from Library Association Record. 1906.

Ministry of Reconstruction. Adult Education Committee. Third Interim Report. Libraries and Museums. H.M.S. Office. 1919.

Ministry of Reconstruction. Adult Education Committee. Final Report. H.M. Stationery Office. 1919.

Morel, Eugene. La Librairie Publique. Paris. A. Colin. 1912.

Public Libraries Act, 1919. H.M.S. Office. 1919.

Rural Libraries.

Antrim, Saida B. and Ernest I. The County Library. Ohio, Pioneer Press. 1914. 8vo. Illus.

Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. Annual Reports. Dec. 1914—Dec. 1920. Edinburgh. Constable. 1921.

Sayle, A. Village Libraries: a guide to their formation and upkeep. Grant Richards. 1919. 8vo.

Weaver, Sir Lawrence. Village Clubs and Halls. Newnes. 1920. 8vo. Illus.

Training in Librarianship.

Friedel, J. H. Training for Librarianship: library work as a career. Lippincott. 1921. 8vo. Illus.

Ross, James. Technical Training in Librarianship in England and abroad. Reprint from Library Association Record. 1910.

FOOTNOTES:

[47] Samuel Butler: Erewhon, XXXV. “The Book of the Machines.”

[48] J. H. Friedel: Training in Librarianship, p. 92.

[49] See, e.g., the Cambridge History of English Literature, and compare it with the Cambridge History of American Literature, a model of arrangement, indexing, bibliography, and general editorial work.

[50] A. Sayle, Village Libraries.

[51] “Education should be preparation for life. Its purpose is to prepare the immature human being for the life he is to lead when he becomes mature. It is to fit the child for the life he is to live when he shall be no longer a child. That is, to my mind, the purpose of education.” Dr. C. A. Mercier (The Principles of National Education, 1917.)

[52] Adult Education Committee: Third Interim Report, par. 12.

INDEX

Adams, Prof. W. G. S., on library provision, 136-139

Administration, 14, 183-184, 200-210, 221

Administration of Centralized Library System, 179

Adult Education, 4-6, 98-99, 111, 149, 154, 202-204, 208-209

Adult Education Committee and Board of Education, 200-201

Adult Education Committee and Central Library for Students, 190-191

Adult Education Committee, centralization, 73, 171-2, 175, 194, 197, 198, 202

Adult Education Committee, fiction question, 230-235

Adult Education Committee, Final Report, 165-167

Adult Education Committee, on grants, 186-187

Adult Education Committee, on intelligence bureaux, 89-90

Adult Education Committee, on lectures, 111

Adult Education Committee, on reading Rooms, 62

Adult Education Committee, on reconstruction, Preface, 30, 31, 73, 171-172, 175, 194, 197, 198, 202

Adult Education Committee, Technical and Commercial Libraries, 78-80

Advertising, 48-49, 103
Agricultural Libraries, America, 160-161
Airdrie, adoption of Library Act, 22
America, books for the blind, 94

America, children’s libraries, 64, 68, 74, 131

America, Education Authorities a. Library Authorities, 201-202

America, indexing, 227-228
America, inspection of Libraries, 184-186
America, librarianship, 224
America, libraries, 25, 41, 118
America, library schools, 213, 216, 219-220
America, rural libraries, 156-162
America, school and library, 131

America, State Library Commissions, 156, 184-186, 209

America, travelling libraries, 156
American Library Association, 211
Ancient Libraries, 11
Andersonian Institute, Glasgow, 8
Antwerp, Institute of Commerce, 77
Apparatus, Library, 219
Apprentice Classes, America, 220
Archbishop Tenison’s Library, 12
Architecture, library, 219
Assistants, 212, 217-219
“Athenæum”, The, 181
Baillie’s Institution, Glasgow, 23
Bath, adoption of Library Act, 22
Bibliography, 131, 171, 220, 223, 225
Birkbeck, George, 8
Birkbeck College, 8
Birkenhead Public Library, 22, 64
Birmingham Commercial Library, 80
Birmingham, library rate, 27

Birmingham Public Libraries, reference library, 45, 48, 50

Bishopsgate Institute, reference library, 51
Blackburn, adoption of Library Act, 22
Blind, libraries for the, 91-95, 171
Board of Education, 208-209

Board of Education as central authority, 200-201

Bolton Public Library, 21, 80

Book issues, 25, 40, 41

Book selection, 34-36, 54, 97, 129-130, 179, 215, 223, 224, 228-235

Book selection for children, 68, 70-72
Book selection, periodicals, 57, 59
Book supply, 41-43, 70, 105, 142
Bookbinding, 42, 180-181
Bookbinding demonstrations, 218-219

Book-box system, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 146, 149, 164, 165

Books, requirements of good, 72, 180-181, 227
Bootle Public Library, lectures, 101
Borough councils, 173
Borrowers’ restrictions, 40-41
Bradford Commercial Library, 80
Braille system, 93
Branch libraries, 37
Bright, John, 18, 21
Brighton, Local Act, 1850, 21
Brighton Public Library, 120
Bristol Commercial Library, 80, 81, 86, 85-87
Bristol Public Library, 11, 45, 50, 101
British Museum, 12, 13, 14, 170, 182
British Museum Library, 34, 54, 55, 195
Bromley Public Library, lectures, 101
Brotherton, Joseph, 13-19
Brougham, Lord, 1, 4, 9
Brown, James Duff, 54, 55
Buckinghamshire, village libraries, 135
Bureaucracy, dangers of, 7, 208, 222
Burslem, adoption of Library Act, 22
Bury, William, 11
Business librarians, courses for, 216
Camberwell Public Library, 22, 101
Cambridge, adoption of Library Act, 22
Canterbury, 16
Canterbury, adoption of Library Act, 22
Cardiff Public Libraries, 22, 45, 50, 89, 101
Cardiganshire Rural Library, 140
Carnegie, Andrew, 23, 25, 77
Carnegie Rural Library Scheme, 31, 139

Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, annual report, 140-141, 145-146

Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and Central Library for Students, 145-146, 190

Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and National Library for the Blind, 92-93

Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and rural libraries, 31, 139

Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, Scotland, 139-142

Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and training in librarianship, 213

Catalogues, 39, 40, 171, 182, 226, 232
Cataloguing, 179, 218
Central clearing house, 170

Central Library for Students, 111, 170, 177, 188, 190

Central Library for Students, relations with rural libraries, 143, 145, 147

Central repository, 139, 141, 142
Centralization in library system, 29-30
Rural, 137-138, 161
Urban, 169-210
Chambers of Commerce, 85
Chelsea Public Libraries, 51, 101
Cheltenham, adoption of Library Act, 22
Chetham Library, Manchester, 11, 17
Children, books for, 129-130
Children, library work with, 216, 219
Children’s Libraries, 63-74, 205-6
Children’s Reading room, 63, 64
Choice of books, See Book Selection
Christian Socialists, 10
City and Guilds Institution, 194-195

Classification, 53, 83, 213, 223, 225-226, 227

Closed system, See Open access
Coats Libraries, 135, 139
Cobden, Richard, 13
Cockerell, Mr. Douglas, on bookbinding, 180
Commercial Libraries, 74-91, 219
Co-operation, 174-176, 177, 196-197
Co-operation, rural 150-155
Co-operation with industries, 97

Co-operation with outside organizations, 117, 150-155

Co-operation with schools, See Schools
Cork, adoption of Library Act, 22
Correspondence classes, 212

County Education Authority and rural libraries, 149

County library schemes, 137-139, 156-160
Coventry, 22
Coventry Public Library, 22, 41, 120, 133

Croydon Public Libraries, 80, 101, 106-107, 119

Croydon Public Libraries, junior library, 65, 66, 106-107, 133

Curriculum of School of Librarianship, 218
Czechoslovakia, library school, 220
Degrees in library science, America, 219
Derby Public Library, lectures, 101
Dickens, Charles, on libraries, 21
Digests, from periodicals, 182
Discipline in children’s libraries, 66-67
Discussion, value of, 109-110
Dr. Williams’s Library, 12
Doncaster, adoption of Library Act, 22
Dover, 16
Dramatic Circles, 114-117
Dublin Public Library, reference library, 45
Dundee, adoption of Library Act, 22
Dunfermline, central repository, 139, 147
Dunfermline Public Library, 61
Edinburgh Public Library, 23, 45

Education, 1-6, 72-74, 98, 122, 173, 184, 210-211.

See also Libraries and education
Education Act, 1870, 2, 24
Education Act, 1918, 224
Education Act for Scotland, 1918, 140

Education authority as library authority, 175, 200-210

Education Bill, 1807, 1
Education Bill, 1820, 2
Education Department, 2
Edwards, Edward, 13-17, 21, 29, 183, 184
Edwards, Passmore, 25
Elementary Education Act, 1870, 22
Engravings, 50
“Erewhon,” 221-222
Ewart, William, 6, 13-19
Ewart Act, See Public Libraries Act, 1850
Examinations in Librarianship, 212, 214, 219
Exeter, adoption of Library Act, 21, 22
Exhibitions, 120-122
Fiction question, 34-35, 230-235
Filing, 58-59, 226
Finance, 25, 26, 31, 41, 42, 102, 148, 193
Fisher, Mr. H. A. L., 98
Formby, Thomas, 25
Forster’s Act. See Education Act, 1870
France, librarianship in, 220
Fulham Public Libraries, lectures, 101
Furniture, fittings, etc., 82
Germany, library schools, 220
Glasgow, 8, 23
Glasgow Commercial Library, 80
Glasgow Mechanics’ Institution, 8
Glasgow Public Libraries, 38
Gloucester Public Library, 163
Gloucestershire Rural Libraries, 140, 163

Government department as library authority, 172-3

Government grants, 184-188
Government inspection of libraries, 183-188
Grantham Rural Libraries, 140
Grants, 29, 184-188

Greenwich Public Libraries, co-operation with schools, 127

Greenwood, Thomas, 29, 183
Guide-books to books, 179, 225, 232
Guildhall Library, 51
Hackney Public Library, 22, 127
Hampstead Public Library, 51, 101
Hebrides, rural library scheme, 147
Hereford, adoption of Library Act, 22
History of library movement, 1-31
Holland, library school, 220
Hornsey Public Library, lectures, 101
Huddersfield, 8
Hull, adoption of Library Act, 22
Illustrations, 43, 52, 53, 64, 65

Indexing, 47, 53, 61, 181, 213, 223, 226, 227, 228

Indicators, 38-39, 222
Industrial libraries, See Technical libraries
Industries, co-operation with, 79

Industry as local authority in technical library system, 198

Information Bureau, 54, 76, 82-83, 88-90
Information desks, 89
Inspection of libraries, 183-188
Ipswich, adoption of Library Act, 22
Ireland, Public Library Act, 20, 22
Ireland, reference libraries, 45

Islington Public Libraries, 22, 43, 55, 69-70, 101, 127

Issues as index of reading, 25

Italy, library schools, 220

Jast, Mr. L. S., on Schools and libraries, 203-204

Journalism, schools of, 223

Kidderminster, adoption of Library Act, 22

Kilmarnock Public Libraries, reference library, 50

Kingston Public Libraries, lectures, 101
Kirkwood, James, 11
Lamb, Charles, 116
Lambeth Palace Library, 12
Lancashire and Cheshire Union library, 135

Lancashire and Cheshire Union of Mechanics’ Institutions, 8

Lantern slides, 52, 106, 119
Leamington, adoption of Library Act, 22
Lecture rooms, 62, 99-107

Lectures, 64, 65, 99-107, 211, 212, 215, 228, 232

Leeds Commercial Library, 80, 88
Leeds Public Libraries, 8, 22, 45
Leeds Technical Library, 88
Leek Public Library, lectures, 101
Leicester, adoption of Library Act, 16, 22
Lending libraries, 33-43, 233, 234

Librarian, 66, 67, 69, 106, 107, 127, 205, 214, 216

Librarianship, definition of, 216-217
Librarianship, training in, See Training
Libraries and education, 29, 175, 200-210
Libraries Board, suggestions for a, 209-210

Library Association of the United Kingdom, on bibliography, 227

Library Association on centralization, 171-2

Library Association, commercial and technical libraries, 78, 80

Library Association, libraries and education, 29, 202-203, 204

Library Association on rural libraries, 153

Library Association and school libraries, 13

Library Association, Subject-Index to Periodicals, 181

Library Association on technical libraries, 198-201

Library Association Education Committee, 211
Library authorities, 173, 174, 175
Library authority, parish council as, 137
Library committees, 28, 173, 175
Library economy, 213
Library extension, 96-134, 219, 224
Library provision, 136, 139
Library rate, 15, 18, 19, 26, 136, 137
Library schools, 211-220
Library service, 14, 32-95, 138
Liberal education, 217, 222
Lichfield, adoption of Library Act, 22
Light literature, See Fiction
Literary and Scientific Institutions, 33

Literary and Scientific Institutions Libraries, 12

Literary history, 228

Liverpool Commercial Library, 80

Liverpool Public Libraries, 16, 37, 45, 48, 50, 91, 100, 102

Liverpool, Special Act, 1852, 21

Loan Collections to schools, 122, 124-125, 133

Local collections, 51-52

Local Education Committee, 31

Local Education Committee as library authority, 201

Local Government Act, 1894, 27
Local records, 52
London, City of, 20, 22
London Education Committee, 127, 175, 192
London libraries, 22, 47-48
London libraries, lectures, 101
London libraries, reading rooms, 60

London libraries, reference libraries, 45, 49, 50

London libraries, special collections, 50-51
London libraries, statistics, 178
London libraries, and students, 195-196
London library, 34
London, Library Act, 1877, 24
London Mechanics’ Institution, 8
London School of Economics, 211-212, 225

London, University of, School of Librarianship, 213, 216, 218-219, 222

London, University of, University College, 191, 213

McKillop, John, supplemental library scheme, 191-197

Magazine rooms, 55
Magazines, See periodicals
Maidstone Public Library, 22, 101, 163
Manchester, 13, 15
Manchester College of Arts and Sciences, 8
Manchester Commercial Library, 80, 81

Manchester Commercial library, contents, 83-85

Manchester Commercial library, vertical file, 225

Manchester, library rate, 27

Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 8, 61

Manchester Public Libraries, 21, 38, 45, 48, 49, 101

Maps, 43, 52, 58, 82, 119
Marylebone, adoption of Library Act, 22
Massachusetts Agricultural College, 161
Massachusetts Free Library Commission, 185-6
Mechanics’ Institutes, 5-10, 26
Mechanics’ Institute Libraries, 5-10
Meredith, George, on fiction, 230

Metropolitan Association of Mechanics’ Institutions, 8

Middlesex, rural library scheme, 163-164
Ministry of Reconstruction, 30
Mitchell Library, Glasgow, 23
Monastic libraries, 11
Motor service, 38, 141, 146
Museums, 15-16
Museums Act, 1845, 15, 18
Museums and Gymnasiums Act, 1891, 27
Music, 43
National Art Library, South Kensington, 178
National Home-Reading Union, 112, 119
National Institute for the Blind, 93
National Library for the Blind, 92-95, 171

National library service, preface, 155, 169-210, 220

National Science Library, South Kensington, 60-61, 178

New York Public Library, 94, 118, 132-133

Newcastle-upon-Tyne Public Libraries, 27, 45, 50

Newspapers, 43, 55-59

Newsrooms, 47, 55-59

Non-municipal libraries, incorporation of, 177-178

Northampton Public Library, 50, 80, 120

Norwich Public Library, 11, 21, 80, 101

Nottingham Public Libraries, 22, 45, 50, 64, 91-92, 101, 120

Obsolete methods, 220-221
Ogle, J. J., 29
Oldham, adoption of Library Act, 22
Oldham, library rate, 27
Open access, 37, 38-40, 161, 232
Orkneys, rural library scheme, 147
Overseas Trade Department, 85
Oxford, adoption of Library Act, 21
Paddington, adoption of Library Act, 22
Paisley, adoption of Library Act, 22
Palæography, 52, 218, 220
Parish council, as library authority, 137
Parochial libraries, 11-12
Parochial Libraries Act, 12
Patent Office Library, 178, 193, 195, 200
Peacock, Thomas L., 9
Periodicals, 47, 56-61, 181-182

Periodicals, indexing of, See Subject-Index to Periodicals

Permanent collections of books in country districts, 138, 149

Perthshire Rural Library, 140, 146
Philadelphia, Commercial Museum, 77
Philosophical Radicalism, 4
Polytechnics, 195
Poplar, school and library, 126-127

Post Office, transmission of books by, 95, 191

Practical instruction in librarianship, 218-219

Press clippings, 53, 65, 82
Preston, library rate, 27
Prints, 43, 52, 119

Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 78-79

Public Library Acts, 6, 96, 136
Public Library Act, 1850, 12-20, 30
Public Library Act, 1853, 12-20, 26, 30
Public Library Act, Ireland, 1853, 20
Public Library Act, Scotland, 1853, 20
Public Libraries Act, 1892, 24, 27
Public Libraries Amendment Acts, 1894, 28

Public Libraries Act, 1919, preface, 112, 122, 135, 140

Public Libraries Act, 1921, 30

Public Library Acts, adoption of, 21, 22, 23, 24

Public Library Bill, 1854, 20
Public Record Office Library, 178
Publications, library, 179-180
Purdue University agricultural library, 161
Putney, adoption of Library Act, 22

Rate, library, 27, 30, 172, 174, 175, 187-188, 193

Readers, issues, 40, 41

Reading circles, 62, 64, 65, 104, 110-111, 112-114, 143, 215, 228-229, 232

Reading courses, 64
Reading, standard of, 40, 42, 60, 229-235
Reading rooms, 55, 61-63
Ready-reference library, 48
Reconstruction, preface, 29-30
Reconstruction Committee, 30

Reference books, 44, 46, 47, 52, 58, 70, 138, 149

Reference libraries, 34, 36, 44-55, 176-177, 223

Regional committees, 189, 210
Rochdale Public Library, business section, 80
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 1
Royal Blind Asylum and School, Edinburgh, 93
Royal College of Science, 194

Rural libraries, 31, 110-111, 112, 135-168, 188, 219

Rural libraries, co-operation with outside organizations, 150-155

Rural libraries, co-operation with schools, 141-144, 148-149, 150-155

Ruskin, John, 134

Rye, Mr. R. A., libraries of London, 178

St. Bride Foundation Library, reference library, 51

St. Helen’s, library rate, 27
St. Kilda, transport of books to, 146-147
St. Pancras, adoption of Library Act, 22

St. Paul’s Cathedral Library, reference library, 51

Salaries, 179, 212
Salford Public Library, 13, 16, 27, 101
Sayle, Miss, village libraries, 135
School libraries, 70, 72, 73, 122-125, 216

School of Librarianship, University of London, See London, University of

Schools, 2-5, 98, 154, 200-210, 224

Schools, co-operation with, 23, 29, 51-52, 64, 65-74, 97, 106, 122-134, 137-138, 141-144, 148-149, 150-155, 200-206, 223-224

Scientific associations’ libraries, 178-179
Scotland, adoption of Library Act, 22, 23
Scotland, Education Act, 1918, 140
Scotland, Public Library Acts, 20, 26, 28
Scotland, reference libraries, 45
Scotland, rural libraries, 135, 140
Selborne, Roundell Palmer, Earl of, 19
Sheffield, adoption of Library Act, 21, 22
Sheffield, library rate, 27
Shelf-room, 180
Shetlands, rural library scheme, 147
Sion College Library, 12

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 9

Somerset Rural Library, 140, 162-163

Special collections, 43, 49-51, 52, 53, 119-120, 198, 225

Staff, 76, 77, 90, 183, 184, 211
Staffordshire Rural Library, 139-140
State aid, See Grants
State control, 29, 137-8, 179

State Library Commissions, America, 156, 184-186, 209

Statistics, Bristol Commercial Library, 86
Statistics, Islington Public Libraries, 43
Statistics, library provision, 136
Statistics, London libraries, 178

Statistics, public libraries, 16, 17, 23, 35, 43, 81, 86

Statistics of reading, 35

Statistics, rural libraries, 140-141, 144, 148

Statistics, supplemental library, 193, 194
“Steam Intellect Society,” 9
Stirling’s Library, Glasgow, 23
Story-telling for children, 64, 65

Stratford-on-Avon Public Library, reference library, 50

Students, 41, 46, 54, 62, 195-7
Students’ Library, Oxford, 92
Students’ reading rooms, 62

Subject-Index to Periodicals, 61, 171, 181, 182

Summer Schools, 211, 220
Sunderland, library rate, 16, 27
Supplemental libraries, cost of, 193-194

Supplemental libraries in national scheme, 188-193

Swansea, library rate, 27
Sweden, library schools, 220
Syracuse University, library school, 216
Teachers, 72-73, 132, 133, 142, 205
Technical associations’ libraries, 178-179
Technical libraries, 74-91, 197-200, 219
Thackeray, W. M., on libraries, 21
Training in librarianship, 171, 179, 211-235
Transport, 38, 141-142, 146-148, 191
Travelling collections for schools, 124-125
Travelling libraries, 135, 139, 156
Tutorial Classes, 104, 109-111, 142, 215
Union Catalogue, 182

Union of educational and library administration, 72, 73, 122, 133-134, 200-210, 234

Universities, 1
University Extension Courses, 107-114
University libraries, 45
Utilitarian function of the library, 74-77
Van Wert County Library, Ohio, 157-159
Verney, Sir Edmund, village libraries, 135
Village clubs, 141
Village Clubs Association, 151-153
Village Institutes, 8, 165-167, 168
Village libraries, 135

Voluntary workers in libraries, 103, 138, 141-142

Wales, National Library of, reference library, 50

Wallasey Public Library, lectures, 101
Walsall Public Library, 22, 27
Walthamstow Public Libraries, lectures, 101
Warrington Public Library, 16, 17, 27, 101
Warwick, adoption of Library Act, 22

Washington Training School for Business Librarians, 216

“Weeding-out,” 36, 159, 177, 225

West Riding Union of Mechanics’ Institutions, 8

Westminster, adoption of Library Act, 22
Whitbread, Samuel, 1, 4
Whitechapel, adoption of Library Act, 22
Whittington, Sir Richard, 11
Wigan Public Library, 27, 101
Wilts Rural Library, 140, 163
Winchester, adoption of Library Act, 21
Wisconsin, University of, 161, 216
Wolverhampton Public Library, 22, 27
Woolwich Public Libraries, lectures, 101

Workers’ Educational Association, 99, 110-111, 119, 142

Working Men’s College, 10
“Workshop theory,” 36
Yorkshire Village Libraries Association, 135

Young Mens’ Christian Association, 150, 153, 154

Young Women’s Christian Association, 150

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Transcriber’s note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation has been standardized.

Page numbers in the List of Illustrations reflect the position of the illustration in the original text, but the links point to the current position of illustrations.

In the Index “Selborne, Roundell Palmer, Earl of, 19” was out of alpha order and was moved. Page number references in the index are as published in the original publication and have not been checked for accuracy in this eBook.

Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following changes:

List of Illustrations: |

“Library of The South-Western”

“Library of The South-Eastern”

Page 5: “rom a railway company” | “from a railway company”
Page 8: “working mens’ institution” | “working men’s institution”
Page 27: “to find Wolverhamption” | “to find Wolverhampton”
Page 38: “could not even seen” | “could not even see”
Page 70: “provided in the childrens’” | “provided in the children’s”
Page 71: “greater volume to more” | “greater volume of more”
Page 87: “Stockton to Middlesborough” | “Stockton to Middlesbrough”
Page 101: “free course of lectures” | “free courses of lectures”
Page 177: “of interchange, are manifest” | “of interchange, is manifest”
Page 202: “ran as follow:—” | “ran as follows:—”
Page 216: “University of Winconsin” | “University of Wisconsin”
Page 219: “ten subject set” | “ten subjects set”
Page 224: “his own bibliogapher” | “his own bibliographer”
Page 227: “take the expect advice” | “take the expert advice”
Page 232: “appeciating good fiction” | “appreciating good fiction”
Page 241: “Gloucester Public Libary” | “Gloucester Public Library”
Page 242: “of Library Act, 161, 22” | “of Library Act, 16, 22”
Page 247: “Sir JOSEPH BBOODBANK” | “Sir JOSEPH BROODBANK”
Footnote 43: |
“voluntary organizattions” | “voluntary organizations”

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Table of Contents

- THE PUBLIC LIBRARY.

- CONTENTS.

- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

- PREFACE.

- I. HISTORICAL SKETCH.

- FOOTNOTES:

- II WHAT IS A LIBRARY SERVICE?

- FOOTNOTES:

- III LIBRARY EXTENSION.

- FOOTNOTES:

- IV RURAL LIBRARIES.

- FOOTNOTES:

- V A NATIONAL LIBRARY SERVICE.

- FOOTNOTES:

- VI TRAINING IN LIBRARIANSHIP

- FOOTNOTES:

- INDEX
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- Transcriber’s note
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE