The public library

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.

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:—

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.

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.

The Library Question of To-Day.

Rural Libraries.

Training in Librarianship.