There is more philosophy in that than in all Aristotle. It is also a practical exposition of the doctrine of chances. Somewhere is the combination that you want. You will find it, if you only keep on long enough.

Libraries that are afraid of being victimized by chance, or, as we may put it, becoming martyrs to bad luck, should ponder somewhat more closely the possibilities of relief from insurance. Of course here I am using the word “luck” in its simpler meaning of unforeseen occurrence. Take the case of the library that suffers from the fact that an influential member of the committee that fixes the amount of its annual appropriation has eaten something indigestible for breakfast. Such an unforeseeable occurrence, such a “piece of bad luck”, might cost a library anywhere from two to twenty thousand dollars, according to the usual size of its appropriation.

Equally injurious might be the illness of the president of the Board, throwing upon an incompetent member the duty of presenting the library’s claims and needs. It is surely unjust that a public-service institution should be at the mercy of such trivial chances. In some states, including my own, the library is removed from such ill-luck as this by a statutory provision fixing its public income, subject to proper checks and taking away the ability of an individual’s illness or indisposition to lower it. But where this ill-chance is still in its baleful working order, why should not the library be protected against it by insurance? Such protection would be analogous to the corporation insurance taken out by large industrial companies to offset the loss likely to result from the death of an officer on whose administrative ability much of the company’s earning power depends, or to the payment of death duties by insurance, now being advocated by many companies, and adopted on a huge scale by Mr. J.P. Morgan. Insurance is the great equalizer; it multiplies instances, enlarges the field of possibilities and abolishes ill-luck. We are availing ourselves of it in case of possible damage by fire or storm, or of loss through our liability as employers. We may in future use it to cut out chance and luck in other fields also and to make our resources so dependable that we may devote to the extension and betterment of service the ingenuity now often spent solely in devising means “to get along”.

I am afraid that you will compare this address very unfavorably with the celebrated chapter on snakes in Iceland, because whereas the author of that was able to announce the non-existence of his subject in six words, it has taken me a good many thousand. You will do me an injustice, however, if you think that I have simply been demonstrating the non-existence of luck. I believe that when we say a man is lucky, we mean something definite, and that thing surely has an existence. It may not be the Goddess Fortuna, or her modern successor, but it is very real and it is worth investigating and taking into account. If you are told that one of your assistants is “lucky”, do not laugh it away. Find out the facts, and if they indicate that she is unusually successful in what she undertakes, be thankful that you have a lucky person on your staff. Cherish her and promote her. And if you can find such a person outside of your library, with the other necessary qualifications, prefer him, or her, in making an appointment, to one of the “unlucky” variety. It is of the lucky kind that the world’s geniuses are made—inventors like Bell, Edison and Marconi, captains of industry like Carnegie, Rockefeller and Henry Ford, soldiers like Napoleon, Grant, and Moltke, statesmen like Lincoln, Gladstone and Bismarck, poets like Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe. We have had too few of these in the library profession. They were all lucky and what we need, especially in the present emergency, is plenty of “Luck in the Library”.

THE LIBRARY AS A MUSEUM

I do not intend to dwell on the case where the books in a library are themselves treated as museum objects, although possibly this is the one that may first occur to the mind in this connection. Books that are curiosities on account of their rarity or for other reasons are limited usually to very large libraries. The Lenox Library in New York, now part of the Public Library, was almost entirely a book-museum and was so intended by its founder. The private libraries of great collectors, such as J. Pierpont Morgan, or the Huntingtons, are often largely book-museums, and in general, a book that brings a high price, brings it for its value as a curiosity, not as a book. The freer a book is the more value it has as a book; the more restricted it is the greater its value as a curiosity. Of course, even a small library may have one or two books that are worth display as curiosities, because they are old, or rare, or have interesting local associations either through the author, or the owner, or in some other way. The Hawthorne and Longfellow room in the Bowdoin College Library is an example of this latter case. But a book, or anything else, owned and displayed as a mere curiosity, is of not much real value, no matter what price it may bring at auction. The things that make a good museum what it is are not curiosities at all, in the vulgar sense. They illustrate some science or art and make its study easier and more interesting; they throw light on geology or history or sculpture. Once in a while we see a museum collection of books made for this object, to illustrate the art of binding or the history of printing, or the depredations of book-eating insects. The value of specimens like these has nothing to do with their rarity. Sometimes the smallest library may have books or pamphlets that may be displayed with this object, especially where the subject is local. It may for instance gather a collection of early pamphlets from local printing offices, or of books once the property of some eminent citizen.

These things belong to a museum pure and simple, which is the reason why I am mentioning them at first, to get them out of the way before treating my real subject, which is the debateable ground between library and museum. There is nothing debateable about a book-museum any more than about any other kind of a museum—a collection of historical or geological specimens, for instance, that often finds place in a library building, not because it is a library, but because it is a convenient place, or because it has been thought best to build a library and a museum under one roof, as has been done in Pittsburgh.

There is however a real debateable ground between library and museum, with somewhat hazy boundaries which I believe that either is justified in overstepping whenever such an act supplies an omission and does not duplicate. In other words, there is a boundary region between library and museum that may be occupied by either, but should not be occupied by both.

I shall try briefly to define this region and indicate how the library may occupy parts of it without legitimate criticism when the necessity arises.

Descriptive and illustrative material is to be found in both library and museum. Speaking generally, the former is of primary importance in the library and the latter in the museum. Many books consist of descriptive text alone, without pictures or diagrams, and on the other hand a museum might contain specimens without labels, although they would not be of much use. In general, text with illustrations belongs in a library and specimens with labels in a museum. The mere statement of the distinction as it has just been given, however, shows that it may be very difficult to draw a line between the two kinds of collections. A museum has been defined as “a collection of good labels accompanied by illustrative specimens.” Here the value of the descriptive text is emphasized, even in the museum collection. When descriptive treatises are shelved in connection with the specimens, as in some modern museums, we have an expansion of the label into the book; and the museum, in this one particular at least, crosses the dividing line between it and the library. No one would blame it for so doing.

Similarly the library may occasionally cross the line in the other direction without incurring blame. Let me repeat that both library and museum may contain descriptive and explanatory text and illustrative material. In the museum the text is usually in the form of labels, attached to the specimens, and these are generally material objects. In the library the text is in book form and the “specimens,” if we may so call them, are plates bound into the book.

The first step taken by the library toward the line that separates it from the museum is when the plates, instead of being bound into a book, are kept separately in a portfolio. The accompanying text, corresponding to the “labels” of museum collections, may be on the same sheet as the plates (often on the reverse side) or on separate sheets, which may be bound into a book even when the plates are separate.

In the St. Louis Public Library about a thousand volumes, forming one third of the collection kept regularly in our art room, have separate plates. These are of course not usually on display but are in the cases ready to be used in the room on demand. They thus correspond, not with museum material displayed in cases, but with specimens packed away in such manner that they may easily be secured for study by those who want them. One may imagine a whole museum equipped for students in this way, with nothing on display at all—no popular exhibition features. Probably no museum was ever so administered, as an entirety; and as you know the large museums are making more and more of features adding to the attractiveness of the collection as a popular spectacle. The public visits the Museum of Natural History in New York, much as it turns the pages of the National Geographic Magazine—just to look at the pictures. This treatment of material is justified because it increases popular interest in the subject-matter and brings people to the museum who would not otherwise enter it. Also, it predisposes public bodies to more generous support of the museum. This is true again of such institutions as botanical and zoological gardens, which have always been show-places for the public as well as laboratories for the student. The library can not afford to neglect such an opportunity of attracting the public and of stimulating interest in its own subject-matter—books. It can not continuously display any great part of its separate prints, as a museum does with its specimens, but it can exhibit them from time to time, so that one or another of them is always displayed in this way. Simple screens can be cheaply made and the prints fastened thereto with thumb-pins, taking care not to injure them by perforating with the pin, but letting the edge of the head lap over the edge of the print to hold it, and using sheets of transparent celluloid for protection, where necessary. After beginning such displays in our own library, we found them so popular with our readers and so helpful in our own work that we are now holding thirty or forty yearly, sometimes two or three at once in different parts of the library, supplementing our own material with loans from interested friends.

The value of exhibitions of plates is so highly estimated by some librarians that they are breaking up valuable volumes so that the plates may be used separately. This is a second step toward the museum use of the library. I have heard a well-known librarian assert that if permitted by his Board he would dismember every art book in his library, in this way. Most of us, especially if we are interested in the exhibition side of library work—which is distinctly a museum side—will be inclined to sympathize with him.

But although we hesitate, perhaps, to tear to pieces good books, even for such a good purpose as this, there is much material that can be so treated with a clear conscience. Many duplicates of art works can be thus used, and there is hardly an illustrated book which when the librarian is ready to throw it away does not contain plates or maps which can be saved and used. In St. Louis when we condemn books they are never destroyed and consigned to the old-paper dealer before passing through the hands and before the eyes of all those who might use still usable fragments of this kind. Taking the item of maps alone, some of the best special maps are attached to volumes of travel or history, as folders or in pockets. So long as the book is usable, the map, of course, must go with it, but if the map has been reinforced with linen when the book is purchased, as it ought to be, it will probably be in usable condition when the book is worn out, and may at once be transferred to the map collection. The same is true of other plate than pictures—fac-similes of handwriting, for instance. A very fair autograph collection may be made of such detached plates—not originals of course, but originals are valuable merely as curiosities, in the way that we have already noted. Fac-similes are as good for any other purpose.

Of course all such torn up or detached material is very convenient also for reference use—easily filed and quickly consulted. It may be kept in vertical file cases, in loose-leaf binders or in ordinary portfolios. One of the interesting things about it is the facility of assembling it in different ways. In our own library we sometimes tear apart the leaves of an art book simply to group the plates in an order that will make them more valuable for reference purposes. This leads us to another nearly related, though I should call it a still further, step toward the museum region, which is taken when we deliberately create specimens by clipping and mounting. Most libraries are now doing this freely, both for reference work and for circulation. In many cases there are no separate labels here except a brief descriptive title, the material being classified according to its subject or its intended use. The similarity to the school museum or circulating museum—a very recent development of museum work—is striking. In this field the library has been ahead of the regular museums. The material clipped and mounted is usually book material—largely plates from books, magazines or papers. There is much other material that can be so mounted and used—the kind of thing that is familiar in memorabilia scrapbooks—theatre and concert programs, announcements, invitations, tickets of admission, badges, menus, photographs, advertising material, etc. It is usually a mistake to make permanent scrap-books of such material. When they need to be assembled in book form the separate mounts can be brought together in a loose-leaf binder. A permanent scrap-book ties the material together in a way that may prove embarassing. Suppose, for instance, that you are keeping printed material from three clubs in your town, as you ought. Clubs seldom do this for themselves. Several St. Louis women’s clubs have told us that they visit the library when they want to indulge in research into their own past doings. It might be natural to keep a scrap-book for each club and insert the material as it comes. But suppose you desire to display all your material on war activities and that some of the material in these scrap-books falls under this head. You will have to leave it out or tear out your scrap-book leaves.

Mounting takes time, and it is not necessary to mount everything. Material used only occasionally may be left unmounted. For instance, much newspaper-clipped material may be kept loosely in heavy manila envelopes. Again, some material may be made more accessible if not mounted, especially if in card form and in standard sizes. Such is the postal card. The amount of valuable material obtainable in postal-card form will astonish those who have not looked into the matter. Besides the usual views of localities, embracing buildings, monuments and scenery, good collections of sculpture, architecture, portraits and many other things may be made in postal-card form. Postal cards are all of the same size and very compact, so that they may be filed in trays and treated very much like catalogue cards, guides being used with them as in an ordinary catalogue. The amount of usable material that can be stored to the square foot in this form is probably greater than any other.

In all material of this sort, the similarity of collection, treatment and use may be so close that the passage from the picture to the object seems almost negligible; yet many persons apparently consider that here we must draw the definite boundary line between the collections of the library and those of the museum. They would say for instance that it is perfectly legitimate for a library to acquire, preserve and use a plate bearing a printed fac-simile in natural colors, of a piece of textile goods, but not a card mount bearing an actual piece of the same goods, although the two were so similar in appearance that at a little distance it would be impossible to tell the colored print from the actual piece of textile. Librarians will not be apt to attach much importance to this distinction, and those whose collections include treatises on textiles with colored plates will not hesitate to supplement them with mounted specimens of the actual textile with typewritten descriptions.

Generally manufacturers are only too happy to furnish samples of their current output, and older specimens, sometimes of historical interest, can be bought from dealers.

There are precedents for the treatment of this sort of thing as library material. Probably Hough’s well-known work on American Woods will occur to everyone. No library, so far as I know, has ever thought of barring this from its shelves because it contains actual thin sections of the various woods instead of pictures thereof.

The peculiar adaptability of this kind of material to library use is a physical one, and is shared by every flat specimen that may be mounted on sheets. Instances will occur to every one. An actual flower or leaf, for example, is generally cheaper than a color reproduction of it, and takes up little more room when mounted. A good descriptive botany with inadequate pictures may well be supplemented by a herbarium of this kind. Historical material is quite generally flat—often written or printed on card or paper—old programs, menus, railroad tickets, dancecards, timetables, cards of admission, souvenirs of all kinds. One of the most interesting exhibitions I ever saw was of foreign railway material—timetables, tickets, dining-car menus, etc. Many Chinese and Japanese specimens were included. A treatise on forms of railway tickets, with fac-simile illustrations, would be eagerly sought by libraries; why should not the objects themselves be equally valuable? Librarians were glad to have Miss Kate Sanborn’s book on old wall papers, with its realistic reproductions, but how many of them thought of the possibility of making their own books of specimens, using the papers themselves, instead of photographic facsimiles thereof?

This point of view may be commended to the makers of decorated bulletins in libraries. Much laborious hand-work is often done in the preparation of these, and the results are seldom worth the trouble. Even when a work of art has been produced it may be questioned whether the time withdrawn from other library work has been employed to the best purpose. By the use of what has been called above “museum material” time may be saved and better results reached. For instance, I once saw, in an exhibition of picture bulletins one bearing a list of books and articles on lace. It was made in white ink on black cardboard, and bore a most realistic representation of lace, done with the pen, probably at a vast expenditure of time. The most that could be said for this really clever bit of work was that it looked enough like a real piece of lace, mounted on the cardboard, to deceive the elect at a short distance. Why then did not the maker mount a real bit of inexpensive lace on the board, at an expenditure of a few minutes’ time? It should not require much thought to see that bulletins prepared in this way are usually better and more effective than elaborate decoration with pencil and brush.

Another point of resemblance between this kind of library material and that utilized by museums is the fact that its value is so often a group-value—possessed by the combination of objects of a certain kind, rather than by any one in itself. For instance, a common earthenware jar designed by John Jones in the Trenton potteries may have little value, but if you add to it a thousand other earthenware jars, or a thousand pieces of any kind designed by John Jones, or a thousand other specimens made in Trenton, the collection acquires a value which far exceeds the average value of its elements multiplied by thousands. The former may be five cents—the latter five thousand dollars. In the same way an illustration by Mary Smith, clipped from a trashy story in a ten-cent magazine, has little value—zero value, perhaps. But a thousand such illustrations showing the published work of Mary Smith from the time she began until she acquired standing as an illustrator, is worth while.

It should not be necessary to tell librarians that the best way to make such a collection as this is not to search for each element by itself but to gather miscellaneous related material in quantity and then sort it. If you have a pile of slips to alphabetize, you do not go through the whole mass to pick out the A’s, and then again for the B’s and so on. You sort the whole mass at once, so that while you are segregating the A’s you are at the same time collecting the B’s and all the rest of the alphabet. Likewise, if you want the illustration work of Jessie Wilcox Smith, for instance, you need not hunt separately for bits from her pen; you need only clip all the illustrations from magazines and papers that would be otherwise discarded. Then you sort these by the names of the illustrators, and you have at once collections not only of Miss Smith’s current work but of that of dozens of other illustrators. This is applicable in a hundred other fields.

It should be noted that this group value is potentially present in many large collections of material, whether classified or not into the particular groups in question. For instance, we have a large collection of locality post-cards, filed by cities and towns. Here are groups ready for use. If anyone wants views of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Stockton, Cal., to show to a class, or for use with a reflectograph, or to copy for newspaper work, they are already assembled. But also if someone is going to lecture on court houses, it is the work of only a few moments to assemble from the file a temporary collection of fifty or sixty examples. The same is true of buildings of any other type, say college dormitories, railway stations, libraries or warehouses, of parks, mountain scenery and industrial processes and of a hundred other things. The value here is a true group value; it is created by assemblage and becomes dormant again when the items are distributed to their proper places in the file.

The same is true of lantern-slides to an even greater degree, for slides are practically never used except in groups. As a collection of slides may be grouped in scores of ways, it is better to file them in some order that will admit of quick selection, than to form groups arbitrarily at the outset and keep these together. A slide in such a group is practically withdrawn from the possibility of assemblage in some other group. For instance, a view of Michael Angelo’s “Moses” might find a place in a group to illustrate a talk on Michael Angelo, or Renaissance Sculpture, or The Art Treasures of Rome, or Old Testament Worthies, or any one of a dozen others. If we place it arbitrarily in any one of these and keep the group together, we shall of course spare ourselves a little trouble if anyone wants that particular assemblage of slides, but we shall not only make it more difficult to assemble the other groups, but practically put them out of the running. Several years ago we had a valuable gift of a collection of slides illustrating phases of city-planning, given by the Civic League of our city. They included many foreign views now difficult or impossible to obtain. The donors had assembled them in groups to go with lectures prepared in advance and we maintained this arrangement for a time, although it was not in accord with our general plan. But we soon found that persons who asked for slides on London or Munich or Milan were missing some of our best material, simply because we could not always remember to look through the city-planning groups for something that might be there. Consequently we broke up these groups and distributed their slides to the proper places in our file, which is in trays arranged precisely as if the slides were catalogue cards, with proper guides and cross-references on cardboard slips. We have memoranda of the slides that belong in each lecture group and these can be quickly assembled if wanted. Of course we allow the public to go directly to the trays if they desire and assemble for themselves any group that they choose.

This is all borderland material between library and museum. There is much of it analogous to the lantern slide that libraries have not taken up yet, but that they might handle to good advantage. I do not see why we should not, for instance, circulate microscope slides or photographic negatives. Stereoscopic pictures are now commonly handled by libraries owing to skilful and perfectly legitimate exploitation.

There is perhaps some doubt whether we should include in this sort of material musical records, either for the mechanical organ and piano or for the phonograph. These should possibly be considered as books containing music written in a kind of notation that admits of sound-reproduction. The fact that there is this doubt should perhaps suffice to throw these records into the borderland of which we are speaking. They are to some extent capable of the group arrangement spoken of above, as where a library patron asks to take out half a dozen records from one opera or eight old French dances. They are also capable of a kind of correlation with other library material that is quite unique. Thus a reader may take out at the same time Chopin’s military polonaise in ordinary notation and in music-roll form. The pianola reproduction serves as a guide to his own reading of the piece, or he may simply follow the musical notation as he operates the mechanical player. Similarly, he may take out the miniature orchestral score of a selection and the phonograph record of the same as played by an actual orchestra. Here he can not play the piece himself but he can follow the reproduction with score in hand, much to his own musical pleasure and profit.

An exactly similar correspondence exists between an ordinary book and a phonograph record of it read aloud. Such records are not often available, but I see no reason why they should not become so, at any rate in the case of poetical and oratorical selections. Our means of popular instruction in spoken language are deficient and these might prove useful. At present we teach children in the schools to read and write, but not to speak. If they do not learn good colloquial spoken English at home, they are apt to remain uneducated in this respect. This plan has worked well in the teaching of foreign languages and it is now possible to buy small phonographs with cylinder records in French, German or Italian corresponding to printed passages in the accompanying manuals. I certainly think it legitimate of libraries to purchase these, and they would be “border-land” material, I suppose, in the same sense as the musical records.

I may say before closing, in regard to this sort of museum material, that the largest circulation of music rolls that I know of is that of the Cincinnati Public Library, which distributes them at the rate of 60,000 per year. We have 3681 rolls and circulated 16,814 in the year 1917. Neither the Cincinnati library nor our own pays out money for this material. It is all donated.

The status of phonograph records of all kinds as museum material is hardly as high in this country as abroad. In the Sorbonne, in Paris, records of French dialect speech have long been acquired and stored. Records of this kind and moving-picture films, made of permanent material and carefully prepared to show existing conditions would have very high future value. I do not know of any systematic effort to collect them in the United States. Possibly it might be difficult to find permanent films. A moving picture man told me that only perishable ones were being made, as it was not for the interests of the trade that they should last long. There is too much of this spirit in modern industry and trade, and it is responsible for poor materials of all sorts—paint, textiles, dyes and furniture. Permanent carbon photo-prints on paper can be made and doubtless the process can be applied to transparent films if desired.

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

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

THE LIBRARY AND THE LOCALITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the other hand the establishment, construction and opening of the 96th Street Branch were treated by the surrounding residents with supreme indifference. No one had asked to have a branch located at this point, which had been selected solely for reasons of topography and population. As the building went up, no one asked whether it was a school or a bank. Nobody came to the opening exercises. And yet when the library began to circulate books the community responded to such an extent that in a short time the branch was giving them out at the rate of 40,000 a month. Here the interest and pride of a community in the possession of a library building and its disposition to make use of the library are clearly shown to be two different things. In this case the two communities were parts of the same city, but separate towns often show the same phenomenon. Some of the most indifferent library towns, for instance, are the ones where superhuman efforts were put forth to secure a Carnegie building.

A kind of standardization of which we can not have too little is that controlled by the man who takes himself as the standard—his own ideas, prejudices and habits. This kind of standardizer is not always aware of what he is doing. He believes that his methods are the best. They may be best for him and possibly for the particular environment in which he has been working. I am not sure that some of our most cherished library habits did not originate in this way—were not originally simply the personal whims of some able and forceful library administrator who was in a position, in the formative stage of library progress, to impress them on the fabric of our work. Fortunately for us, the men of this kind, in the early history of the library movement, were not only men of force but generally of common-sense as well. Possibly their habits and customs were as good as any others that we might have adopted. I am sure that they were better than some. But individual points of view may in some cases prove disastrous. I remember an English novel in which a local librarian personally interested in the history of the French Revolution, uses all the available funds of his institution for years to buy books on the subject, building up a fine collection, but making his library useless for its ordinary purposes. His successor, a man with other interests, threw out the whole collection. I have often wondered which of these two librarians one ought to condemn most. Both are examples of the injury that may be done by what we may call auto-standardization.

I am preparing this whole lecture with a fear that some one of this kind may think he is adapting his library to his locality when he is only standardizing it by himself. Self-deception may go far in matters of this kind, and there is something to be said in favor of hard and fast standardization without departure of any kind, in that it prevents aberrations such as I have just hinted at. I trust that no self-standardizer is in my present audience.

Our conclusion from all this should be, I think, that a library should not only assimilate its methods to those of other libraries—which is standardization, but should react to the needs and conditions of its own surroundings, which is localization. If you would know the extent of this local reaction and the character of its results, ask the members of the library’s community, especially if that community is small. And we must remember that no library community is large, so far as its direct popular use is concerned. Whether it is in a village or a city, whether it is a central library or a branch, it is effective as a community centre only within a small circle, of perhaps half a mile radius. The residents of this circle are in a position to give testimony regarding the library’s local services. If it has succeeded in adapting itself to local needs its reputation will be that of a valuable, helpful, well-disposed institution; if not, the neighbors will be hostile, or at least indifferent. Libraries that are in constant trouble with their readers—the object of continual complaint and controversy, generally have the feeling that the fault is with the public. Sometimes it is; for a maladjustment is seldom on one side alone. But more often it is chiefly due to the fact that the library has overlooked its purely local functions, while possibly at the same time conforming most admirably to what are considered the best library standards. No library can afford to neglect its special duties to its locality and if these conflict with standardization, it should be the general standards and not the local adjustments, that should go by the board.