The public 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:

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:—

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:—

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.

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.