The Library Of Tomorrow A Symposium

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The library of
tomorrow

020.4

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The Library of Tomorrow

The Library
^Tomorrow

A Symposium

EDITED BY

EMILY MILLER DANTON

1939
AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

COPYRIGHT 1939 BY THE

AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

PUBLISHED MARCH 1939

27 '9

Contents

Introduction

Looking Forward, a Fantasy i

Frederic^ P. Keppel, President, Carnegie Corporation
of "New YorJ(

Responsibility of the Library to Continue the Literary Tradition 12
Harry Miller Lydenberg, Director, New Yor^ Public
Library

Libraries The Stronghold of Freedom 22

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

National Leadership from Washington 28

Carleton B. Joec^el, Professor of Library Science,
University of Chicago, and
Wittard 0. Mishoff, Librarian, 'Baldwin-Wallace College

Ideal Library Support 39

Milton /. Ferguson, Chief Librarian, Brooklyn Public
Library

Experimentation 47

Carl H. Mikm, Secretary, American Library Association

One for All; A Historical Sketch of Library Cooperation,
1930-1970 60

Robert Eingham Downs, Director of Libraries,
New Yori( University

Libraries and Scholarship 68

Sydney B, Mitchell, Director, University of
California School of Librarianship

Extension of Library Service 78

Judson T. Jennings, Librarian, Seattle Public Library

Standards for the Public Library Book Collection 87

Carl 5. Roden, Librarian, Chicago Public Library

The Librarian of the Future 96

Charles E. Rush, Librarian, Cleveland Public Library

Housing Tomorrow's Library 106

John Adams Lowe, Director of Libraries,
Rochester, New

The Trustee of the Future 1 19

William E. Marcus, President, Board of Trustees,
Free Public Library, Montclair, New Jersey

The Library's Responsibility to the Child 124

Lillian H, Smith, Head, Boys and Girls Division,
Toronto Public Libraries

School Library Service: 1970 133

Mildred L. Batchelder, Chief, School and Children's
Library Division, American Library Association

College and University Libraries 142

Henry M. Wriston, President, Brown University

Educating the Community Through the Library 152

Lyman Bryson, Professor of Education, Teachers
College, Columbia University

The Library's Part in Developing the Citizen 160

JR. Russell Munn, Librarian, National Youth Admin-
istration Library, Quoddy Village r Eastport, Maine

The Special Library Looks Forward 171

Ruth Savord, Librarian, Council on Foreign Relations,
Inc., Library, "New Yor/(

The Future of the Library of Congress 179

Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress

Introduction

FOR THOSE who are accustomed to the services of a great city library
marble halls, vast collections, trained personnel, mechanical book
conveyors, electric signals it is difficult to visualize the first tax-
supported public library in America, opened in Peterboro, New
Hampshire, in 1833. It consisted of a handful of books, collected in
one room, accessible to readers a few hours a week, but it was an
acorn and from it has sprung a vigorous sturdy growth, spreading
over the country, covering some territory sparsely, to be sure, but
thickly spread in others Subscription libraries there had been, even
in the eighteenth century, and the college library, too, was of early
origin, Harvard's, the first, having been begun in 1638 and eight
others following before the Revolution. But Peterboro is a land-
mark in expressing for the first time the ideal of free reading -for
the people.

Today there are over 17,000 libraries of all kinds in the United
States, with total collections of more than 160,000,000 volumes.
Some of them are not unlike that first little library in Peterboro
they are small and poor and struggling. On the other hand, there
arc libraries which can boast of one, two, and three million vol-
umes; and there are libraries all the way between. Every one of
more than 1,000 institutions of higher education in the country has

vii

The Library of Tomorrow

a library of a sort; few cities above 50,000 are without them; there
are libraries in banks and manufacturing plants, in insurance com-
panies and in newspaper offices, in CCC camps and in national
parks. In some states, notably California, county-wide library serv-
ice is well established and highly effective. City high schools often
have excellent libraries and excellent service, while grade school
libraries are showing steady growth.

Who are the beneficiaries of all this library activity? Theoreti-
cally, everybody. Students, business men, clubwomen, children,
mature people seeking the education they missed in youth, and
people of any age who are looking only for amusement and recrea-
tion. Actually, and in spite of the rapid growth of the library idea,
about 45,000,000 people in the United States do not have access to
free books and book service, and several million more are only a
little better off. As is to be expected, the poorer regions are the
backward ones in library facilities, while the great cities and, gen-
erally speaking, the closely populated Eastern states are usually well
equipped.

It is now pretty well established that the library after the faculty
is the first essential of the college or university. Indeed, nearly
every change in educational trends lays new emphasis on books and
reading. It is no less true that the public library ranks with the
school in importance to the community. Its carefully chosen collec-
tions, its intelligent, aggressive service, are reflected in the quickened
intelligence of the people who expose themselves to its influence-
in the business men, the young people, the children.

Libraries are never "finished"; they grow continually, not only
because they serve more readers and buy more books, not only be-
cause social changes and progress place new and increased demands
upon them, but because librarians and trustees have ideas and are
not afraid to experiment with them. Are libraries going in one well-
defined direction? If they are, this book should bring out the fact,
for its purpose is to offer a picture of what libraries may be, and
may be doing, 25 years or so from now. A few types of libraries will

viii

Introduction

be missed from the symposium., but an effort has been made to
Include as many as possible. It is hoped that the picture these chap-
ters present may serve to show, indirectly, the great variety and
signal importance of library activities today and, more particularly,
that it may indicate in sharp relief the tremendous potentialities of
the library of tomorrow in terms of service to humanity.

For this compilation, library specialists of all types and a few
non-librarians with closely allied^ interests were invited to express
freely their ideas and hopes for the library of tomorrow based
always upon possibilities f but looking perhaps a little beyond what
actually may be expected to come within a quarter of a century.
Some of the chapters were prepared in 1937, others in 1938, and it
may be that a few authors might have wished to alter their state-
ments slightly, if an opportunity to do so could have been given
them.

The twenty authors, whose opinions are wholly their own, have
expressed varying, divergent, and occasionally even conflicting
views. This is as it should be, of course, and provides a provocative
challenge to the reader, whether he be directly concerned or not.
Because of the present and probable future place of libraries in our
society, we hope and believe that this volume will be of interest to
the "intelligent layman" and of value to sociologists, educators,
political scientists and others concerned with the future of American
civilization.

Whatever "the library of tomorrow" may be, the experience of
the past 100, or even 25 years, as well as the opinions of these writers,
indicate that it will be considerably different from the library of
today and that it will unquestionably be an even more useful,
versatile and diversified agency serving the public good.

KM.D.
December 1938

fX

Looking Forward, a Fantasy

BY FREDERICK P. KEPPEL

WITH an earnest determination, to acquire some ideas about the
library of tomorrow I went to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on a day
in June when I knew that librarians by the thousand were to be
found them

As it turned out, I did get some ideas, but not from a librarian.
It was from my friend Alvin Johnson, of the New School for
Social Research. Back in 1916 he had been commandeered to visit
and report upon the Carnegie libraries throughout the United
States, and he was now once again on the trail after a gap of twenty-
one years in his library activities. As he was telling me, in a sort
of vingt ans apr&s, of the changes he observed in libraries and
librarians, my vagrant thoughts turned to wondering how it would
be if one could look twenty-one years ahead, instead of twenty-one
years back. Pretty soon they had conjured up a mythical delegate
to this very A.L.A. convention, to bear the historic name of Rip
Van Winkle or, on second thought, Rippina Van Winkle a
delegate fated to return from the convention utterly spent by its
stimulations and its fatigues, and, following the family precedent,
to fall into a sleep of characteristic profundity and duration.

What would Rippina Van Winkle, thoroughly refreshed after
this good long nap, find of professional interest in 1958 ? To begin

The Library of Tomorrow

with, I doubt if she would be able to recognize the public library
building, were she to wake up in a town that made any pretensions
to up-to-dateness. She would find no imposing facade, no Greek
columns or Gothic towers, and no dorsal hump as the outward and
visible sign of the book stacks. On the contrary, the building would
be more like a compact factory, and its flat roof would look like a
small landing platform, which is precisely what it would be.

However, on being assured that the strange structure was really
the town library, she would enter it and be more astonished than
ever. To begin with, she would already have passed through double
doors, for the library would be air-conditioned, both for tempera-
ture and for humidity and, incidentally, it would be noise-condi-
tioned as well The light of heaven would have full play, with no
columns to cut it off, nor Gothic mullions to cross its pathway.
Artificial light as needed would be of a kind hitherto unknown to
her. There would be no great reading room, but in its place an
assortment of smaller chambers, some of them lined with books,
to be sure, but more of them looking as if they had strayed from
some wholly different type of institution. One, for example, might
have come from a museum of science and industry, with its array
of models of various kinds. Several others obviously might have
come from a physics or chemistry laboratory, and still others from
a musical conservatory or theater or art museum. Among these lat-
ter, one room would have special equipment for stereoscopy and
for polarization to restore the third dimension to sculptural and
architectural material. The rooms for paintings would have their
color sifters and analyzers. Perhaps the most astonishing of all
would be the practice floors for the students of the dance, with pho-
tographic recording apparatus for comparison, odious or otherwise.

Backstage scenes would seem at least as strange as the public
rooms, for, though the young assistants to be found there would be
as busy as ever, they would not be stamping books by hand, or
lettering cards, or sorting them, but would be tending machines
which apparently performed these and other functions at the turn of

Looking Forward, A Fantasy

a dial. In fact, librarlanship would seem to Rippina to be largely
a setting of dials. There would be no pages, but instead dial-con-
trolled containers would be running the errands of the library a
little reminiscent of the electrically directed torpedoes of old. The
older librarians here and there might be carrying on their share of
a long-distance wireless committee meeting (for librarians would
still be strong on committees!), or might be conversing with a vis-
itor, or listening to records, or even reading a book.

Were Miss Van Winkle to speak to no one but the youngsters
who were of necessity taking all these matters for granted, having
known no other world, then would her visit result in confusion
worse confounded. If, on the other hand, she were fortunate enough
to fall into conversation with a contemporary, someone old enough
to have been a librarian in the far-off days of 1937, one who had
stuck to her job and seen the changes as they took place, one by
one, then perhaps to some degree things might be straightened out.
After a barrage of questions by the visitor, which got nowhere, be-
cause the answers were of necessity unintelligible, the old hand
would call a halt at least according to my musings and would
deliver a brief address somewhat along these lines :

"The beginnings of most of these things which now cause you
consternation were to be seen back in 1937, not everywhere, of
course, bijt here and there. We needed a new conception of the
library and the librarian, however, before we could approach the
possibilities of their development. We knew then that the library
was a repository of records of what human beings had learned, and
thought, and dreamed, but we assumed that these records must be
printed records. Even in 1937 we were beginning to ask ourselves
why the records must always be in print, and we were beginning
to cheat a little with reproductions of pictures and phonograph
records. Now, of course, everyone knows that the form of the rec-
ord makes no difference whatever. It is just as likely to address the

The Library of Tomorrow

ear as the eye and is just as likely to be recorded on disc or charged
wire as on paper. The problem of selecting non-written records for
our shelves is just as hard a job as the selection of books,, but when
we have made up our minds to get any particular record, we have
the equipment to make it available to the public. And don't forget,
just as there are editions and editions of books, so there are records
of different performances of music and drama, color photographs
of different paintings taken under different conditions and by dif-
ferent processes. The large libraries always contain several different
editions of this kind for comparison.

"Or, you can hear a great political address, or a moving sermon,
or a scientific lecture; you can both see and hear a famous trial, or
the Olympic games, or a plenary session at Geneva (yes, there is
still a League of Nations) . Bear in mind, too, that the motion pic-
ture is not only the most generally used means of recording and
conveying information of all sorts, but it has itself become, after
long years of commercialization, the vehicle for masterpieces of
creative art.

"Did you look into any of the radio rooms ? The interesting thing
here is that the newspaper and the radio have long ago learned to
work together and not at cross-purposes, and the running critique
of all radio performances conducted by the great journals is one of
our most used works of reference. Incidentally, we keep back num-
bers of all important broadcasts on our shelves.

"Youngsters, and older people as well, come to the library to in-
crease their speed in the use of the various calculating machines
which have developed from the old slide ruleor they come to
improve their foreign language facility through the polytelephonic
service, or to train their sensitiveness to color or pitch or odor. They
come, too, to better their skill at games by playing against the
photo-bogey.

"Of course, this is a city library, but you will find that the smaller
towns and the rural centers are much the same, though there is
less material in stock, and more coming in from outside on request;

Looking Forward, A Fantasy

for example, we are responsible here for looking after the needs of
a hundred smaller libraries. We provide the service at cost, and this
includes airplane delivery of books and films, as well as delivery by
the old-fashioned trucks.

"All these new services cost money as well as brains and energy,
and new money doesn't seem any easier to come by than it was in
'37. So we have saved the money we needed in one way or another
just as we did long ago. For instance, do you miss the old-fashioned
stacks ? We don't need them any more. As soon as a book or journal
has had its active day, it is no longer kept to gather moss, but is
replaced by a film, and a film in a pill box doesn't take much space,
particularly when you realize that we are down to a standard of
four millimeters for everything. And even most of the pill boxes
ultimately go into regional cold storage. From the standpoint of
budgeting, it is also to be remembered that a pill box doesn't need
to be bound and rebound.

"As to cataloging cards of different types, it is now the publisher's
business to provide them for new books or other records. For old
records we have them telephotoed from the Library of Congress or
one of the other central catalogs. When it comes to using the cards,
I blush to think for how many years we watched the so-called busi-
ness machines juggle with payrolls and bank books before it oc-
curred to us that they might be adapted to dealing with library
cards with equal dexterity. Indexing has become an entirely new
art. The modern index is no longer bound up in the volume, but
remains on cards, and the modern version of the old Hollerith ma-
chine will sort out and photograph anything that the dial tells it,
and, thank heavens, will then put all the cards back in their places.

"We librarians must keep up with all these applications of science,
and I admit it takes a fair share of our time to do so. If you had
happened to start your new experiences at an A.L.A, convention,
Fm afraid you wouldn't have recognized what was going on any
more than you recognized this as a library building.

"You may remember how as youngsters we were fascinated with

j

The Library of Tomorrow

the scientific prophecies of H. G. Wells. Today Weils is still a living
force as an interpreter of human nature, which doesn't change like
the machines, but, as a scientific prophet, time has proved him to
be what, if I remember correctly, we used to call a piker. I have
only told you of the things that had their start back in 1937, be-
cause about these we both can use more or less the same language,
As to the newer processes you will just have to take my say-so that
they have come, and keep coming, and that you wouldn't know
what I was talking about if I tried to explain them to you. If you
were to attribute some of the results to a kind of harnessed and
directed telepathy, you wouldn't be so far wrong. You realize, of
course, that I've been skipping many other things, such as the
whole question of protecting property rights in information which
doesn't happen to be printed, and I've said nothing of the new
demands of the new professions*

"But, after all, some things, and not the least important things
for you to remember, haven't changed a bit in their fundamentals.
For one thing, well never get a machine to select a book or other
record, or to withdraw one from circulation. We'll never get a
machine to establish the personal touch with the reader (we still
call them all readers, by the way, whether their Intake' is to be by
sight or sound or touch) . For another, the library is still the most
generalized of the cultural service* in any community, and now,
as in 1937, the library must stand ready to fill in the gaps, what-
ever they may be, and to do so must adjust the proportionate scale
of its different activities in terms of other agencies which may be
available locally. For example, you see that man over there in what
you called the physics laboratory. He is from one of the department
stores and is matching colors by measuring the light vibrations. If
this happened to be a college town, we would let the college look
after things of that kind. On the other hand, we have here only a
very small library' of illustrative models, because we do have a
good museum which gives that kind of service better than we can.
In fact, we keep only enough models to fix the idea in people's heads

Looking Forward, A Fantasy

that for the modern library a model is a 'book, 5 if it happens to be
the clearest and most economical way to get an idea into a human

head."

By this time the Rippina Van Winkle of my musings would
doubtless have found her voice again and resumed her questioning:
"With all these things which people today must want to use, I
should think the library would be crammed, but it seems to be
rather empty."

"No, we have the usual number here today. Don't forget that in
general the people come in to start a job; most of what goes on
later goes on at home* or in the office, or the shop. The kind of
equipment that you see here is very generally distributed, and, just
as most of the book reading was done at home in the old days and
is today, not only the books but the films and discs are now cir-
culated by the library and used at home.

"By the way, you seem worried because so few of the people here
seem to be reading. Curiously enough, we are delighted that there
are so many; with all the other and apparently easier methods for
conveying and absorbing information it looked for a while as if
reading would become one of the lost arts, but within the last few
years reading is coming into its own again, and the sector of the
librarian's dollar which must go for the purchase of printed ma-
terial is again growing larger."

"But, after all, mustn't the librarian today be a very different kind
of person from the one I knew, really more of a mechanical engineer
than a bookworm?"

"No, indeed, it hasn't proved necessary for a man or woman to
neglect other things, or be a special kind of person in order to run
these contraptions and keep them in order. Just think back and
remember when automobiling and later aviation seemed destined
to be limited as human activities to mechanically minded males."

"But still I don't see how any woman dares to become a librarian."

"Well, it doesn't require any more courage than it did to become

7

The Library of Tomorrow

a doctor In 19375 with all the new knowledge which had developed
during the first third of the century and which seemed about to
overwhelm the profession. It's always a question of hammering
in the fundamentals and getting a sense of scale about the other
things. Of course, we no longer pretend to train a college graduate
to be a librarian in a year or two years, but, fortunately, the public
now recognizes the value of our services to a point where the pres-
ent salary scale justifies the longer preparation. But it isn't all a
matter of the length of formal preliminary training. The work is
much better organized, and we no longer waste time in learning
the processes of yesterday. Furthermore, we librarians come much
nearer today to practicing what we preach about adult education,
and library boards have learned that it is not a bad investment to
permit us to do a good bit of our practicing on company time."
At this point my old-timer might feel moved to point out that the
really big change which had come to the profession was not in its
mechanization but in a new division of intellectual labor. "In a very
general way," she might say, "the information which a librarian
may have to provide is of three types. At one end of the line is the
general knowledge that any reasonably intelligent and trained
librarian should have in his head or know just where to find. At
the other end is the very highly specialized kind of information
to be found perhaps in only one or two erudite brains in any
generation. We don't bother possessors of such knowledge any
more than we can help. If something in their line comes up, we
first ask the Clearing House in Washington if our particular ques-
tion has ever been asked before. If so, the answer is on record
and immediately available; if not, the scholars are very reasonable
about helping out. Last week we were in touch through the Inter-
lingual Clearing House at Geneva with a biophysicist in Tirana
and an anthropologist in Peking, both of whom were glad to give
us what we needed.

"In between general knowledge and these highly specialized items
comes the great mass of rather special knowledge which no li-

8

Looking For ward, A Fantasy

brarian need pretend to cover, but which must be on tap either
locally or regionally. Every librarian who is worth his salt makes
it a point of pride to keep up with some specialty and, o course,
to be ready to share what he knows with his colleagues. My own
specialty happens to be synthetic textiles, and just before you came
in I telephoned quite a little lecture on the subject to someone a
hundred miles away on whom I shall probably never lay my eyes.
One of the big jobs of the leaders in our profession in each region
is to make sure that this kind of informal service is kept up. Mind
you, the experts are not all active librarians. Professors and school
teachers, engineers and lawyers, parsons and a surprising number
of nonprofessional people do their bit as citizens in this way. It
proves an admirable hobby for married ex-librarians."

"What a wonderful profession it must be, with all these marvelous
new techniques for professional development, and all the chores
eliminated.'*

"Chores, my dear, are never eliminated. I do think that today's
chores are more interesting than the ones in the old days and that
they take up a smaller proportion of my time, but chores there are
and always will be, and by the same token there will always be
bores to be served, and colleagues with toes to be trodden upon,
though as to the latter I must add that what used to be called the
personnel movement and the mental hygiene movement have done
much all along the line to steer people into the jobs which, in view
of their particular capacities and personalities, are the jobs they
ought really to be in."

Well, Miss Van Winkle having been projected rocketlike into
the future, all as a result of my talk with Alvin Johnson and the
musings which followed that talk, let us leave her there, trusting
she will adjust herself to a career of happy usefulness.

After all, the differences between 1937 and 1958, spectacular as
they must prove to be, will I am sure be less significant than the
likenesses. The library and the librarian have already found their

The Library of Tomorrow

place in human society and, by and large, despite innumerable
changes in detail, that place won't be so very different twenty-one
years hence. Librarianship is an essential profession, and a profes-
sion is a calling in which it is the broad human qualities which
count, trained intelligence, imagination and initiative, disinterested-
ness and a sense of social responsibility not techniques or tricks of
the trade. The librarian, to be sure, will be freed from some of his
present tasks, from the physical care of dead and dying books, with
the attendant problems of binding and stacking, from a cumber-
some system of records which I suspect is already out of date. He
will also be freed from his present self-imposed task of evangelism,
for it will be no more necessary twenty years hence to "sell" library
service than it is today to sell postal service. For one thing, the
youngsters who are now learning to be "librarious" in our chil-
dren's rooms will then be largely in control of public opinion, and
for another the steady reduction of classroom instruction in school
and college, which has already set in, and the corresponding en-
couragement of individual acquisition of information, will mean
that practically everyone then will have some knowledge of how
to use a library.

The librarian by then should have completely lost that profes-
sional restlessness which is sometimes in evidence today, for, even
though he himself may have no doubt that he is a member of a
profession second in importance to none, he isn't always quite sure
that the other fellow knows it too.

It is my expectation that as time goes on the librarian in our
community councils will tend more and more to line up with the
engineer and the accountant, as a purveyor of a background of
facts, as contrasted with a foreground of hopes and fears. In com-
munity service, the library will continue to be the pinch hitter, in
constant adjustment to changing needs and to new ways of meeting
them, for the library today is sensitive to changes in the body politic
and the body social, more immediately sensitive even than the
school, and it seems destined to remain so. It may well be that

10

Looking Forward, A Fantasy

librarians may have to give over to other professions as yet unborn
some of the opportunities for professional service which today they
regard as most precious; but, if so, they will acquire new oppor-
tunities to replace the ones transferred, and the relative position of
the profession in the social pattern should not be very different.
That position is high and honorable today, and it will be high and
honorable in 1958.

II

Responsibility of the
to Continue the Literary

BY HARRY MILLER LYDENBERG

JUST what is this 'literary tradition" the library is responsible for?

Is it a championing of the belles-lettres against books with no
more imagination than grammars or geographies ? Is it a cherish-
ing of the humanities against the sciences, pure or applied? Is it a
supporting of the old poetry against the new? A holding up to
scorn of histories that reflect any opinion of their author or swerve
in the slightest from matter-of-fact narration? Does it mean the
library's chief end is to collect books, letting their reading and use
be governed by chance or the passing mood of the moment?

If you admit that the literary tradition, or the tradition of liter-
ature, means the connecting of book and reader, then I am sure
we all agree that a literary tradition ever has been, ever will be,
recognized by the librarian as his primary responsibility.

It is merely one more indication of the many-sided appeal of
the book, of the responsiveness of the librarian to his setting, of his
recognition of the charge given him to carry into the future the
tradition of the past. How that tradition will be carried on, what
form it will take, is merely a question of detail.

The photographic plate, the electric ray, radiation and other be-
wildering expressions of natural forces have lately come to play so

12

Continuing the Literary Tradition

striking a part in our daily life that one is tempted to ask not
whether, but how, they are to affect this world of books.

Sixty or seventy centuries ago, before we helped our memory by
making marks on cave walls, or clay tablets, or papyrus sheets, or
skins of animals, the bard wandered through the country and told
his story wherever he found a listener. Generations later some one
tried to preserve these stories in material form. Then and there
library and librarian came into play.

Is it fantastic to ask if broadcasting as we have it today may

perhaps point to a time when once more the man with a story to

tell may stand where he chooses and pour his tale into the air, to

be taken up by willing ears, or other receiving sets ? Perhaps when

^ that time comes we may need no printed books, but be happy to

J0 rely either on the particular message we happen to choose from the

O throngs then in the air or on a reproduction of the author's voice

J\^f rom some mechanical device.

00 But until then we may count on printed books, shaped and
formed in any way you choose to fancy, laid before their users in
^ any way you choose to fancy, gathered, garnered, cataloged, ar-
ranged, classified by the librarian. From his earliest days the librar-
ian has recognized his responsibility for preservation of this literary
^f tradition, and so long as there are authors, books, readers, he may
s * be counted on to carry that tradition forward,

It was a sense of that responsibility that led him to link himself
to Mechanics Institutes and Chautauqua movements, to adult edu-
cation and to Grange reading circles, to book wagons and library
. extension, to English for the foreign born, to joint efforts with the
^"""Junior League. But he has always played his tune on a single in-
* strument the book as the message of the author with a story to
^ tell a thirsty world, whether the plea comes for poetry, history,
CM philosophy, or science. The librarian has never felt that he had any
O other mission than to bring book and reader together, no matter
what the interest of the one for the other.
Sometimes, however, your poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist

13

The Library of Tomorrow

anyone offering what we like to call imaginative writing an-
nounces that he alone produces "literature," that "literary tradition"
or the "tradition of literature" comes from him alone, that he must
rise in protest whenever we talk about the "literature" of slang, or
polar exploration, or horse breeding, or steel making. They say that
books (mere books) may be written about such topics, to be sure ?
but these books are not literature, nor do their writers produce a
literary tradition unless the bare bones of their facts are transmuted
into glowing life by the creative imagination of the author.

Dreiser might use a textbook on steelmaking, but the steel story
would be subordinated to the life story of the steel workers. Miss
Gather uses the contemporary records of seventeenth century Que-
bec, chronicles, maps, letters and manuscripts, in creating Shadows
on the roc\. Mr. Stephen Vincent Benet undoubtedly assembled
for John Browns body facts accepted by all, but it was he who
transformed those facts from the realm of history to imagination
and emotion. It is not until those facts pass through the inspired
artist that they swing into the field of literature.

Grant that and you will find librarians admitting readily enough
that their connection with literature and the literary tradition is
quantitatively smaller than with the unliterary tradition. Not that
they shy away from "literature" or the "literary" tradition. Par
from it. Simply that they have always felt, continue to feel, that
their privilege, duty, responsibility lie in recognition of the wide-
ness of appeal of the printed book, in their duty to fit together book
and reader all classes of each wherever the two find themselves,
rather than bow down to any particular class of books. And of
recent years belles-lettres seem to some of us less active or less
prolific in output than other fields of writing.

Fashions in books change almost as often and widely as in
women's dress, and your library furnishes a striking proof if ever
question arises. Go back only a little way and you find the em-
phasis largely on the producing, collecting, reading and serving of
books theological. Sir Thomas Bodley wanted no papists oa his

14

Continuing the Literary Tradition

shelves. The librarian was as partisan as his community. No one
recognized impartiality. A book was either orthodox or heterodox;
it was either supported or condemned. And so no one is surprised
to see the dominance of theology and philosophy in the catalogs of
libraries of earlier days, any more than he is surprised to see the
usual classification schemes for books or for departments of knowl-
edge open with those same topics.

No one expects the general library today to pay as much atten-
tion to those fields as it did in his grandfather's day. Everyone
expects the general library in his grandson's day to be paying as
much attention to the books in greatest demand at that time as it
did for his grandfather or does for himself. The only thing we dare
not expect is an accurate forecast of the direction, volume and
velocity of the dominating current.

That certain trends will stand out clearly is so plain as to need
no saying. It is equally clear that the librarian has to recognize
them, adapt them to his needs as far as possible and adapt his
course to their flow as far as possible.

How?

Well, for one thing he has taken the first step when he admits
his responsibility. That implies a survey, a study of the landscape,
a planning for the future. Plans have been much in our thoughts
these last few years, five- and four- and ten-year plans, all sorts of
plans. Sometimes they are formally recognized, sometimes acted
on by instinct. It is decidedly encouraging to reflect that in this
country the national association of libraries, with many of the state
associations, has definitely set itself to the task of making such a
survey, defining the steps the organization and its members should
take to carry forward the resulting plans.

It was very definitely in recognition of a duty towards the literary
tradition that, when the Library of Congress a generation ago be-
gan to print the cards for its catalog, it deposited sets of those cards
in libraries at strategic points throughout the land where readers
could find readily at hand records of what the national library

The Library of Tomorrow

contained. It was likewise a definite recognition of that same duty
when that same library took the next step by gathering into its
central stores a record of titles owned by other libraries, eventually
to provide the student with a union catalog of the books at his
command in one place or another throughout the land.

The naturalness of such efforts, the help they rendered produc-
tive scholarship and the possibilities for the future were so plain
that today it is difficult to imagine oneself without such aid read-
ily at hand. Recognition of this fundamental help for research
came soon in efforts to establish similar union catalogs for various
sections of the country. And in all these movements it was the
American library that played its part in recognition of the literary
tradition, in aiding American scholarship.

It has realized, too, that its responsibility includes not only the
collecting of this kind of information but also the appraisal of the
sources at hand. To this end a Board on the Resources of American
Libraries has been appointed by the national association for study
of the character and scope of the present collections, for consider-
ation of means for helping the weaker members strengthen their
holdings and encouraging the older and stronger ones to develop
and round out their collections more nearly to completion.

The American library has done much toward this end by pub-
lication of lists of special collections. This helps the scholar at a
distance from populous centers, aids the librarian in filling gaps in
his collection, and indicates for this or that group of librarians
which fields are for exclusive, which for joint, cultivation. Elimi-
nation of wasteful duplication, encouragement of sane and friendly
rivalry, of cooperation rather than wasteful competition such
steps unquestionably help the American scholar, and demonstrate
a sense of responsibility to the literary tradition.

Every now and then someone discovers a new age in library
development. The past, we are told, was the time of the collector-
librarian, the man whose chief aim in life was the gathering and
assembling of books. The use they were put to was of incidental,

16

Continuing the Literary Tradition

trifling importance. The reader was welcome if a friend, suffered
if an average man or rebuffed if occasion warranted or indigestion
urged. But we have changed all that. It is the fashion, every now
and then, to proclaim a new heaven and a new earth, a new gospel
of carrying the book unto the uttermost parts of the earth, or of
compelling the reader to come in. The old order gives place to the
new, and the mere assembling of books is ranked among wind-
mills, hand churns, horses, and similar forgotten things.

Here and there, however, can be found libraries that admit
unashamedly in the open market-place that they still rejoice in
rounding out their collections, that they still believe they have a
charge to keep in assembling books with the needs of scholars in
mind, that research demands materials to work on, that books are
proper materials of research, that the character of readers is quite
as significant a measure of their importance or value as the mere
record of their numbers, that it is both possible and desirable to
gather books to help scholars and at the same time provide books
for the great body of citizenry.

It is fortunate that the two sides of library work are not mutually
exclusive, and equally fortunate that the library may be counted on
to continue its responsibility toward the literary tradition by gath-
ering books as an aid to research. The scholarly side of its task can
be met in satisfactory fashion with no lessening of the importance
of the library as an element in the scheme of popular education.
The growing recognition of the part the library plays in college and
university life needs no comment. That it has lived up to its re-
sponsibilities toward the literary tradition so far offers ample reason
for belief that its future course is equally certain.

But now, take the commission in its most literal form, and ask
what responsibility the American library has to preserve the tradi-
tion of literature as we see it in what we ordinarily call books of
imagination, in the humanities, in the deeper and exclusive sense
of the term.

Has it any duty in this respect? What tradition is there to be

17

The Library of Tomorrow

preserved? If the library fails who will carry on? Is any one else
in better position?

Librarians generally have recognized that they have certain plain
and obvious duties in this field. Their judgment as to what is now
great literature is as fallible as their brothers'. No one can blame
them for looking at Two years bejore the mast in 1840 or Moby
DicT^ in 1851 as runof-mine books, one more or less imaginative,
the other as matter-of-fact as a countinghouse ledger. The appre-
ciative soul who, when those books appeared, saw that they would
some day be accepted as milestones must later have been properly
pleased with himself.

Undoubtedly Melvilles and Danas are writing today, with as
little appreciation as before, and all we can hope for is recognition
by the occasional mind, blessed with enough imagination and pene-
tration. The problem is simpler with the obviously weak, senti-
mental romances certain to make their crop year after year, certain
of wide appeal, certain of no life beyond today. There the course is
plain. Plenty of books, equally strong in sentimental appeal, un-
questionably superior in permanent value, He at the command of
librarian and reader. All the librarian needs is money to buy enough
copies to keep his readers in a literary tradition tested by time and
proved by general accord, and to buy liberally such books currently
appearing as he honestly feels have good chances of proving to be
pure gold, (He knows he will overlook some and will hold up
others that will not last in the long run, but his errors will be honest
errors of judgment, not of wilfully singing the praises of the
mediocre, the vicious, the weak or the poor.)

The moment he starts on any such path, however, he opens him-
self to two charges. Why, with a public library supported by public
money, should not the public get what the public wants? What
right has he to set himself up as a censor?

The public hospital ought to give the public laudanum as a
cure-all when the public demands it? Physicians make mistakes
in diagnosis or prescription, to be sure, and librarians have plenty

18

Continuing the Literary Tradition

of errors charged up against them. But both have Ideals and con-
victions, willingly changed when proved wrong but firmly held
until that time arrives. Your librarian knows the universal demand,
"Tell us a story/' can be met by books with a lasting thrill and the
added assurance o being good company. It is his duty and re-
sponsibility to help the public taste and test this literary tradition.

Some of us, to be sure, say we are tired of respectable society,
want the fun of playing with a shady crowd now and then if not
every hour of every day. Very well, that's our own choice. But is it
the duty of the public library to furnish such a diversion?

No need for long talk on that point. No, nor on the other, which
goes on to say that when the public established a library it did not
establish a censor morum.

Agreed, without debate.

But when your librarian refuses to buy this, that, or the other
title, he's setting himself up as just that kind of a judge of other
people's reading, isn't he?

Not at alL Nor is it begging the question to say that life is just
one series of selections, day after day and hour after hour, and when
your librarian chooses what he honestly believes is a better piece of
literature than another he is merely exercising that kind of selection
demanded by the position he holds.

He makes mistakes, plenty of them, and he changes his point of
view as the years change. Some of us recall when Tom Jones was
shut out of libraries, and what a grave question it was whether Tess
should be admitted. Zola, of course, found many doors closed. But
how about Three wee/^s?

Yes, it's true that the librarian knows some of the things he
passes over today will be no more questioned tomorrow than are
Tom and Tess. For some he may count on the support of time.

But the point is simply that the librarian admits he makes mis-
takes, asks nothing more than that he be given a fair show when
he tries to serve his readers with what he believes are the best
examples of the literary tradition. A book may be a great book if it

The Library of Tomorrow

reeks with profanity on every page, if in every other paragraph
it sings lustily the ballads of things that normal people ordinarily
accept without talking about, but it is great in spite of those
offenses against good taste, not because of them. The librarian asks
the privilege of accepting or rejecting on the basis of merit as liter-
ature, on the way the book measures up to literary tradition, on
that alone, not on its profanity or pornography.

Your proletarian novel or your sea story may be a piece of real
literature, but it ranks so because it tells a great story, creates real
characters, paints a picture you can't forget, not because it is a tract
for the times with scene laid in slums or foVsle. It may be ac-
cepted as a plea for more humanity to man, but that alone is not
a password to the ranks of literature.

(And here let me say I realize that the airy lightness of sugges-
tion and suggestiveness may be solely ia my mind and intent, not
in the words set down. To escape the danger of misunderstanding
let me say with clumsy and direct plainness that I am speaking with
no particular proletarian or "other half novel or sea story in mind,
citing them merely as Tendenz examples. All I want to do is to
make the obvious remark that Uncle Tom's cabin f and The jungle,
and Nicholas NicJfleby were once thrilling documents in social
movements. As milestones in English literature, however, their
position must be fixed according to the degree they measure up
to the canons or standards of the novel as an expression of liter-
ature, not as to their effectiveness as a clarion call to reform-)

It is in this sense that the librarian must recognize and live up
to his responsibility to the literary tradition. The treasures of the
past have been given him to care for. He is willing nay, eager-
to find, to cherish, to applaud the creations of today. That the task
is less simple to accomplish than to define is no reason for avoid-
ance. Every sign gives assurance that complete recognition for
tomorrow is as certain as for yesterday.

In conclusion, I feel I can do no better than quote the words of
a friend to whom I was talking recently on this subject:

20

Continuing the Literary Tradition

"The literary tradition implies the conserving, the transmitting
from one generation to another of imaginative, critical, philosophi-
cal letters. The factual books are in the main the books of the day,
even the great ones Caesar, Pliny, Herodotus (or does he go to
fiction?), Locke, Johnson's Dictionary, Newton, Darwin being
assimilated in the great body of scientific and factual material.
Cherished for their historical interest, they are unreliable today as
statements of fact. Where would later scientists, military strategists,
lexicographers, economists be if they relied solely on these pred-
ecessors?

"But Plato, Euripides, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Vol-
taire, Blake, Shelley countless others are as forceful and moving
today as when they were brightly minted. No one replaces them,
No one can. No Improvements can be made. Time does not affect
their Influence.

"Therefore the library has a peculiar obligation to cherish and
transmit their work. Even with less exalted writers of imaginative
literature it is the privilege of the library to make them more widely
known than they would otherwise be, to extend to its readers their
illumination of life and to transmit them to the next generation o
library users,"

21

Libraries
The Stronghold of Freedom

BY DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER

THE ONE true library pioneer whom I knew intimately was my
father. He was an educator who preached a crusade for universal
free public education long before that principle was taken for
granted. When the movement was well started and would ob-
viously go forward of its own impetus, he began another crusade
for universal free public libraries. These he saw as the needed rung
in the educational ladder before the American citizenry could step
off into that permanent intellectual maturity without which the
hopes of the country's founders would come to nothing. What was
the use of teaching Americans to read intelligently if they did not
find around them an adequate supply of intelligently selected books
to read?

My father and other generous-spirited library pioneers of his
generation never doubted that with books and readers brought
together the trick was done. But there have been times when I
have been glad they were in their graves and not with me as I have
looked, shocked, at the echoing emptiness of certain well-stocked
but neglected libraries. My father's wholehearted drive towards
providing books might have lost some of the power of his ardor
and courage had he guessed what nobody then knew that there

22

The Stronghold of Freedom

are mysterious, shut doors inside human heads which must be
opened before the right books are taken from those open shelves
and read. How could the pioneers of the library movement dream
of the invisible barrier which rears itself inexplicably between the
busy, happy reading-public of childhood, clustering in well-con-
ducted children's rooms, reading children's classics with delight,
and those children grown up to be the general public, who read no
classics, none, nothing but an occasional best seller, and the maga-
zines ?

But John Brown's soul is not the only one that goes marching on.
All generous-hearted, selfless lovers of the common good leave be-
hind them something that will not die, that lives and, because it
lives, adapts itself to what it finds to do in its own time. Although
it is always a shock for people to see as they grow older that no
problem is as simple as it looked to the first of those who attacked
it, we all come to feel, as we advance into being the older generation
ourselves, that nothing of what the pioneers have done is wasted,
and that their spirit lives on, indomitably continuing to battle for
the good cause, against difficulties of which they did not dream.

They thought or no, they did not think, they took for granted
that an "educated citizenry" (by this, they simpleheartedly meant
a population all of whom had gone through the primary grades,
a large majority of whom had high school training, a large minority
of whom had a college diploma) would spontaneously and eagerly
throng into the public library in knowledge-hungry crowds, if the
doors could be opened to them, using books as tools to advance
themselves steadily year by year in good taste, cultivation, good
judgment, sound information. There is no doubt that they would
be aghast to see that this is not exactly what happens to put it
mildly. They would be horrified by the statistics showing the large
percentage of our population which cannot read with ease, and will
not of its own accord read any book beyond the comprehension of
an eighth grade child (or is it a sixth grade one?). They would be
staggered by the small proportion of the population of any com-

The Library of Tomorrow

munity which uses the books so freely offered by Its public libraries.
Doesn't the American Library Association give five to ten books
a year per capita of the population as about the best circulation a
public library can hope for, under the most favorable conditions?

And what is it we hear from colleges about the apparently con-
genital illiteracy of many students entering the freshman class?
Yes, I think the forefathers of the free public library would have
turned rather pale at some of the things we know, and they did
not, about the relationship between books and human beings.

But, remembering their ardor, their willingness to give their
lives to the cause, I do not for a moment believe they would be
disheartened. I am sure that after they had had time just to catch
their breath they would have turned from their crusade for a wider
public recognition of the vital need for books in a democracy, to
an impassioned attack on the mystery of why a democracy doesn't
use its books as it should. They were determined, you'll remember,
to open to their countrymen those doors to knowledge, understand-
ing and joy, called books. When they saw that opening the literal
material doors to public libraries did not bring inside that rich
realm great numbers of those who would profit by it and, profiting,
would raise the level of their country's life, I don't think they would
have sat down on the front steps to mourn, I think they would have
asked themselves purposefully, "What are the doors that are still
shut?"

That is what their successors in the library world of today are
asking themselves. The new crusaders for books in a democracy
have turned from the material to the inner obstacles, and in long
detailed research are trying to forge the keys that will open those
psychological doors. I feel a reflection from the ardor of the pio-
neers whenever I am reminded of the existence of that Committee
on Readability in Books, with its double connection with the
American Library Association and with the American Association
for Adult Education. Miss Flexner with her Readers Advisory
Service is not only guiding hundreds of readers but storing up

24

The Stronghold of Freedom

priceless heaps of information about the inner workings of readers*
minds. Lyman Bryson with his pioneering and experimental re-
search into what may be the causes, in style, in presentation, in
construction of books, for their having so few readers (relative to
our population), is feeling his way forward into an unexplored
region of the mind, the vastness of which, the possibilities of which,
fairly take one's breath away. Dr. Waples' painstaking piling up
of factual, actual information about what the people of modern
literate countries do read how strange that it is only since he
began that we have seen the necessity of knowing something about
what the situation is, before we try to improve it. And in the schools,
the new interest in reading, the specializing experts, the constant
discussion of causes of failure, the constant analysis of results how
hopeful and promising for the librarians of the future and for our
democracy are the pedagogical battles over the methods of teaching
reading. Every one of them is part of the crusade to open doors
through which a democracy must pass if it is to endure. I think the
spirits of the pioneers must hover with affection and pride over
their descendants who are attacking the problem from this angle.
It is possible, too, that those hovering spirits from their point of
vantage may lift their eyes from the struggles of our generation as
we try to carry on their crusade to bring wisdom and beauty of the
past into the present, and may see, rank on rank, other doors now
shut which may open before the widened imagination of the future.
They may be between laughter and pity to see how we narrow our
efforts to bridge the chasm between the past and the present, think-
ing of the printed page as though it were the only way in which
the collective wisdom of our race may be preserved and carried
forward. They may see that the great door of audible books has
been unlocked by scientific research and by the success of the
cinema and be asking us why in the world we don't push it open
and invite into the library of the future those minds, not moving
freely on the printed page, which have been shut out from normal
growth in the past few centuries. And those other myriads of

The Library of Tomorrow

human minds which love and understand and grow through pic-
tures rather than words for five hundred years the printing press,
straddling like Apollyon over all the way, has darkly forbidden
them to advance into knowledge and understanding, starving and
warping by its pretensions some of the richest personalities of our
race "go to their rescue!" we can imagine the spirits of our library
pioneers crying out to us. Cautioning us to continue straitly and
well that learned laboratory research, the first ever undertaken in
the history of the world, into the real relation between human
minds and books, which is our generation's special pioneer work of
exploration, they are perhaps also bidding us give up as vain the
effort to get all the brains of the race into the heaven of intellectual
life through the needle's eye of the printed page, and telling us
that the gates leading to intelligence and culture are wider than
that.

Rising with a strong wingbeat of the imagination, they may catch
a glimpse of libraries of the future circulating not only those sheets
of paper marked with printed symbols of words which so large a
part of our race translate with difficulty into ideas, but paintings,
music (why not?), records of poems read by the poets themselves,
motion-picture films of far places, of mechanical processes hard to
put into these word symbols, of the stars in their courses, of in-
struction in sports and dancing, in hygiene, in homemakiag, in the
care of children, in gardening, in all the arts.

Yet there is an aspect of the library movement now, in our
troubled times, rising melodramatically into view, undreamed of.
I think, by its founders, with all their greatness of vision. They
took for granted some forms of freedom, assumed that liberty to
think was as pervasive in modern life as the air we breathe. And
we have been tragically taught that this freedom is the first object
of attack whenever democracy is threatened. Highly as the founders
valued the institution of public libraries (they would have said that
it was impossible to set a higher value on that institution than they
did), it did not occur to them, I think, that public libraries play a

26

The Stronghold of Freedom

vital part In preserving that intellectual freedom without which any
form of government is a blighting tyranny. It was only in the lurid
light from the book-burning autos-da-fe in Germany, that the li-
brary took on its true shape of protecting fortress, that we saw it as
the very stronghold of freedom. Since then few of our generation
can pass a public library from the humblest village collection of
books to the grandest white marble urban palace without a lift
of the heart, both in thankfulness that it is there and in determina-
tion to do our share in preserving the shelter it gives to the living
seeds of intellectual life.

Our fathers' generation thought naively, and so did we in our
youth, that the insane wish to burn and crush and destroy those
irreplaceable seeds was a forgotten wickedness of the unenlight-
ened dark centuries far behind us. The revelation which comes to
us in our late maturity and to our younger generation as they first
emerge into adult life, that intellectual freedom is above every other
element in human life marked down for savage destruction by the
totalitarian state, gives us an electrifying warning to look well to
the defenses of our libraries. They are far more than the founders
thought, far more even than rich treasure houses of taste, beauty,
enjoyment and abstract scientific information they are in die last
analysis, as the monastic libraries of the Dark Ages proved, the
vessels in which the seed corn for the future is stored.

All but the most primitive of savages have wit enough to protect
the supply of grain for the next year's sowing. The same kind of
elemental instinct sends us to stand guard over our libraries as
never before, watchful not only of open and avowed frontal attacks,
but of subterranean mining, and of siege by slow starvation. They
are, as we never realized, far more than schools (helpless before
bullying propaganda as schools are), the very core and heart of the
defense against the return to barbarism. "Yet, Freedom! yet thy
banner, torn, but flying" floats in invisible glory over our public
libraries.

National

Washington

BY CARLETON B. JOECKEL
AND WILLARD O. MISHOFF

To MANY PEOPLE, unfamiliar with the administrative history of our
federal government, national library leadership may appear as a
relatively new obligation, associated with political trends of recent
years and partisan advocates of centralized political authority. Al-
though the Constitution of the United States makes no direct pro-
vision for libraries, the national government for many years has
shown a definite interest in library organization and administra-
tion. It not only has developed its own special and technical libraries
in the various agencies, but it has also rendered services promoting
the welfare of libraries throughout the nation. Since the future
relationship of the national government to American libraries will
be determined largely by its current activities, these may be exam-
ined briefly in order that their implications for leadership may be
understood.

The library interests of the United States government may be
grouped conveniently in four well-defined classes: (i) exemptions
and privileges; (2) services in the national capital; (3) field ac-
tivities outside the District of Columbia; and (4) the Library
Service Division of the Office of Education.

28

National Leadership from Washington

The federal statutes allow American libraries exemptions and
privileges. Thus, libraries are exempt from certain import duties
and from postal charges for shipments of books designed for the
blind. Equally significant is the designation of the Library of
Congress as legal depository for material copyrighted in the United
States.

As the activities of the federal government have increased, li-
braries have been established in various branches located in Wash-
ington. Outstanding examples are the collections of the Army
Medical Library, Department of Agriculture, Smithsonian Institu-
tion, Geological Survey, Patent Office, Bureau of Standards, and
Office of Education. So extensive and deeply imbedded in the
administrative structure is the complex library system that its re-
sources and organization are easily overlooked. Despite the incon-
spicuousness of their services, however, these federal libraries exceed
in content and variety the governmental libraries of other nations.
The Library of Congress, an independent administrative unit, is
now the largest library in the world and may be regarded rather as
a group of important special libraries than as a single collection.
The National Archives comprises a recent establishment in an
allied field. The special objectives and diverse sources of income of
these libraries render difficult the coordination of their services.

In addition to governmental activities, many federal libraries,
offer assistance to research workers and students. Equally impor-^
tant are the technical devices available to other libraries in the form
of printed cards, depository and union catalogs, classification sched-
ules, and microfilms. Incomplete as these services may be, due to
inadequate financial support and inherent technical intricacies,
without them the libraries of the nation would be unable to catalog
their collections proficiently and with economy. The interlibrary
loan services extended to scholars are both convenient and sig-
nificant.

Government libraries issue at more or less regular intervals a
growing list of current bibliographies, indexes, and digests in va-

29

The Library of Tomorrow

rious fields* Moreover, the cataloging, and indexing of both state
and federal documents has become a definite responsibility of the
national government. There remains a need to broaden the range
of state document indexes and to analyze more completely the
mass of near-print documents issued by many public agencies. An
exchange of documents with foreign governments is carried on by
the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution.

Of more popular interest is the distribution of public documents
published under the auspices of various governmental units. For
many years the federal government has been more than generous
in its issue of public print to libraries. As a result, it has been ac-
cused justly of extravagance on the one hand and of parsimony
on the other. There have been unsuitable inclusions of small li-
braries in the list of depositories, and strange omissions of large
libraries. Recent legislation has liberalized provisions for the dis-
tribution of congressional journals and committee publications to
depository libraries.

Outside the District of Columbia, federal library service has
assumed varying degrees of organization. The territories and de-
pendencies maintain public libraries according to local initiative
and ability. While organized book service is rendered in the Virgin
Islands, and libraries are scattered throughout Alaska and Puerto
Rico, the most effective system is maintained in Hawaii, Surveys
of territorial needs would make possible the formulation of a com-
prehensive library policy in these outlying domains. In the national
parks, appropriate reading materials are regarded as essential to
the educational and recreational program of the National Park
Service. Throughout the country, the federal government makes
available to blind readers embossed books and talking books, which
are distributed through libraries in regional centers. These federal
grants in the form of books assist materially in this service, which
already exemplifies the intelligent cooperation of national, state
and local authorities.

Wards of the federal government are permitted various grades

30

National Leadership from Washington

and types of book service. A well-organized library system is main-
tained in the leading prisons by a professional staff, while the hos-
pitals and facilities generally provide for the distribution of reading
material. Much less is done for the reservation Indians, who must
depend upon the schools for book service to adults as well as to
children. Although the postwar educational program of the army
and navy included the establishment of libraries, relatively less
emphasis has been placed on library service in recent years. Army
libraries are now administered through a decentralized corps area
program, and nowhere is there more need for planning and
strengthening of service.

Camp and traveling libraries comprise a regular part of the
educational program of the Civilian Conservation Corps, and their
use is encouraging. Despite the emergency origin of the Corps, its
continuance in some form seems assured and a permanent library
policy merits consideration. First, there is urgent need for at-
tachment to the Corps in each area of competent library advisers
in order to eliminate inequalities of service and to secure an effec-
tive level of library performance. Secondly, the Corps itself should
assume responsibility for a minimum standard of library service.
While many units may continue to receive reading matter from
local libraries, the migratory nature of the camps places the major
responsibility for book service upon the federal government.

One of the most extensive field organizations of the national
government is the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is concerned
with the watershed problems jointly affecting federal, state and
local jurisdictions. In addition to technical library service to em-
ployees, reading materials for adults and children have been pro-
vided through the educational program, thereby eliminating a
traditional gulf between libraries and schools. In several areas co-
operative arrangements have proved successful with local libraries,
state library agencies, state educational authorities, the Works
Progress Administration, and the National Youth Administration.
Federal funds are thus made available for library planning and

31

The Library of Tomorrow

experimentation in regional cooperation under the immediate stim-
ulus of an educational program,

Libraries shared to some extent in the federal emergency pro-
gram, and their activities were not only of current importance, but
also of significance for the future. Since the main objective was to
provide employment an obvious handicap to efficiency the ac-
complishments of relief workers deserve respectful consideration.
These workers carried on, with considerable success, routine and
clerical, binding and repair, classification and cataloging projects
under professional supervision. In some cases activities included the
collection and organization of local data for future research. An
impressive achievement of the Works Progress Administration
was the extension of library service to about 2,000,000 residents of
localities hitherto unserved. In these districts new patterns of or-
ganization and administrative areas were used, with a definite
trend toward county or regional units. These federal projects in
some instances resulted in the continuation of library service
through local appropriations. In general the emergency program
yielded important additions to the scope of library service which
should be preserved and made efficient

The establishment of a Library Service Division in the Office of
Education places a new emphasis upon a hitherto minor phase of
federal educational activity. Three types of functions are contem-
plated for this agency, namely: (i) fact finding and research; (2)
fostering interlibrary cooperation; and (3) promoting library serv-
ice in general, with freedom for experiment. One of the most ob-
vious possibilities lies in the regular collection and publication by
the agency of complete and accurate library statistics through co-
operation with state library authorities and the American Library
Association. The Library Service Division exemplifies the common,
interest of schools and libraries, and its strategic location should
facilitate its relationship with all aspects of American education.

The library implications of the program for federal aid to educa-
tion are important. The agricultural extension service, in both its

32

National Leadership from Washington

educational and recreational phases, requires adequate reading ma-
terials and efficient local library service. Similar needs appear in the
federally subsidized system of vocational education in agriculture,
home economics, industry, and trade. Since the specialized demands
of this program are not always adequately served by local resources,
the pressing demand for vocational efficiency will compel libraries
to cooperate actively with neighboring federal projects. Opportuni-
ties for the distribution of reading matter arise in connection with
the forum projects of the Office of Education. Here books and
pamphlets are required in effective quantities, and competent li-
brary staffs are needed to serve local discussion groups. Finally, the
adult education program carried on in connection with rural re-
habilitation and colonization presents unusual opportunities for
cooperation between local, state, and federal agencies in book serv-
ice to farmers too handicapped to be reached by the agricultural
extension program.

The federal library policy of the near future should rest upon
three major issues: (i) What changes, if any, should be made in
the organization and functions of governmental libraries? (2)
Should the national government enter the field of regional library
service in the leading geographic areas of the United States ? (3)
Should federal grants-in-aid be made to libraries, and, if so, in
what amounts?

The administrative organization of the governmental libraries
needs revision. In the first place, a federal library council might be
established to coordinate efficiently the work of these libraries. This
body would resemble the National Archives Council and would be
consulted in the formulation of policies of subject interest, book
selection, technical routines, administration, and consolidation of
functions. The council might consist of federal representatives ap-
pointed by the President, the chairman presumably being the Li-
brarian of Congress. Through a full-time secretary, a small staff
and regular meetings, the council could maintain close relations
with the National Resources Committee and the Bureau of the

33

T/ie Library of Tomorrow

Budget, to insure intelligent correlation of library objectives with
national planning.

Secondly, the technical services of the Library of Congress should
be improved and expanded at federal expense to approach their
greatest usefulness to American libraries. The distribution of
printed catalog cards should be hastened and more entries for
scholarly titles should be made available. Even if such cooperative
activity were to entail a loss, the total cost of cataloging to libraries
throughout the nation would be greatly diminished. The Union
Catalog should be expanded more rapidly through microfilming
and other modern techniques. A comparatively slight increase in
the budget of the Library of Congress would result in greater effi-
ciency among American libraries, to say nothing of economies in
cataloging.

Thirdly, a national bibliographic center might be established at
the Library of Congress, serving as headquarters for information
upon the holdings of American libraries and as a clearing house for
interlibrary loans in scholarly or scientific fields. Since centraliza-
tion of such information is important, the national library would
provide the most appropriate location. This bibliographic center
would organize formally the services now rendered to scholars by
the Library of Congress, and would become the proper agency to
index the special collections among libraries in the United States.
This type of service is already carried on in several national libraries
abroad.

In the fourth place, the present system of document distribution
is in pressing need of revision. The methods and results of this
important activity might well be surveyed by the Superintendent
of Documents in cooperation with the American Library Associa-
tion, prior to recommendations for legislative changes. Waste could
be eliminated, and at the same time a more liberal distribution of
needed items achieved, by the careful selection of depositories, with
reference to regional importance, adequate personnel, and potential
usefulness.

34

National Leadership from Washington

Fifth, the Library Service Division in the Office of Education
might be given status and financial support commensurate with
its importance as the national headquarters for library affairs. The
personnel should be increased to provide specialists in each major
type of library activity. There are important opportunities for serv-
ice through the integration of regional statistics and reports,, ex-
perimentation in various types of library service, and the promotion
of interstate cooperation. To facilitate these activities, the advance-
ment of the library agency to bureau status in the government
merits serious consideration.

Finally,, the federal government, through appropriate agencies,
should endeavor to formulate a consistent and coherent policy for
book service in all its jurisdictions. Since it is directly responsible
for library service in its field facilities, territories, and dependencies,
closer attention might well be given to the book needs of the Indian
Service, the National Park Service and the Civilian Conservation
Corps, thereby approximating the high quality of library service
developed by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

A significant opportunity for national library leadership appears
in the establishment of regional library systems. By means of grants-
in-aid and book services from its own libraries, the government
might promote the development of regional centers and a general
program of cooperation which would coordinate library resources
on a national scale. Studies of the National Resources Committee
and federal emergency projects have brought forward the general
problem of regionalism. In the library field, the federal government
alone is able to provide competent, authoritative and planned direc-
tion with adequate funds to prevent confusion and duplication of
effort.

The establishment of a national system of regional libraries
should be an evolutionary process in which each step would be
studied carefully. As a preliminary, regional information centers
might be established with union catalogs, reference materials, and
interlibrary loan services closely integrated with similar tools of the

35

The Library of Tomorrow

Library of Congress. These centers could be housed in the impor-
tant library of each region by agreement between local and federal
authorities. Tested experience and surveys of existing book needs
might eventually expand these information centers into libraries.
Such surveys could be directed by the Librarian of Congress, who
might be advised by an adequately financed national library re-
sources board, consisting of librarians appointed by the President
to represent each major geographical area. The work of this board
should be closely affiliated with that of the National Resources
Committee,

The question of federal grants-in-aid to libraries has assumed
practical significance since the report of the President's Advisory
Committee on Education and the suggested appropriation by Con-
gress for rural library service as part of the national educational
program. Cultural and economic arguments favoring permanent
federal subsidies for education apply with equal force to libraries.
The library's potential contribution to public welfare in a democ-
racy is unlimited, and popular education is obviously the concern
of nation and states alike. Reading materials should be available to
all citizens with a reasonable measure of equality. Since nearly one
half the number of books read in the United States comes from
public libraries, it is apparent that the library already is a major
factor in adult education. It is also true that students comprise a
large proportion of public library readers. Without equitable dis-
tribution of the book resources of the nation, efforts to remove
illiteracy and to extend formal schooling are pointless.

The wide variation in economic conditions among the states is
reflected in similar inequality of library service. States of relatively
greater wealth in general spend more for libraries. Library expendi-
tures are likewise directly proportional to density of population, so
that book service is lacking in sparsely settled areas where the need
Is greatest. The poverty of certain states, notably in the South,
accounts for the fact that only a small surplus remains in the public
budget after the primary functions of government have been

National Leadership from Washington

financed. Here depreciated books, buildings, and equipment pre-
vent adequate book service,, and local or state funds are insufficient
for rehabilitation. Thus the present economic diversity in the
United States points strongly toward federal aid if a nationwide
minimum standard of library service is to be maintained.

Federal grants-in-aid may be used to promote a broad program
of library extension and improvement, including public and school
libraries, those in institutions of higher learning, demonstration and
experimental library projects, and library buildings. Since the pub-
lic library derives its income usually from the local government, it
is likely not to share in any subsidy for education unless it is so
specified. The pressing need for school libraries warrants the gen-
erous expenditure of federal funds for books, equipment, and ad-
ministration. Demonstration and experimental projects should be
carried on jointly by federal and state library agencies. Progress in
a library building program will be greatly stimulated by substantial
contributions from national funds.

Federal subsidies should be used t& make up any deficiency in
state and local appropriations, in order to maintain a national mini-
mum standard of library service, generally thought of as possible
on a dollar-per-capita basis. The major portion of such grants
should be derived from an equalization formula based upon the
inverse ratio of taxpaying ability in each state to total national
taxpaying ability. Other grants might be stimulative, calculated on
a percentage of current state and local appropriations for library
purposes. Special difficulties and costs peculiar to rural areas may
justify additional per capita grants for library service in those re-
gions. Under any circumstances, the ideal of a nationally adequate
standard of library service can be approached only through the
united action of local, state, and federal governments.

The actual distribution of federal aid may well observe certain
principles. Administrative control of library service should remain
with state and local units of government. Since federal supervision
of subsidies is well established, however, library grants will prob-

37

The Library of Tomorrow

ably warrant no exception to this policy. There is little to fear and
much to gain from reasonable federal supervision, as its purpose is
to guarantee proper use of funds. To this end, the Library Service
Division of the Office of Education should not only assist in the
development of state plans prerequisite to federal aid, but also
should exercise sufficient supervision to insure the efficient use of
government money. Cooperative planning will result in more effec-
tive state library agencies, better interlibrary cooperation, larger
units of service, and higher personnel standards. Annual state re-
ports and federal audits of expenditures constitute reasonable se-
curity for the proper use of federal funds.

Summarizing the problem of national library leadership, one can
distinguish a number of fundamentals underlying a federal library
policy. First, the federal government should not only synthesize and
correlate its own library functions, but might well expand its tech-
nical and bibliographical services to the limit of their usefulness.
Secondly, the Office of Education, through its library agency, should
take an active part in the development of nationwide library service.
Thirdly, the national government should cooperate in plans for
regional library systems .and should make a prompt decision as to
its policy. Fourth, federal aid is essential to attain a nationwide
minimum standard of library service. Finally, the cooperation of
local, state, and federal governments will be necessary in order to
approach the ideal of nationally adequate book service. The charac-
ter of national library leadership will depend upon its share in the
responsibility.

Ideal Library Support

BY MILTON J. FERGUSON

BETWEEN the conservative right wing of the old subscription library,
in which the pay-as-you-enter plan prevailed, and the modern left
wing, which expects to "get it from Washington," there ought to
be an ideal method of supporting a public library. But it is scarcely
the question alone of getting the money necessary for a satisfactory
service. It is conceivable that some well-intentioned philanthropist
might leave the funds to keep a public library up to the highest
standards of efficiency, and that that library might even then fall
short of the results so desirable in this service. There can be no
question, in other words, that man is so peculiarly formed as to
benefit from the blows he receives over the head, while he grows
soft and flabby under caresses. And, it has been said, man values
what he pays for. Therefore, if the public library hopes to prove a
true benefit it must use its utmost endeavor to operate in a whole-
somely stimulating manner.

What are the objections to the subscription library? As an insti-
tution it cannot be wholly bad. Traces of this once flourishing cul-
tural center are still clear, across the continent the New York
Society Library, the St Louis Mercantile Library Association, the
San Francisco Mechanics Institute Library are examples of the sort
of thing I mean. They buy books in generous quantity; readers get

39

The Library of Tomorrow

the volumes they want while they still want them. And even on
busy days their reading rooms do not remotely resemble a mid-
town subway station at the rush hour. They are, in fact, more like
clubs, where inspiration for reading and study abounds. The catch ?
It costs five dollars a year, or some such sum, to belong. It is just
conceivable that we public librarians are placing the emphasis in
the wrong place. If the subscription library offers such advantages,
why do we not devise schemes by which the moneyless may earn
that five dollars ? A good argument could be made for the benefit
the individual would thereby experience. Think of the satisfaction
the boy or girl would feel in working for the money which would
then buy such treasure! But perhaps the day has passed; the sub-
scription library is for the comparative few who have the price. One
can arouse some enthusiasm, however, for such a Captain-John-
Smith kind of philosophy : let him who would read books first earn
his subscription. Maybe the method is too ideal; and we are merely
looking for the practical ideal.

A word will not be amiss concerning some of the principles
underlying the support of public libraries in the several states. Did
I say principles? My error; I should have emphasized their lack,
rather than their existence. Some early draftsman of library meas-
ures tried to do the problem on the millage basis; and most of his
kind, lacking knowledge or inspiration, have followed his lead.
There is little point in providing a quarter-mill or a two-mill tax
for library purposes. Why nobody had a revelation which would
show him that the basis of such a service is the reader or the resi-
dent, and not the mill, a crystal gazer alone could answer. In many
parts of the nation where a small tax would raise little money,
the readers are numerous, and their capacity to pay, limited. And
yet the plan now generally followed is to levy a library tax from the
standpoint of property, or money, not from that of readers to be
served. Business would have to close its doors if it tried such meth-
ods. Cannot librarians learn something from the restaurateur and
the proprietor of the department store? The latter know that a

40

Ideal Library Support

certain patronage may be expected from each thousand unit of the
population; and they are prepared with meals, or shoes, or what-
ever, to meet that demand. Whoever finally pays the library score,
we may be fairly certain that the ideal plan of support will not be
found on the millage basis alone. An attempt has been made, in a
few instances, to get the correct answer by empowering the library
board to fix the tax. If we grant that the library authority is well-
advised and liberal some of us librarians are rather too careful of
the pennies the levy could be sensibly fixed. The trouble is that
this method is poor public economy; one board or authority should
be charged with the responsibility, the credit or the blame, for gov-
ernmental expenses. I wonder the local statesmen have not been
willing to leave the library tax to the library board, thus scattering
the responsibility for the assessment; but it is not so.

A factor which must have marked influence on the financial side
of library service is the unit of operation. There was a time when
songs, punctuated with enthusiastic "Glory, Hallelujahs," were
written by the advocates of "a library in every town." And again
there were those who would do the job from a state center, firing
packages of books at distant readers with the accuracy of a modern
artilleryman pouring shells into a skyscraper city. Both, as we now
view the problem, were wrong. The first group cannot provide a
sufficient stream of books to keep the current moving in an inter-
esting manner; and the second is a type of blind flyer without
instruments of precision if they hit the landing field once, out of
the favorite box of 50 volumes, nobody need be elated. Accidents
are still accidents. Libraries which do not provide a competent staff
and an adequate supply of books are failures; and the higher the
per capita charge, the greater the failure. The last few decades have
demonstrated that the small town unit is quite as futile as the state
unit. Somewhere between, for reader satisfaction and for taxpayer
consent, lies the golden mean which will prove ideal from more
than one point of view.

One other school of library thinker has arisen, as a cloud on the

41

The Library of Tomorrow

horizon, in these late days o economic unhappiness. Its exponent
looks to some far-off generous Santa Clans, who plucks bank notes
from the thin air and stuffs them into the coffers of town, county
and state. Thereafter, nothing need disturb local serenity: repay-
ment is not a local irritant Oh yes, he is honest and sincere, and
very human: who among us doubts the existence of fairies or un-
derestimates their powers ? As an example of this philosophy let us
turn to the Report of the Second triennial general meeting of the
South African Library Association, which was held in Bloemfon-
tein in October, 1936. The Mayor of that pleasant city heartily
welcomed the visitors, saying some of those agreeable things which
friendly municipal officials utter regarding the merits of their local
library staff.

His Honor, the Mayor, impressed upon his hearers the important
fact that the municipal authority was deeply conscious of physical
and recreational needs of the people, that, in fact, for playgrounds,
parks, and sports fields an annual expenditure of ^5,000 was being
made. Toward the maintenance of the public library the sum of
^1,150 was appropriated for the current year. The Mayor, however,
seemed alarmed with the proposal which came from Johannesburg
that all public libraries of the Union should, like its own, be "a
charge on the rates." His address closed thus:
"I am not going to argue against a free library, but it should not
be charged against the rates of a town. But we all benefit and should
bear the cost. Therefore a library, Mr. President, should be charged
against the National Government of the country, not against a sec-
tion of your people, those who have invested in bricks and mortar."

South Africa is far away the sentiment is nearer home and the
system of government down there may give force to an argument
which does not seem convincing to us. There may be a difference
between providing sports fields and public libraries at local expense.
His Honor, the Mayor, quite reasonably may be compelled to speak
against excellent services for the citizens merely because the tax
burden will thereby be increased. Convictions of the mother coun-

42

Ideal Library Support

try transplanted to the colonies probably change with slower pace
than do those same ideas back home. It is not surprising, therefore,
to find South Africa adopting free libraries, "charged against local
rates," with the greatest deliberation. A little help comes from the
local government, a little less sometimes from province or nation,
but in South Africa the main dependence for public libraries still
rests upon the subscriber. The advantages to the user who pays his
own way are clear; but unfortunately this system means the limi-
tation of libraries to a small part of the public.

We librarians are prone to compare our system to the public
schools. We maintain, and rather reasonably, I think, that despite
our informality, our lack of grade books, classes and diplomas, we
nevertheless do have a cultural influence on the persons who fre-
quent our house. The state, of the type developed under new world
conditions, is sure that the greater the average intelligence of its
people, the more likely is its form of government to endure. If it
can be shown that the public library is a kind of school capable of
touching the lives and the thoughts of its clientele, not only for a
few of the years of immaturity, but from childhood to old age, there
would be reason in expecting the state to do its share in maintaining
such a system. The expense of the public schools, in New York, for
example, is borne by the local unit and the state on approximately
a one-third to two-thirds basis. In most other states in the Union
some similar division of the school budget is made. On the other
hand, New York, again as an example, grants public libraries a
mere tip-like pittance: namely, $100 per year for each library or
branch the money to be spent for books approved by the Regents
of the University of the State of New York. While to most libraries
$100 is $100, and the books bought therewith welcome additions to
otherwise half-filled shelves, the great importance of the regulation
is found in the agreement of the local library to abide by the state's
certification scheme for librarians. Other states are not so generous,
as a rule; though in a few of them, notably Illinois and Ohio, the
depression has resulted in valuable aid in the purchase of books. It

43

The Library of Tomorrow

remains to be seen whether an emergency measure will survive the
stressful days which gave it being, and whether the state can be
induced to see the library as an educational force, entitled to as-
sistance because it makes for stability of government, for change as
the outgrowth of logic and reason. American statesmen may well
think the matter over.

The most enthusiastic trustee or librarian may hesitate to ask the
state to help maintain the public library on the same basis as the
public schools in New York are supported. There is plenty of argu-
ment, however, as to why the state should give aid in a greater or
lesser degree. If libraries are actually educationally important, then
as a matter of right they should expect favorable consideration. The
trouble is, perhaps, that this newer agency has failed to convince
the parents that without its assistance little Johnny can never hope
to become President, or his little sister Mary attain the pinnacle
of her ambition. Parents now grumble a bit when branch libraries
are too far apart, or when their juvenile book cupboard is bare,
more or less as it has been too generally these past eight lean years;
but they do not rise up in the majesty of their American right and
demand that fiscal boards do something about it. If a school build-
ing is needed, parent associations, with teacher backing, storm the
most fortress-like city hall, and the authorities surrender. Library
forces have not yet learned these arts of assault. Possibly they are
not too sure of the place they hold in the hearts and minds of the
people; probably they are less certain that their heaviest broadsides,
once fired, will penetrate the tough armor worn by municipal and
state fiscal authorities. After 50 or 60 years of intense library cam-
paigning, it is evident that there is some weakness in our plan of
operation, except in a few of the more favorably situated cities.
The country, as a whole, needs to be plotted on some different and
perhaps radically revised plan, before we may expect the results
the public library is capable of giving.

For the most part, we are the victims of our ancestor, the sub-
scription library. In the early days the oratorical statesman held the

44

Ideal Library Support

little red schoolhouse on the hill up to worldwide admiration: it
would mold our people after the pattern of democracy, self-reliance,
and room-at-the-top, which should forever continue this land of the
free, this home of the brave. But the public library, coming later as
an organization of citizens for their personal edification or amuse-
ment, had slight claim upon the municipal strongbox, and none at
all upon the faraway state treasury. There was no recognition by
the state of the part the library could contribute toward citizen fit-
ness in a democracy. That conception of the library is a late develop-
ment which has been accentuated by the experiences of the public
during the depression, and especially by their contact with assist-
ants engaged, avowedly, in adult education. It seems particularly
timely, therefore, to consider changes in library organization, and
to bring about a fair distribution of expenses between state and
municipality. This writer must add that, as yet, he sees no reason
for expecting any part of the library budget to come from the
federal government. In other ways Washington can do its part
toward the formation of a well-rounded nationwide library system;
though it may be unfortunate that some states, poor in assessed
valuation, but blessed with readers, will have difficulty, without
such assistance, in equalizing library opportunity for all.

It seems altogether feasible to devise a public library system
which, state by state, will present conditions approaching ideal sup-
port. The precedent found in the action of states like New York,
where small annual allowances have been made to all public li-
braries for books, and like Illinois and Ohio, where grants for the
same purpose have been made on a more generous scale, should be
seized upon while the example is fresh in the popular and legis-
lative mind. However, just to get more money is by no means the
whole story. If there is a weakness in the average public library
setup, a frank effort should be made, through the persuasion of
more ample funds, to correct that defect. New York, as has already
been noted, makes its allowance when certain personnel standards
have been attained. It is not clear whether any spur to better organ-

45

The Library of Tomorrow

ization is offered by the grants made in the other states. Let the
American Library Association, in cooperation with commissions
or other state authority, set up a minimum standard for public
libraries. Let that scheme cover such points as suitable unit for
profitable operation, properly trained personnel, and minimum lo-
cal support. The American Library Association has already given
$i per capita as the lowest budgetary figure for a fairly satisfactory
service; many cities have far exceeded that amount. Secure the
adoption of this scheme by the states, providing that when the local
library has reached the minimum standard it shall then receive a
50 per cent addition to its budget from state sources. This new
allowance would not be used for books alone, but for all activities
in just proportion. Such recognition, on the part of the state, of the
educational importance of the public library will not only enable
it to do its job, but will also more speedily bring the people to an
appreciation of its value as a recreational agency of first importance
and as an educational instrument of lifelong worth. A difficult
problem, you say! Well, the ideal has always been elusive, but its
pursuit is cure for most of our ills.

Experimen tat ion

BY CARL H. MILAM

THE MODERN LIBRARY has come into existence because of the belief
that men can use recorded facts and ideas for the advancement of
themselves and for the improvement of society. All of the thoughts
and experiences which have been recorded are the materials with
which it deals; and all people in nearly all of their relations are its
potential beneficiaries. But the modern library is one of the younger
social institutions. As compared with the university, for example,
it is hardly more than an infant. Consequently, the structure which
has been erected on this foundation is incomplete. The modern
library is not sure of its fields, functions or specific objectives. With-
out belittling past achievements it may nevertheless be assumed that
the library of the future will be a much more useful servant of
individuals and of society than any library has yet become. It is the
purpose of this chapter to suggest the role of experimentation in
bringing about some of the anticipated improvements.

It may first be noted that there is no set pattern for libraries in
America. No one authority decides for all libraries what books shall
be bought or how they shall be made available. There is no author-
ized scheme of organization, of division into departments, or of
those numerous library activities which are intended to encourage

47

The Library of Tomorrow

reading and study. While this may be less true for school librariet
than for others, it is essentially true for all. Within certain broad
limits, which are accepted rather than required, each library is free
to determine its own precise objectives and to pursue them in its
own way, limited only by public sentiment, available financial re-
sources and the quantity and quality of intelligence and imagina-
tion possessed by trustees and librarians.

This freedom to do things differently can probably be credited
with a considerable share of the progress which has characterized
the modern library movement during the years of its history. The
making of a catalog on cards was an experiment 60 or 70 years ago.
The arrangement of books on shelves by subject, rather than size
or date of accession, is still looked upon by some of our foreign
colleagues as an experiment in extravagance. When libraries first
allowed readers to take books home, when Mr. Brett of Cleveland
first permitted ordinary hum^n beings, not scholars or students, to
come into contact with large numbers of books at one time through
the open-shelf system, when children were not only permitted but
encouraged to use public libraries, these were bold experiments.
So were branches, stations, state traveling libraries, county libraries,
the book automobile, readers advisory service, library training.

The conviction to be recorded here is that the library of the future
will be and ought to be a continuously changing institution; and
that librarians with imagination will formulate new objectives and,
by trial and error, will establish new forms of organization and new
services, and adjust and revise the old techniques to fit these services.

Library techniques in spite of the jibes of our friendly critics
were developed to facilitate the use of libraries, not to amuse the
librarians, and are worthy of further improvement through experi-
mentation. Nevertheless, it may be hoped that much of our best
thought will go not to their further refinement, but rather to ex-
ploration into the realms of book use. Obviously, such exploration,
if it is to be of maximum usefulness, must take cognizance both of
the inadequacy of libraries to meet present needs, and of the new

Experimentation

obligations which arise because of changes in our ways o living,
our ideas of education, and our attitudes toward government, busi-
ness and labor.

Experimentation should not be conducted in ignorance of what
is going on in our own or other fields. It must always be related to,
and usually preceded by, investigation. The records of activities and
measures of results should be as full and as accurate as possible. If
the experiments can be conducted under controlled conditions such
as might be established by an experienced research worker in the
social sciences, so much the better. At the least they should be based
on some reasonable hypothesis and the results should be impartially
reported.

The writer is of the opinion that most, perhaps all, of the experi-
ments suggested here have been tried somewhere. It does not
appear, however, that any of them have been tried generally, or
enough to convince most librarians either that they will or will
not work.

Experiments with New Types of Material. The pamphlet is a
form of print which is now laboring under grave distribution diffi-
culties. The bookseller is naturally unwilling to carry it in stock
because it does not pay its way. The librarian buys one copy which
he usually stores In a vertical file or pamphlet case. It is easily ac-
cessible when needed for reference or circulation, but comparatively
few readers know of its existence. It rarely leaves the building. The
open-shelf system which almost everywhere in this country is
applied to books is not often applied to pamphlets.

The present pamphleteering era may be only temporary. On the
other hand, the pamphlet may come to fill an important permanent
place in meeting the demand for up-to-the-minute information and
opinion. In any case it is now with us in large numbers, and is
capable of serving many people if a means for getting it to its
audience can be found.

Many pamphlets on current questions are propagandistic, and
the present methods of distribution (largely by mail to members of

49

The Library of Tomorrow

an organization) tend to get pamphlets with a certain point o view
into the hands of people with the same point of view. The library
would be performing an important public service if it could occa-
sionally get readers to look at all sides of a public question as pre-
sented in several pamphlets; and it would be meeting one of its
own direct and obvious obligations if it added measurably to the
distribution and use of this form of print.

The Newark Public Library, which has pioneered on the pam-
phlet frontier for many years, now has a separate "Pamphlet Li-
brary" in the main library, and smaller collections in the branches.
All readers are exposed to pamphlets, and the annual circulation
has reached about 20,000. The Cleveland Public Library described
in the Library Journal of December 15, 1936 its efforts to make
pamphlets popular largely through displaying samples. S. W. Smith
and Marion E. James have described recent experiments in Milwau-
kee with what M. S. Dudgeon once called "shirt sleeve literature'*
(Library Journal, September 15, 1936) . Under the leadership of the
U. S. Office of Education several libraries are now participating in
an experiment in displaying a set of current affairs pamphlets with
a view to increasing their distribution. More such experiments
with emphasis on circulation are needed.

It is frequently predicted that a few years hence some agency will
be lending inoving picture films as libraries now lend books; that
they will be used not only by schools and clubs, as they are now to
a considerable extent, but also by individuals. Whether it is feasible
for libraries to take on this function may be questioned, but the
answer would be clearer if several libraries would try it out. There
is the related question of whether libraries have a responsibility for
the preservation of films for future generations.

Many libraries now buy and lend jxhpnograph records. "Talking
books" are circulated by libraries for the blind, and may have other
uses not yet discovered. Another form of record has recently come
into existence, namely, the electrical transcription of radio talks.
Surely these records which give us the voices as well as the words

50

Experimentation

of some o our great personalities should be preserved in public
institutions. Is this a library responsibility?

Among the new mechanical aids to learning, none are more cer-
tainly of great importance to libraries than those which make it
possible to reproduce library materials photographically on film at
small expense. The effect which these copying devices may have on
interlibrary loans, on the library's ability to supply hitherto un-
obtainable materials, on the preservation from wear and tear of
rare books and manuscripts, is incalculable. At least two American
librarians have predicted that the time will come when a good
research library will undertake to supply its patrons on short notice
with a copy of any book which exists in any library anywhere in
the world! Film copies are already beginning to take their place in
many great libraries. Yale University Library has recendy expanded
its film laboratory with foundation aid. The University of Chicago
Library, with assistance from another foundation, has established
one. The New York Public Library and many others are also ex-
.perimenting. Much progress has been made with cameras, projec-
tors and other apparatus; much more is said to be just around the
corner. Here appears to be a field in which experimentation may
result in revolutionizing some library practices which have existed
for centuries, and thereby greatly expanding the library's usefulness.
Experiments in Cooperation. We have long recognized in theory
that university and other large reference libraries and special librar-
ies for research should be closely coordinated to avoid unnecessary
duplication and to increase the availability of books, manuscripts,
and related materials needed by research workers. Recently, experi-
mentation in coordination has greatly increased. The Denver Public
Library has become the bibliographic center for several libraries in
three states. Union catalogs have multiplied. The librarians of 13
southern states are surveying their resources and planning together
for coordination. Five states and one province in the Pacific North-
west have appointed a joint committee to work out a scheme of
cooperation for all of the important libraries of that area. We have

The Library of Tomorrow

observed with admiration the work of the National Central Library
in London and the establishment of regional centers. With similar
objectives, we shall probably find it necessary to continue for several
years our experimentation to determine what are logical regions in
the United States, what functions can be performed by regional
centers, whether regional centers of a general character are desir-
able as against different centers for each subject, as well as to evolve
the devices and codes of practice which will fit a country or a
continent of our size.

Of the 6,235 public libraries in the United States, nearly 5,400 are
in towns of less than 10,000 population. In Iowa, 92 (more than
half) of the public libraries have annual incomes of less than $2,000
each. Carnovsky's study of book collections in the small libraries in
the Chicago area disclosed the fact that most such libraries are
making few recent nonfiction books available to their readers.

Adequate educational and informational service is impossible
with the limited facilities books and personnel which small li-
braries are able to provide. Consolidation of several such libraries
in one administrative unit is desirable in many instances, but diffi-
cult of accomplishment. Cooperation would appear to be a step in
the right direction, and not so difficult.

"One form of cooperation would be an informal pooling of book
funds. For example, three libraries close together, each having per-
haps $400 a year to spend for books, might agree to spend $200 each
independently, and $600 in common, the books purchased from the
common fund to be divided equally and to be exchanged at inter-
vals. Any number of variations of this suggestion are conceivable.
All the libraries of a county might be included. The object would
be to increase the resources available to the communities served and
to discover how far libraries can go to advantage in pooling their
holdings and services. It might be possible in some instances, also,
for two or more libraries to employ jointly a children's librarian, or
readers adviser, or other specialist.

In somewhat larger libraries the experiment might be in subject

52

Experimentation

specialization. Each library would buy the books it commonly needs
in all subjects; but the more expensive materials would be pur-
chased by only one library; one specializing in the fine arts, another
in business and technology, another in the social sciences, etc. The
arrangement would of course include free use of the materials in
the "special" collections by the patrons of all libraries in the scheme.

Adequate Service in One Field. One often hears librarians say:
"We don't need any reading lists or other publicity on that subject;
the books are always out, anyway; we never have enough to supply
the demand." It is probably true that no good large library has ever
had enough books and enough assistants to enable it to do all that
it might do in any field. This means that no library has yet had an
opportunity to find out what the capacity of its community is to
make use of books and library services.

It may therefore be hoped that some library, sometime, will try
the experiment of doing all it can with one subject, such as garden-
ing or drama or better English, or with one group of readers, such
as parents or forum attendants. Such an experiment would involve
money for materials, publicity of many sorts, and one or more spe-
cial assistants. It might effectively demonstrate to the people who
control library incomes and to the general public, as well as to
librarians, that the library is capable of performing a much larger
service than it has yet done.

The radio readers adviser experiment suggested in another para-
graph is somewhat similar to this.

The Rural Library, Because rural adult education (especially
agricultural extension) appears to have got on rather well in most
areas without libraries, and because the rural library tends more or
less to follow the conventional urban library pattern, it is interesting
to contemplate what would be the result if the rural people and the
rural adult education agencies of some county were themselves to
develop, without much help from library tradition, the type of
agency they need for making reading and other visual materials
available. The farmers and the farm agencies are concerned with

53

The Library of Tomorrow

county agricultural planning, cooperative marketing, cooperative
buying, soil improvement, the prevention of erosion, etc. They
might create a type of library and library service which would be
pointed more definitely to their present and future problems than
would a little imitation of a city library set down in their midst.
Such an experiment might help to indicate where the emphasis in
rural library service should be placed; and it might also demonstrate
whether a library can deliberately promote interest and reading in
subjects which are considered socially important and at the same
time avoid telling people what opinions they should hold with
respect to these subjects.

Broadening the Base. A constantly recurring thought with a few
librarians is that the public library has overdone the business of
"sticking to its last." Perhaps under some circumstances it could be
the actual head and center of all or most of a community's informal
adult education activities. Perhaps Mr. Carnegie was right when he
established the Homestead Library as a community center. Maybe
the Director of libraries in the T.V.A. is right when she encourages
librarians in T.V A. centers to assume responsibility for most of the
recreational and informal educational activities, however remote
from reading. A university president once suggested that public
libraries should have laboratories and shops as well as reading
rooms.

Reaching Readers Who Are Only Casually Interested. Experi-
ments might be tried with various physical arrangements and facili-
ties to determine which offer the most effective invitation, and the
least deterring formality to persons who are only casually interested
in reading. There might be browsing rooms fitted up more like a
living room than a public institution. Smoking might be permitted.
The assistant would be a hostess. Books would be arranged accord-
ing to the interest categories of the casual reader, rather than for the
scholar. The reader's point of view would control the preparation
of catalogs, indexes, reading lists, and, in so far as possible, every-
thing else. All of this would be for the patrons or prospective

54

Experimentation

patrons with miscellaneous rather than closely defined subject in-
terests, for those who are interested or could be interested in reading
for general education and a broad cultural background.

Such an experiment should probably be tried first in a small or
medium-sized or branch library, as it would seem very difficult to
introduce an air of informality into a great building.

Library Personnel. Important experiments are now being con-
ducted at Columbia School of Library Service and elsewhere with
tests for admission and for measuring accomplishment. They may
have to continue for many years before anyone can know with rea-
sonable certainty how to eliminate at the start those who would be
misfits in the library profession, and how best to measure the
effectiveness of professional education.

The kind and degree of specialization in education for librarian-
ship and the right place for it are important and largely unanswered
questions. In the first-year curriculum, with some important excep-
tions, the library schools attempt to produce "a librarian" who pre-
sumably can do any kind of work. The employer, seeking a person
for a specialized position, examines the candidate's record of studies
in college, his experience, his interests and his aptitudes, but usually
does not expect any specialization in professional education. One
important exception is the children's librarian; and it may very well
be that the specialized training is an important reason for the ex-
cellence of the work which libraries do for children. Much experi-
mentation in specialization for students who carry on beyond the
first years is now taking place. More undoubtedly will occur in
the future.

There is much justification for insisting upon a broad program
during the first year. But it is not clear that breadth should or can
be achieved by a wide range of offerings primarily of processes and
methods. Some library school might experiment with the division
of the curriculum into two parts: the first to be concerned with
philosophy, principles, functions and reasons for the existence of
libraries of different kinds; the second with processes in general or

55

The Library of Tomorrow

with processes in a broad field, such as circulation work in a public
library; or reference work and bibliography; or accession, catalog-
ing and bibliography; or college and university library administra-
tion.

We librarians appear to assume that library school training
usually one year is the end of our professional education. After
that, it is enough if we read and attend meetings. In recent years a
few college and university librarians, a good many school librarians
and some library school instructors have followed the teaching pro-
fession back to the universitiesbut far too few public librarians.
The cost and the necessary leaves of absence are parts of the prob-
lem. It is quite possible, however, that the chief obstacle has been
the lack of library school courses in summer sessions which deal
with important, nontechnical problems. There appears to be a need
for long and short courses, but especially short courses, on such sub-
jects as sources of library income, relations with local government
and local organizations, the library and adult education, the college
library and modern methods of college teaching, etc. These sub-
jects are largely absent from the first-year curriculum, yet they are
the subjects around which many of the problems of the working
librarian center. Such experiments as have already been made in-
dicate a fair probability of success, both from the standpoint of rea-
sonable attendance and of the availability of competent instructors.

Many other opportunities for profitable experimentation await
the schools and also any library organizations which are willing to
try out various schemes for post-professional education, whether
institutes, special discussion groups, home study and examinations,
or internships. Exchanges also offer a fruitful way of enriching the
experience of trained and competent librarians, but they are now
relatively infrequent. The subject is worthy of more exploration.
- College Libraries. The library experiment at Stephens College,
Columbia, Missouri (which is itself an experimental junior col-
lege), has attracted wide attention among librarians and college
administrators. The librarian is equipped with professional train-

Experimentation

ing for education and librariansliip. He is dean of instruction as
well as director of the library. The whole college is engaged in an
ambitious effort to make books function more effectively in the life
of the undergraduate.

Other college library experiments related to the new trends in
education (with their emphasis on self -education through reading),
possibly variants of the Stephens College experiment, possibly quite
different, may be in order. Some of the ideas may involve new
building arrangements and new equipment, as well as new types
of educational service. Some of them may be for the whole college;
others for particular groups within a college. There might well be
more trying out of the readers adviser idea in college libraries. The
recent entrance into college library work of a considerable number
of unusually alert young men and women may be expected to
produce a good crop of new ideas.

The typical university in America has both undergraduate and
graduate students. The university library is called upon to serve the
research needs of graduate students and professors, and to provide
books and service for undergraduates. In many respects these func-
tions are quite dissimilar. The experiment of having a separate
library for undergraduates, or the junior college, is not unknown
but possibly deserves further trial. It would appear that such a
library, separately housed and staffed (but under the administra-
tion of the university librarian), with only a few thousand tides,
generously duplicated to meet both instructional and general read-
ing needs, might prove to be a good solution for some of the prob-
lems which arise out of the university library's dual responsibility^

Libraries and Broadcasting. For several years now, librarians
have talked freely about taking advantage of the stimulation in
educational broadcasting to increase the use of libraries. From time
to time there has been an effort to check up on what libraries have
accomplished. The results are far from gratifying. Library efforts
at cooperation have been stopped short by lack of personnel and
materials. When the AX.A. has been offered opportunity to pre-

J7

The Library of Tomorrow

pare reading lists in connection with national broadcasts, it has
been forced to decline for the same reasons or to do a wholly in-
adequate job. Two or three years ago, the A.L.A. Committee on
Library Radio Broadcasting reached the conclusion that, until one
institution, at least, had found the means for carrying on a some-
what elaborate experiment, we could not know how effective the
library might be in the stimulation of reading following broadcasts.
The experiment suggested calls for a radio readers adviser who
would give full time to trying out the various ways of stimulating
reading in connection with the broadcasts which reach the com-
munity in which the library is situated. It also calls for a special fund
for the purchase of reading materials and especially for duplication,
so that people drawn to the library as a result of the eflforts may not
be disappointed. This experiment has not yet been made.

During the past five years, the political scientists and other stu-
dents of government tried their hands at broadcasting the "You
and Your Government" series. The economists, the psychologists
and many other professional groups have conducted similar pro-
grams in their fields. During that period, members of A.L.A. com-
mittees and other librarians have agreed with each other that there
should be a national program about books and reading sponsored
by the libraries of America. Detailed projects have been prepared
but not tried. The same may be said for children's programs.

Of local library broadcasting there has been a great deal. But we
have apparently much further to go before any library program will
have proved itself as much a success as some of those presented by
other educational agencies.

Regional Libraries. Regional libraries are a means of improving
(through consolidation or federation) existing small libraries as
well as a way of establishing service for those now wholly without it.
The citizens of some rural areas may be without library service
simply because they do not want it enough to pay for it. The fact
is, however, that the laws for library maintenance are suited to
cities and large, populous counties, and not to sparsely populated

Experimentation

rural areas and small towns. Most of our successful experience has
been In the large cities and counties. Public libraries for rural people
simply do not fit into the governmental clothes which are now
made and ready-to-wear. That, we know. We do not know what
the size of the governmental garment should be, or of what ele-
ments it should be composed, and we can find out only by trial.

Port authorities, sanitary districts, water districts, consolidated
schools, and various other agencies of government have pointed the
way, but none has cut a pattern which exactly fits the library. The
need is for more experiments with large units like those in British
Columbia and Vermont.

Business Machines and Business Methods. There is a tradition,
based on at least some facts, that card filing systems, now used ex-
tensively in business, originated with librarians. And it sometimes
seems to the librarian that the department store or bank or hotel
could even now profitably imitate some library methods. On the
whole, however, the library appears to have fallen behind the pro-
cession. It is reported that a very efficient European librarian, in-
terested in still further improvement of method, visited this country
in search of new ideas; and that he found them, almost not at all
in libraries, but in the offices of companies devoted to transportation
and communication! Certainly it is true that experimentation with
some business machines not commonly used in libraries is long
overdue.

Other experiments may be more important than those suggested.
But this writer is convinced that continuous experimentation of
some kind is most important. The pioneers in the modern library
movement were experimenters. The things they did for the first
time are the things for which they are remembered. If the library
is to continue to hold the place in society to which they brought it,
and to make advancement, it will be in part because present and
future generations of librarians are equally bold in trying out new
ideas for making their service meet the needs of their generation.

59

One for All; A Sketch

of Library Cooperation, 1930-1970

BY ROBERT BINGHAM DOWNS

BY THE EARLY 1930'$ the frontier and pioneer traditions were fast
fading into the past. There were few spots remaining where any
contemporary Daniel Boone could get out of hearing of the bark
of his neighbor's dog. As the scene changed, a cherished national
characteristic of America, rugged individualism, became more and
more of a museum piece. Society was becoming too complex, too
closely interrelated and interdependent to tolerate the ruthless if
picturesque methods of the trail blazer. The champions of laissez
faire had not given up the fight and declared that all individual
opportunity was being lost under the new regime. The validity of
their arguments was doubtful, but in any case there could be no
going back. The growth of social consciousness was bringing about
profound modifications in many established institutions. Schools,
colleges, universities, libraries, museums, and hospitals were being
shaken out of their self -centered existence and each was coming to
realize that its actions affected other similar organizations.

Cooperation has long been an overworked word in the librarian's
vocabulary. Unfortunately, until the beginning of the period here
treated there had been more discussion than practice of this fine art.
Of course notable instances of library cooperation could be listed,

60

Library Cooperation, 1930-1970

from the compilation of Poolc's index onward. Nevertheless, the
vast majority of libraries, large and small, had developed with scant
regard to their neighbors. In the public library field conditions were
chaotic. Town and city libraries were serving restricted areas, leav-
ing untouched the large population outside city limits. On the great
research library level, likewise, near anarchy prevailed. Each insti-
tution had as a general rule built up its collection without trying to
ascertain whether it was unnecessarily duplicating the work of an-
other library. Frequently keen rivalries rather than gaps in knowl-
edge determined buying activities. In either case the sheer waste of
time and money was often appalling.

The present writer's primary concern is with resources for ad-
vanced study and research. To some other historian it will be left to
relate the fascinating tale of how the public librarians worked out
their salvation along cooperative lines, and their part in the chron-
icle will be touched upon here only as it pertains to the many-sided
problem of materials for scholars and students.

Librarians in the 1930'$, interested in the increase and coordina-
tion of research materials, found themselves working in the dark
for lack of information on available resources. It was therefore de-
cided to undertake a nationwide survey, sending trained investi-
gators to inspect and inventory the holdings of every type of library
containing collections of potential value. The results of this inten-
sive study, made jointly by libraries and learned societies, were
published in a series of volumes by the American Library Associa-
tion, and formed a basis for many of the later developments here
described. Without such a preliminary view these far-reaching
plans for library cooperation would have been constantly handi-
capped, and indeed might never have come to actual realization.

The growth of the great Union Catalog in Washington to a virtu-
ally complete record of all important books in libraries throughout
the world is now a generally known fact. Started at the beginning
of the present century, this monumental bibliographical tool ex-
panded slowly for the first three or four decades of its history.

61

The Library of Tomorrow

Librarians by then had generally recognized that in the union cata-
log idea lay the solution for some of the most perplexing problems
that had presented obstacles to library cooperation. Interest in union
catalogs had become so widespread by 1936 that in that year a con-
ference of librarians and technical experts met in Washington to
consider future developments. There came out of this conference a
determination to support the national Union Catalog with all pos-
sible measures. The Rockcarn Foundation made several generous
grants to enable libraries to prepare records of their holdings for
inclusion in the catalog. The expense was too large, however, for
any single agency except the federal government, and in 1950 Con-
gress approved the first of a series of annual appropriations, leading
eventually to a comprehensive record of all American library col-
lections of distinction. By 1970 there were over 135,000,000 cards on
file for this country alone. Through the system, established about
25 years ago, of reporting new acquisitions, the catalog at Wash-
ington now contains information on all important additions made
to libraries of the nation.

In 1955 leaders in the library profession recommended that the
foreign section of the Union Catalog be enlarged. Negotiations
were entered into with the governments and outstanding libraries
of all foreign countries. Agreements were made to supply each of
these nations with a film copy of the American Union Catalog in
exchange for a record of books in its libraries. So far has this under-
taking now developed that we may say the age-old dream of bibli-
ographers for a universal bibliography at last is brought to practical
fulfillment. About every five years for the past generation film
copies of the complete national Union Catalog have been made and
distributed widely over the United States. In essence these are new
editions of the catalog and have facilitated more extensive use of
resources available in each region, and have also relieved the central
catalog staff of much routine searching and correspondence.

At the beginning of the period under review a striking suggestion
was made by certain university administrators for the establishment

62

Library Cooperation, 1930-1970

of great storehouses of little used books. So many practical difficul-
ties were met that the proposal came to nothing. This scheme may
have been one of several factors, however, which helped to empha-
size the expensive problem of space for rapidly accumulating col-
lections. Another consideration was the ever-growing number of
published books and journals. No one library could hope to buy
and store them all, and individual library budgets could not be
increased fast enough to cover the cost of even the most important
tides in all fields. The only satisfactory answer to questions of space
and expense was found to be cooperation. The country was divided
into the now familiar six regions : Northeast, Southeast, Northwest,
Southwest, Middle states, and Far west, each division based upon
a common cultural and economic background. From 1945 to 1960
these areas built up regional union catalogs at strategic points, and
listed there their book resources. These catalogs are, of course, com-
plementary to the Union Catalog at Washington, enabling each
section to make maximum use of local facilities. Comprehensive
purchasing agreements have been entered into by the research librar-
ies in every region, each library undertaking to develop definite
subject fields and types of publications. The load of maintaining
unbroken files of the immense number of learned journals of the
world has been spread over the entire group of libraries. In numer-
ous instances there have been transfers of material to help an institu-
tion round out a collection. For example, if one library assumes
responsibility for historical material on fascism, that curious phe-
nomenon of the 1920'$ and 1930*5, other libraries in the area have
transferred their miscellaneous files on the subject to the special
collection. In effect there has been a redistribution of resources, and
seldom seen now are the large heterogeneous libraries typical of
the first part of the century, each having something of everything
but rarely being exhaustive in any field.

At the first meeting of the American Library Association in 1876,
Justin Winsor predicted the use of the telegraph and pneumatic
tubes to facilitate delivery of books to branches of a public library.

The Library of Tomorrow

Now, nearly 100 years later, we have still not achieved anything
quite so rapid as Mr. Winsor's ideal, but for nearly two decades
there have been developing, in all the larger cities of the country,
quick delivery services to bring libraries into closer unity. In New
York, for example, the numerous college, university, public, and
special libraries are reached twice daily by an organization which
brings wanted books from other libraries and returns borrowed
volumes. Every institution, of course, has a complete catalog show-
ing the contents of collections in the New York metropolitan area.
Naturally there is little incentive for these libraries to duplicate each
other needlessly, and the total resources of the city can be made
immediately available wherever required.

The potentialities of microfilm, which came into general use
about 1940, were soon realized by forward-looking librarians. Al-
most immediately the new medium revolutionized interlibrary
loan practices. It was no longer necessary to trust rare books and
journals to the none too tender mercies of the primitive transporta-
tion systems of the time. Instead, a film copy, which the borrowing
library could retain permanently, was sent. As the cost of film was
steadily reduced through technical processes, it became possible for
one library to supply another, without prohibitive expense, with a
large body of special material for scholarly use. When all the con-
tinents had been linked in 1948 by regularly scheduled airship serv-
ice, and the postwar barriers to international communication were
broken down, it became an easy matter to send books on loan back
and forth between countries. It is now possible to secure in two
days time a film copy of a book from any part of the world, except
from a few remote regions.

Newspapers, once the bane of existence of librarians because of
difficulties in preservation and excessive requirements for storage
space, became a minor problem after the introduction of microfilm.
For the major newspapers, both American and foreign, a scheme of
cooperation was soon developed whereby each library assumed a
prorata share of the film cost and each received a copy of the current

Library Cooperation, 1930-1970

files. For papers of more limited interest regional plans were ar-
ranged, with each library in a given area responsible for preserving
certain specific titles. A like scheme was arranged for foreign pub-
lications. Historians and other research workers are still plagued
by the numerous gaps in newspaper files before 1940. A majority
of local papers were apparently lost in toto simply because no
libraries undertook to save them. A turning point in this problem
came with the publication of one of the early cooperative enter-
prises, the Union list of newspapers, in 1937. Numerous important
runs of newspapers in publishers' offices and obscure libraries were
thereby uncovered. Then a cooperative project was proposed and
carried through for filming these papers and placing copies in the
large libraries of the nation, a step for which historians have every
cause to be grateful.

The success of the newspaper plan was matched in two other
fundamental research fields, historical manuscripts and public doc-
uments. In the older settled sections of the country were to be found
vast quantities of early letters, diaries, journals, account books, and
other manuscript records, scattered for the most part in the cellars
and attics of private homes and constantly exposed to fire, water
and other hazards. New England was a pioneer in the rescue of
such materials. Profiting by her example, the South and other re-
gions began a systematic canvass of existing collections in order to
bring them into safe custody. As the result of this campaign and a
large degree of institutional cooperation, there are now few impor-
tant manuscript collections outside of libraries.

The destructive forces of modern warfare frequently have endan-
gered the great archival sources of history, and in some instances
have caused irreparable losses. More or less spasmodic efforts were
made early in the twentieth century by various American institu-
tions to reproduce such materials. Eventually it was seen that con-
certed action was necessary for thorough coverage of the important
collections. Owing to the specialized interest of the documents, a
limited number of duplicates would meet all conceivable require-

65

The Library of Tomorrow

ments. This fact meant there could be little economy through mul-
tiple copies. The final plan, put into effect in 1958, divided the field
among 27 outstanding libraries o the United States. Thirty-three
foreign institutions agreed to share the expense and become depos-
itories for portions of the reproductions. Utilization of new and
rapid copying processes reduced the expense and time required for
the enterprise. There has not yet been adequate treatment of all
countries, especially some of the smaller nations, but there are now
available in at least two of the cooperating libraries, copies of every
notable archival collection in Madrid, Rome, Lisbon, Paris, Berlin,
London, and numerous other manuscript centers. The chances are
exceedingly remote that any cataclysm of war or natural disaster
could be so complete as to destroy both originals and reproductions.

Public documents were one of the first areas in which effective
library cooperation was achieved. As early as 1930 centers were
designated for saving official publications originating in each re-
gion. During the succeeding 15 years the problem of preserving all
local and state documents was fully worked out. The foreign field
presented greater difficulties because of its complexity and volume.
As in the case of newspapers and other materials, it was found that
the most satisfactory solution lay in specialization among libraries,
A group of interested institutions in each region worked out divi-
sions along geographical and subject lines which have been highly
efficient in bringing together the world's important documentary
publications. Noteworthy also were the projects for filming long
runs of British Parliamentary papers, and other files no longer pro-
curable in their original form. Through library sharing of the ex-
pense of reproduction, copies of these are now widely available.

For a long period the disposal of duplicate material was an annoy-
ing problem for libraries. National clearing houses were organized
about 40 years ago to handle special classes, such as periodicals and
public documents, and this plan was partially satisfactory. There
remained, however, immense quantities of valuable duplicate ma-
terials in all fields, taking up needed space and of no use to the

66

Library Cooperation, 1930-1970

possessors. Attempts to handle the problem on a national scale were
abortive. The regional approach was finally tried, with striking
success. In each o the six major cooperating regions, warehouses
were constructed and to these were sent duplicates of every type
from libraries. At the beginning a considerable staff of professional
and clerical workers was required to arrange and list the collection.
Later only a skeleton staff was needed. The distribution of dupli-
cates has been largely on a subject basis, the idea, of course, being
to complete those fields for which libraries had assumed primary
responsibility. Under the agreement a library received approxi-
mately the same amount of material as it put into the collection,
though this arrangement was not adhered to if a larger number of
titles was needed by an institution in order to round out a special
division. After a time it was discovered that a certain residue was
left after all the requirements of a particular region had been met.
These remainders were shipped to other regional depositories. The
final result was to place everything where it would be of maximum
use and completely to eliminate waste.

So much for the major advances in library cooperation over the
last forty years. Only the highlights have been touched upon here.
A look into the future encourages one to prophesy even greater
progress to come. New fields are opening which will call for the
best combined intelligence of the library profession. To control
these forthcoming changes, the ideal of "one for all and all for one"
should prove as effective in the future as it has in the recent past.

Libraries and

BY SYDNEY B. MITCHELL

THIS paper does not deal with miracles nor with prophecies. Per-
haps I might indulge in a few pipe dreams and imagine a society
in 25 years which would put the librarian at the throttle of culture
so that all the power of research and scholarship answered to his
pressure, but I can also visualize a society where it is the librarian
who would be throttled and his office reduced to that of propa-
ganda. Nor do I care to write of mechanical miracles, of reference
robots who would answer any one of ten thousand questions. It is
not difficult to think of the changes in library service which might
conceivably come with the developments and refinements of tele-
vision, soon to be with us, or of microphotography, already here.
But I have lived 35 years in scholarly libraries, and from that ex-
perience I am unwilling to say that in the next quarter century
scholarship will be divorced from the unusual individual and the
unusual collection of material for his use. If one may not garden
and sit in the shade one may hardly be scholarly and keep out of
the shade of the lamp, in this case. I shall also have to assume that
scholarship may mean a broad general culture, naturally now lim-
ited or focused in a way not necessary when "a scholar and a gentle-
man" was a person of good breeding who had a nice acquaintance
with the humanities and probably a classical education. Also that

68

Libraries and Scholarship

it may mean such thorough acquaintance with a small field, in-
tensively cultivated, that from complete knowledge of its literature,
in some cases, in others from the combination of this with experi-
ment, a crop is produced, new relations established, new theories
propounded, new information furnished. This is productive schol-
arship.

For scholarship or research in any of these senses there are two
essentials men and materials. Perhaps one should add complete
freedom in the endeavors of the former and in the collection of the
latter, for even as the biologists had to fight for 50 years for freedom
of experimentation and had to face obstruction from established
interests fearful of their findings, so social scientists may be cramped
and hindered in their research, and librarians in the collection of
materials, by the entrenched forces of those who feel they will suffer
from social change and the results of investigation into our eco-
nomic and political situation.

It would not be difficult to demonstrate that the emphasis in the
last quarter century in American scholarly libraries has been on the
materials. This is not surprising, for we are a wealthy people and
materials can be bought, but men have to be bred. It is easy to show
the foreign visitor library buildings of grandeur and of modern and
efficient equipment; it is easy to show fellow librarians the treas-
ures which our money and our energy have enabled us to gather
together in these fine buildings. We take pleasure in our plans for
the development of our collections into more complete laboratories
for research, but have the librarians to care for them shown com-
parable development? Are we not still noticeably short of scholarly
librarians, of staffs which measure up to their materials for scholar-
ship, o men and women to whom the teaching and research
scholars are willing often even to concede a real understanding
of scholarship and its requirements, let alone acknowledge them as
active aids or participants in productive scholarship?

How is librarianship going to attract to itself now the men and
women who will be essential to the scholarly libraries of tomorrow ?

The Library of Tomorrow

What shall be their character, their general education, their training
for librarianship, their fields of service and their future in the librar-
ies where they are so needed? It would first of all seem necessary
to recruit to the service of scholarly libraries a greater proportion of
men with positive capacities and inclination for scholarship and
relatively less ambition for administrative responsibilities. I men-
tion men because thus far it is men who have predominantly shown
these characteristics and in many fields of scholarship it is men
alone who have been encouraged to continue. With the conditions
which have been responsible for the attitude towards women's work-
ing for the doctorate we are not here concerned they are in part
social and in part professional. Perhaps in time if graduate depart-
ments realize that there are placement opportunities in scholarly
libraries for their best women, to take charge of special subject
collections and to head departmental libraries, they may become
more receptive to women. Certainly this should be an opportunity
for women of scholarly instincts who perhaps more often than men
are imbued with a desire to help others. When, as has now come
about, graduate library schools have gravitated to large universities,
the recruiting of both men and women of this character should be
comparatively easy, with the chief difficulty the necessity of seeing
that those encouraged to become librarians have such personal and
social qualities as are essential to their usefulness in dealing with
people.

The question of the best general education for those who plan
eventually to provide library service for scholars is still unsettled.
In the opinion of many of our most scholarly university librarians
the professional doctorate in librarianship is not the answer today.
They believe that as a preparation for teaching or research in the
professional field it may be very satisfactory. Some would approve
it also as a preparation for executive work, but frankly say that they
would prefer in charge of special collections or subject divisions of
the university library those who have undertaken the discipline
for the Ph.D. degree in subject, or nonprofessional, fields. The ade-

70

Libraries and Scholarship

quacy of such preparation is however doubted by those who state,
without much contradiction, that the doctorate is now practically
a professional degree and that, far from turning out good scholars
in even one subject, it is becoming limited to the preparation of
technicians, experts in some narrow field, whose services are ac-
ceptable as such, but whose educational influence is narrowing.
From the librarian's standpoint this is certainly true. The discipline
Is too much focused on a narrow field for the service of one whose
function it will have to be to keep in mind the interests of scholars
in a much wider subject area. The emphasis placed on the comple-
tion of a piece of research must also tend to direct attention to the
importance of personal research, rather than to interest the indi-
vidual in bibliographical service concerned with the accumulation
of materials and their scholarly use by others.

It is fortunate that many of our more critical educators have lately
been concerned with rather traditional requirements and overem-
phasis on specialization in the discipline for the doctorate, so that
in universities as far apart as Harvard and California the rumblings
of discontent may become the prelude to what seem earthquakes
to the conservative. Harvard's recently announced provisions for
doctorates in the history of science and in American literature^ with-
out emphasis on philology but with consideration of its broad cul-
tural background, are heartening to those who feel that to take
charge of a science library the present requirements for a doctorate
in zoology or botany are hampering. The study of the history of
science must be so integrated with its literature that a degree in
that field would constitute almost ideal preparation for one whose
life is to be spent in a scholarly science library. In a comparable way,
the correlation of literature with history, economics and politics,
perhaps even art, should give just that breadth desirable for library
positions such as might be available in large universities, in such
public libraries as that of New York City, and in the special liter-
ature collections typified by the Huntington Library.

The training in librarianship which should be added to such a

71

The Library of Tomorrow

general education has nowhere been satisfactorily worked out as
yet. Attempts have been made at some of the graduate library
schools to efifect some sort of combination of first and second year
subjects as would meet the needs of the occasional student coming
with a PhD. degree, but such a student is generally irritated by
both the approach and the highly technical character of first-year
courses. When the demand is strong enough, one or two schools at
least should experiment with a more mature and quicker moving
program, which will provide the technical equipment but allow for
a broader philosophical and bibliographical approach. For those
who have this double equipment, beginning salaries should equal
those of university instructors, and in large libraries enough posi-
tions should exist in a quarter century to provide advancement in
salary for these scholar-librarians, comparable to that of associate
professors. Some will doubtless show administrative ability and
eventually take on such responsibilities along with the generally
higher salaries, but from a faculty standpoint they will retain al-
ways that understanding of scholarship and research the existence
of which is often questioned by those whose experience has been
purely technical or administrative.

Without such men and women not those with obvious limita-
tions of personality or physique who have been forced into this
phase of librarianship as a regrettable second choice, but men and
women who have selected scholarly library work as one of the most
important agencies of education it is difficult to see how scholar-
ship will be adequately satisfied in libraries. This particular type of
librarian would doubtless occasionally publish on his own account,
but the mistake of trying to make good college teachers into poor
productive scholars should not be repeated with scholar-librarians.
The rewards, financial and cultural, should be evident enough to
draw and keep in this field men and women admittedly lacking in
any number in the American library scenery of today, without their
having to give up their lives to administration. Failing these re-
wards, librarians of the future will be as great contributors to

72

Libraries and Scholarship

scholarship as they are today and as small. They will remain ad-
ministrators and technicians, perhaps general educators, but schol-
arship will still have to be borrowed from the faculty.

The matter of materials is much simpler than that of men. It has
always been so. Greece could pass on its Parthenon and Rome its
Colosseum these were material things, but they could not even
keep democracy themselves. The materials of productive scholar-
ship are various, some unique, some rare, most of them expensive
and bulky manuscripts, records, documents, newspapers, monu-
mental works, journals and society transactions embodying the
records of earlier research and current additions to knowledge, and
in the social sciences a large unorganized body of ephemeral ma-
terial. Scholarly libraries must have the most important materials
in many fields, everything in some few.

Perhaps the first lesson in accumulation will be learned in the
next quarter century the lesson of limitation. There are doubtless
librarians whose acquisitive sense is overdeveloped but, without
the agreement of trustees, administrators and faculty to establish
positive spheres of research and as definitely leave to other institu-
tions the responsibility for the collection of materials and cultivation
of others, the foolish competition of the last 25 years will continue,
whatever librarians may desire and advocate. It should be a fair
assumption that between them costs and cooperation will end such
competition, at least between institutions at no great distance from
each other.

The development of microphotography should be such that accu-
mulation of materials will become much easier and much cheaper.
Not only will it be possible for libraries working together to get
comparatively cheap reproductions of individual works, docu-
ments, files of journals and publications of learned societies, which
during the last two decades have become very expensive and almost
unprocurable in their original form, but unique records will be
made regionally available and newspapers and other materials,
scarce, bulky, and ephemeral because of their poor paper, will be

73

The Library of Tomorrow

more readily provided for those needing them. In its help to schol-
ars in the social sciences, presumably the great field of research in
the future, the importance of cheap copies which can be economi-
cally stored and readily transported can hardly be overestimated.
As has been stated, it will make possible the reproduction of basic
materials for research, it will preserve what will otherwise dis-
integrate, will save space and will also allow the publication of
studies of rather limited circulation. It may readily add a new kind
of service in libraries. The librarian who is a subject specialist may
be able to go from the compilation of bibliographies to the actual
reproduction for scholars of the materials they need at hand or wish
to look over. In the case of the current periodical literature it may
mean providing scholars with film copies of abstracts of what is
appearing in their fields of interest. Projectors will be so cheap, so
easily handled, so commonly available that their use will be accepted
everywhere.

While it may be Utopian, if our present social system endures, to
predict great regional research libraries, one would not hesitate to
say that great research centers may be developed, areas where the
concentration of people and of libraries may make possible a de-
gree of cooperation and integration now difficult, that only in ex-
ceptional cases will it be necessary for a scholar to travel thousands
of miles in his own country to get complete facilities for his work.
Not all the reasonably complete files of Canadian documents, let
us say, will be east of the Mississippi, though not more than one or
two need be available on the Pacific coast. Such research centers can
hardly be predicated on a state basis; they will naturally develop in
areas of population concentration where great university, special or
state libraries or all of these exist, and the problem will be the
integration of their interests and the pooling of their resources. It
is conceivable that national and regional boards on research will
ultimately designate the area or the particular institution where the
material belongs, and a unique Chinese collection, let us say, will
go where it will supplement existing facilities, not where there

74

Libraries and Scholarship

happens to be someone who can be persuaded to pay the price for
it. In a more enlightened age, scholars will work where unique,
special collections exist rather than expect to have attempts made
to duplicate these in their own institution.

Heading these regional research centers will be the Library of
Congress, where by 1963 there will be available, not only its then
great collections, but a record of the existence of any work in the
United States, with its location, and a fine bibliographical service
available to scholars throughout the country.

It follows, of course, that the present-day trends in interlibrary
loans will have become so emphasized as to constitute the practice
of the future. They will be requested not as a favor but as a service
of scholarship, to be paid for by the borrowing library. The very
term loan may disappear when what will be supplied at cost will
be mechanical reproductions of the material desired, on films, paper
or cards of whatever form or size is desired. The questions to be
discussed at future library meetings will not be whether a service
is to be rendered but just what is the best way to do it.

The records necessary to make effective libraries for scholars have
possibly not yet been devised. We who have been brought up on
the card catalog, particularly on that dissipated form of it called the
dictionary catalog, have been wont to accept it as the last word in
records of book holdings, while our scholars are perplexed by its
complexity and appalled at its cost. Now even we are questioning
whether there will be room in future libraries for anything else. As
the records needed for future scholars may well have to include
all the books in a region, or all the books on some subject available
in any library, we can only hope that the next quarter century will
bring about such novel methods of reproduction that films or pho-
tographs enlarged when in actual use will give us cheap and com-
pactly housed records of holdings, and that a field for librarians
will open up in the compilation of bibliographies of subjects which
will constitute records of existing materials, act as buying lists or
furnish the location of the nearest available copies. Beginnings have

75

The Library of Tomorrow

been made on a great union card catalog at die Library of Congress,
and on catalogs of cities or centers, but at great cost and with the
limitation of such tools in use. Something better must come. The
problem will in part be simplified when the use of scholarly li-
braries is limited to those who need them, and people in process
of education are unencumbered by greater book collections and
more complicated records than they can conveniently use.

The housing of scholarly libraries is today unduly complicated
by the fondness of donors and institutions for monumental library
buildings, and also by the now passing desire to gather all book
users into one place, which naturally has become overlarge for con-
venience and comfort. Hordes of undergraduates swarming around
the library, who might well be served in study halls or special li-
braries adapted to their limited needs, constitute hindrances to
library service to scholarship. Huge gothic or renaissance halls do
nothing to help the scholar. The university library seems destined
to abandon the attempt to house such heterogeneous groups under
one roof and to develop special libraries providing for group collec-
tions in the humanities, the social sciences, the biological and the
physical sciences. Many of the large buildings built since 1900 will
become too small long before 1963, so books will be drawn out from
the general collection and brought closer physically to the graduate
students and faculty needing them. Yet, the size of the unit being
so much greater than that of the old departmental library, it will
permit of full service in hours open and its librarians will have a
quality of knowledge of the collection now hardly obtainable. Evi-
dences of this trend are already seen at Chicago and at California.
In these new libraries for service, not for show, light and air will
be independent of natural supplies, studies and cubicles may be
soundproof or really noiseless typewriters will be supplied, and the
mechanical equipment for the use of films and other microphoto-
graphic accessories will be everywhere available. Possibly President
Eliot's idea of cheap union storage stack buildings for the less live
books of many neighboring libraries may after many years be

Libraries and Scholarship

adopted, as improvements in communication and transportation
annihilate distance and make a cooperative storage and service both
economical and effective.

Without doubt productive scholarship will still in 25 years be
associated with the university libraries, with special libraries and
with fine reference libraries which occasionally are part of a public
library system. The sphere of the good public library will doubtless
lie in popular literature and adult education, with I hope less
emphasis on purely pastime reading than at present. Two trends of
the public library likely to be very evident by 1963 will be the re-
gional library system and, as a natural consequence of its size and
income, the possibility of more division by subject than today, con-
sequently collections and staff members better fitted to aid scholar-
ship. The regional library may well become the reservoir for all
materials for the study of the region served, and therefore the best
possible place to study its social problems, its economic questions,
its history, its government, its agriculture and horticulture, its na-
tural history, its industries. Such libraries, by their close relations
with others, may well become centers for service to a type of scholar
which has long been evident on the English scene, the knowledge-
able amateur. In the era of greater leisure there should develop a
kind of American amateur scholar who because of our tempera-
ment and tendency to specialize may even outclass the nineteenth
century English amateur. In many spheres where a lifetime of ap-
plication is unnecessary, he may, with the aid of his library, add his
little bit in extending the boundaries of knowledge and also find a
more satisfying life, for there are few greater pleasures than being
an expert, an authority in some subject which may be quite outside
that in which one earns a living.

77

Extension of Library Service

BY JUDSON T. JENNINGS

IN THE sunny month o June, in the year of our Lord 1976, several
thousand bookish people met for conference in the City of Broth-
erly Love. Of more than ordinary significance was this particular
occasion because leading librarians and eminent educators from
civilized nations throughout the world had foregathered to felicitate
the American Library Association and to assist in celebrating its
one hundredth birthday. Compelling speakers outlined various
phases of the American library movement. One described the or-
ganization of the Association in this same city of Philadelphia in
1876 and cited events that signalized that period as the real begin-
ning of library progress : the historic government report on librar-
ies, the invention of the Dewey classification, the founding of the
Library Bureau, and the appearance of the first issue of the Library
Journal.

But the speaker who drew most applause was Melvil Dana Put-
nam, when he described the progress of the movement called "Li-
brary Extension." This was an important feature of the program
because the A.L.A. was able for the first time to announce that the
United States and Canada were at last completely covered by ade-
quate library service. As a young student just out of library school,
tremendously interested in the mission of the public library, I gave
close attention to this address.

Extension of Library Service

The speaker first described the libraries o 1976 and then reviewed
the stumbling steps by which the goal of complete coverage had
been attained.

The most striking feature of this modern library service was the
fact that the 6,000 independent libraries of 1938 had gradually been
combined or federated into 600 library systems whose united service
reached all parts of the nation. Every citizen had access to the books
that he needed, for inspiration, for information and for recreation,
and no future Lincoln would need to walk 20 miles for a book.
These library systems varied greatly in size, geographically and
also in population. Some served single large counties, others cov-
ered several counties, while many of them reached out from popu-
lous centers to serve large metropolitan areas. The various regions,
however, had one marked characteristic in common, in that their
outlines were not drawn on a map with ruler and pencil as many
of the old county lines apparently had been determined. They were
established rather as cohesive units that served logical trade areas
or had natural geographical boundaries.

A second characteristic was the installation of new methods of
taking books to the people. Branch libraries, deposit stations, and
book wagons were still in use, but to these had been added new
schemes in keeping with a modern world. Photostatic copies of
library material were being sent to distant readers and airplanes
were delivering books to places formerly inaccessible. Television
made it possible to read extracts in books that were thousands of
miles away, and a new and very low rate of postage on books sent
to or from public libraries made books easily available to borrowers
everywhere.

Those older readers who came to the library for their books also
found many changes. The location and design of the buildings
were in marked contrast to those of an earlier generation. No longer
did the reader waste his breath climbing to a Greek temple atop
the highest hill. He found his books in the market-place where the
library was as accessible and as convenient as the best department

79

The Library of Tomorrow

store. Many o the later structures were attractively modernistic,
with great bands of high windows throwing ample light on the
readers' books. For the evening readers a generous supply of in-
direct light was provided;, while comfortable furniture in air-con-
ditioned rooms helped to make these buildings popular places in
which to read and study.

Each central library maintained a room especially equipped for
the storage and use of microfilms, those miniature books of the
modern age. These collections included microfilm copies of rare
books and manuscripts from all parts of the world, and each film
room was provided with special tables holding projectors in which
the tiny film pages were enlarged for the readers.

Cooperation between libraries and librarians was the third item
emphasized by the speaker. Cooperation had been discussed as far
back as the 1930 J s but it was many years before the idea developed
into something more than words. By 1960 libraries had perfected
systems of cooperative book buying and cooperative cataloging
which were not only saving money but also providing better serv-
ice. Specialization in book selection, too, had made great progress,
Every regional library maintained one or more collections on spe-
cial subjects pertinent to the region, and the value of these special
collections had been greatly enhanced by the addition of appropri-
ate books voluntarily surrendered and donated by other libraries.
Union catalogs of books in neighboring libraries had grown rapidly
in number, started first by the use of microfilm and kept up to date
by the exchange of catalog cards. These various cooperative ven-
tures made it possible to locate promptly many of the books needed
by special students. They led to a tremendous increase in the use of
interlibrary loans, and resulted in saving time, travel, and expense
for authors and others engaged in research. Still another coopera-
tive venture was the warehouse, or storage, plan. Many of the re-
gional libraries and, in several cases, groups of regional libraries,
had erected fireproof but inexpensive stack buildings on cheap sites,
to which they relegated books that were out of date or seldom used.

So

Extension of Library Service

These books were still available when needed but the plan proved
a bonanza to the overcrowded libraries, since the shelves in the reg-
ular library buildings could now be reserved for the standard works
in all important fields of human interest and for the live and up-to-
date books that were in constant demand by readers.

A fourth point was the high quality of the professional service
offered the user of these delightful libraries. Laws for the certifica-
tion of librarians had been enacted in all of the states and no longer
was it possible to pension a broken-down teacher or clergyman, or
reward a faithful political friend, by placing him in charge of a
library. Legislators had at last discovered that the public should be
protected from the bungling librarian as well as from the clumsy
barber. These modern library workers were not only equipped with
college and university education and library school training, but
they also had special aptitude or preparation for their particular
niche in the library's service. The Art librarian was something of
an art amateur and student. The Technology librarian had majored
in pure and applied science. Other assistants developed other spe-
cialties, so that the professional staff in the larger libraries was prac-
tically a faculty covering in general the field of human knowledge
and prepared to render expert service to the readers and students
who came to these informal educational institutions. This increas-
ing competence in the library personnel brought to the institution
not only the respect of the entire community but also larger funds
and greater patronage.

The last feature mentioned by the speaker was the manner in
which these modern libraries were maintained. Local autonomy
was still in force and approximately 50 per cent of the library main-
tenance fund was provided by local taxation. The new idea in
library financing was that the other 50 per cent of the fund was
provided by state and federal grants given to libraries in recognition
of their great service to education. Many of the states had been
unable to attain the goal of complete library coverage, and so serve
all of their people, until these grants became available.

81

The Library of Tomorrow

Under these five headings, then, the speaker outlined the main
features of a service that fulfilled the purpose of the public library,
as stated many years ago by Mrs. Fairchild, a pioneer teacher of
library science: "The function of the library is the development and
enrichment of life in the entire community by bringing to all the
people the books that belong to them."

The latter part of the speaker's address reviewed the chief battles
in the long fight for universal library service. It had been a strenu-
ous campaign, starting in 1926 when the A.L.A. was only fifty years
of age. The report of the Extension Committee presented at the
semicentennial conference was the first serious national attempt to
study the question. This comprehensive survey, discussing the ex-
isting distribution of library service, brought out the striking fact
that library extension was almost entirely a rural problem, and
showed that of the 45,000,000 people without library service nearly
40,000,000 lived in rural districts. Libraries had naturally developed
first in the cities, where it was easier to maintain and to use them,
while the people on farms and in the open spaces had been left to
look out for themselves.

Thus the first batde was fought between the socially minded
librarians and the rugged individualists. The individualists asked
the question: "Why all this bother about the rural people? If they
really want library service, don't you think that they will find the
means and the methods of providing it for themselves?" The
speaker said that this question recalled to his mind a book entitled
What social classes owe to each other. Professor William Graham
Surnner, the author of this volume, himself a rugged individualist,
interpreted laissez-faire to mean "Mind your own business," which,
he said, is the doctrine of liberty. He felt that social classes owed to
each other only "good will, mutual respect, and mutual guaranties
of liberty and security." He considered that the schemes of the re-
formers "could always be reduced to this type that A and B decide
what C shall do for D."

The librarians replied that rural residents did not seek library

82

Extension of Library Service

service because they had never had It and therefore did not realize
what it might mean to them. When once they had a taste of it
they refused to go back to the old bookless days and were willing
to provide the funds needed for library support. Furthermore, said
the librarians, they were "bothering" about library service for rural
districts because democratic government would depend for its ulti-
mate success upon the education of all the people and upon the
widest diffusion of knowledge. Alexander Meiklejohn had said
"democracy is education. In so far as we can educate the people we
can have democracy." They stressed the interesting thought that
our whole sum of knowledge is stored in books and that there is
no other complete storehouse. If knowledge is power, then libraries
are powerhouses. To state this thought in other words :

Ideas are the things that brought us out of the jungle;

Language is the vehicle by which ideas are conveyed;

Print is the invention by which language is preserved;

Libraries are the power plants where ideas in printed language
are kept ready for your use and mine.

The second conflict in the battle of the books was over the size
of the territory that could be efficiently covered by a single library
system. The Extension report of 1926 had recommended the county
as the logical unit, a natural conclusion because the county was the
only governmental unit available, except the states themselves, and
county libraries had met with marked success in California and a
few other states. In 1936, however, the Extension Committee sur-
veyed the accomplishments of its first decade and found that the
results, at least in figures, were disappointing. Sixty million people
had library service in 1926 as compared to 77 million in 1936, this
increase of 17 million corresponding closely to the increase in popu-
lation during the xo-year period. Out of a total of over 3,000 coun-
ties, less than 300 had complete library service in 1926. There was
some slight gain during the decade but in 1936 the number of
counties with full service was still under 300. Confronted by these
facts the librarians began to take notice, since at this rate of progress

The Library of Tomorrow

the ultimate goal would be reached about the year 4000 AJ>.

The failure of the county campaign may have been due partly to
the depression of the 1930'$, but the larger reason was the failure of
county government Itself, Waste and inefficiency had brought this
particular branch of local government into disrepute. Counties had
been laid out in the days of the oxcart and the stagecoach. They
had no logical boundaries and many of them were too small or too
poor to maintain independently such services as public health, pub-
lic welfare, and public libraries. A writer of that period, Thomas H.
Reed, put the matter tersely, as follows: "It is a slight exaggeration
to say that our present form of county government was brought
over on the Mayflower and is about as well adapted to modern
metropolitan conditions as the Mayflower would be to compete
with the Queen Mary, but it is not far from the truth."

Librarians, then, about 1938, began to seek larger units, a move-
ment that was aided by experts on governmental problems, by
other public services in similar quandaries, and by state planning
boards.

This idea met with a friendly hearing also because of the success
of several demonstration libraries inaugurated in the 1930*8 and
1940*5 for territories much larger than counties. British Columbia,
Prince Edward Island, and Vermont were pioneers in such demon-
strations. These demonstration libraries exhibited their wares, ren-
dered their service, the people were convinced, and the answer was
"Sold." They proved that larger units meant economy, while at the
same time they provided better book collections and a more efficient
staff and service.

In the 1940*5 the movement gained considerable momentum and
a few progressive states took the bull by the horns, abolished the old
counties, and established in their place regional governments of
larger size and more natural boundaries. Similar plans promoted
in other states were blocked by the politicians, but here the libraries
found other methods. A few state legislatures established library
districts ad hoc, with provisions for governing boards and power to

Extension of Library Service

raise funds. Still another plan used in some sections was the group-
ing of several counties by contract into a unified library system.

The third hurdle to be overcome was the popular impression that
any person can run a library. Schools for the training of librarians
bad been in existence for several decades, but many libraries were
inefficiently managed by incompetent people until state laws for the
:ertification of librarians were enacted. Many of the library schools
were connected with state universities and it finally became appar-
ent, even to the politicians, that it was an economic waste to allow
this training, paid for by the state, to lie idle while the libraries
needed trained workers. At first blush it might seem that the cer-
ification of librarians had little connection with library extension.
On the contrary, however, the movement rapidly gained headway
From the impetus brought to it by these educated, trained, and en-
thusiastic young workers.

The last battle of the campaign, but perhaps the most vital, was
:he long fight for federal and state aid for library service. This idea
was for some time vigorously opposed by those who clung to the
:heory of states* rights and by those who believed that local auton-
omy would be destroyed. Again the speaker showed the thought of
:he time by quoting from Thomas H. Reed: "The concept of the
right of local self-government and its universal efficacy have been
so deeply ingrained in the public mind in relation to the existing
units of government that it can not realize that progress has
wrought a change in the definition of what is local."

In the 1940*5, plans for federal and state aid gained headway,
Deing greatly aided by the state library commissions, by the federal
library agency established in 1936, and by groups of citizens or-
ganized to promote libraries and calling themselves "Friends o
Libraries."

Three principal arguments were successfully used in this last
:ampaign. Federal and state grants would serve as stimulating
:unds, they could be so allocated as to promote an equalization of
ibrary service, and they were justified on the ground that public li-

The Library of Tomorrow

brary service was a fundamental feature of our provision for public
education.

These, said the speaker, were the four great battles in the march
toward bigger and better libraries. In closing, he paid his respects
to the veterans of the campaign, to AX, A. headquarters and com-
mittees, to the state library commissions and the "Friends of Librar-
ies," to the Commissioner of Education and to the individuals and
organizations whose vision and donations had made possible those
living examples, the regional library demonstrations. These con-
stituted the army that had fought successfully in order to provide
"The best reading for the largest number at the least cost' 9

86

Standards for the Public Library
Book Collection

BY CARL B. RODEN

IT is NOT altogether easy to speculate upon the book collections in
the library of tomorrow without a rather general orientation in the
functions and objectives of that institution as they may differ from
those of today. This volume is dedicated to the proposition that
there will be a difference between the old and a new conception of
such functions and objectives, and that old standards, of book col-
lections as well as of other elements of library organization, will
undergo some sort of change or revision. A library has been defined
by one of the wise men of our craft as a collection of books assem-
bled for use, as against collections assembled for sale, for display,
for the pride of possession, or for any other of the purposes for
which books may be assembled. The same learned commentator
points out that the function or use of books that makes them a
library may be: for instruction, for entertainment, or for "handing
down," by which, presumably, is meant preserving books for the
benefit of future generations. This definition may not be very pro-
found in its analysis of the functions of a library, but it is at least
comprehensive and affords a fairly convenient starting point for
the consideration of standards for library book collections.
Books are the foundation of any library, and every library must

The Library of Tomorrow

have standards for the selection of its books if only for the reason
that there are more books now in the world, and still more appear-
ing day by day, than any single library can possibly buy or house
or find use for, except possibly for the purpose of "handing down."
That, however, is, fortunately, the duty of a very small number,
such as the great and inclusive reference libraries, and the copyright
depositories charged with the immense task of storing books for a
legal record of their publication. The library of tomorrow that is
here under particular contemplation is, we may assume, the free
public library, established for the service of a whole community;
and that institution is, or should be, very little concerned with build-
ing book collections for posterity, and much more with providing
its contemporary constituency with the books useful to it for
instruction and entertainment.

To say that the public library is established for the service of the
whole community is to state a broad and theoretical truth. Actually,
of course, the portion of the population that makes use of its library
facilities is distinctly and rather definitely limited. One limitation
upon the ambition of the local library to serve all persons is imposed
by the fact that not all persons are inclined to reading, and that the
reading habit is far from a natural or universal gift, but is an ac-
quired skill not too common even in a wholly literate population. A
registration of 25 per cent of the population as library cardholders
is a high average, and even possession of a library card does not
always mean continuous library use. At the present time, for ex-
ample, a serious and unaccountable drop in library use, out of all
proportion to the number of recorded cardholders, is perplexing
public librarians the country over.

Another limitation of an entirely different character arises out
of the proverbial inadequacy of the means and resources with
which the library attempts to carry on, and at the same time to
extend, its services, as it constantly strives to do. Between these two
limitations there are many variations in reading abilities, and many
levels in reading interests and tastes, on the one hand, and in the

The Public Library Boo^ Collection

degree to which the library may undertake to allot its scanty means
in the service of each, or of those which it recognizes as the more
legitimate and more urgent. There is, therefore, plenty of room for
difference of opinion as to what a good library book collection
should consist of and how it should be administered. The compet-
ing claims of different groups of readers, the so-called "demands"
of the public to which we still pay altogether too much heed
and the general relation of the two principal library functions of
instruction and entertainment, along with the ever-present insuffi-
ciency of funds that makes it impossible to do all and to serve all
and enforces a state of incessant compromise all these combine to
impart to the standards, for book collections as well as for other
library activities, a degree of fluctuation and inconstancy which, it
is to be hoped, the library of the future will find a way to reduce if
not to eliminate.

The public library makes no secret of the fact that it is a product
of the horse-and-buggy age, when books were scarce and not easy
to come by, when the use of books was mostly for serious purposes,
and when even the borrowing of books was the privilege of the
few. A study of its origins discloses that in England, the land of its
birth, as well as in America, to which it was soon transplanted, it
was intended as a strictly educational institution. In England it was
directly sponsored by the workers, or such of them as could read,
whom the Industrial Revolution with its laborsaving machines had
deprived of a livelihood and who realized the need of more knowl-
edge and training in new vocations and new methods for the old in
order to hold their own. In America it was quite commonly re-
garded and accepted as a sort of continuation of the public school
system by which adults could carry on the learning process if they
were so inclined.

But it was soon realized that this new agency, offering a new and
untried public service, could make its way much more rapidly and
attract to its doors a much larger number of patrons by leveling off
its standards to the desires and interests of a wider circle than that

The Library of Tomorrow

embracing the learners alone. Thus the entertainment or recrea-
tional function joined the educational one and very soon exceeded
the latter in popularity and in measure of its growth. And thus the
American public library entered upon its long career of progress,
development and, in the period of the Carnegie benefactions, of
vast expansion, without serious interruption and without much
questioning of its functions or objectives, either by the body politic
or by itself. During the late distressful years, it is true, the public
library was subjected to certain disturbing experiences at the hands
of officials harassed with the problem of reconciling shrinking reve-
nues with the unshrinkable costs of government and inclined to
draw fine distinctions between the "essential" and "nonessential"
public services. But, on the whole, the libraries came of? very well
in these scrutinies, and may one day look back upon the Depression
as an ordeal not without many wholesome lessons and reactions to
counterbalance its pains and discomforts.

One of these reactions manifests itself in the mood of self-exami-
nation into which the public library has now entered of its own
volition, and to which these chapters bear witness. Whether that
tomorrow toward which they are dedicated will in reality disclose
itself as a new era or will be only a long period of readjustment,
leading ultimately to a return to former standards, it is, in any
event, a useful and profitable exercise for the public library to pause
for a brief retrospect and a longer look ahead and thus to try to
forecast the opportunities and responsibilities of the future and how
far they may depart from those of the past. What follows is offered
as a fragmentary, tentative and wholly subjective contribution
toward that end.

It is not unlikely that book collections will in the future tend to
grow smaller rather than larger smaller, that is to say, in the num-
ber of new books or tides added, but larger in the number of
copies supplied for current use. In 1851, George Ticknor, that emi-
nent Bostonian to whose energetic promotion the Boston Public
Library largely owes its establishment, formulated a program for

90

The Public Library Boo^ Collection

the new institution which, among other advanced and enlightened
ideas, contained the interesting proposition that a public library
should provide "popular books ... in such numbers of copies that
many persons . . . could be reading the same work at the same
time/' and should include not only such books as would tend to
"moral and intellectual improvement" but the "pleasant literature
of the day." This is still a fair statement of the aspiration of every
public library, but of an aspiration constantly circumscribed by the
lack of funds and a task that becomes one of rigid selection and
the exercise of much judgment and discrimination. It involves not
only the problem of deciding which books among the many are to
be added, but also that of deciding which are to be duplicated to
the limited extent that the library budget will permit. It is likely
to be somewhat simplified, hereafter, by the establishment of a new
standard of book selection, in the form of a line of demarcation
between the reasonably "permanent" among the current output of
books and those that are clearly of passing and temporary interest
often stimulated by publicity and other external influences.

Such a line would by no means correspond to any distinction
between recreational and "educational" books, nor fiction and non-
fiction. For, in the first place, not all fiction is recreational, nor is
all nonfiction necessarily educational; and neither does the latter
always represent a contribution to knowledge of permanent worth
nor the former in all cases a contribution to mere entertainment.
Both kinds will continue to be carried in public libraries and both
will be duplicated so that the "pleasant literature of the day," what-
ever that may be taken to include, will still be made available to
readers. But readers are also of both kinds and it seems likely that
a shift of emphasis will take place in the service of one kind against
the other. The public library is organized for the service of the com-
mon reader a useful and comprehensive designation of a large
and varied group with many interests, many tastes, many degrees
of literary appreciation. For him it will undertake to provide a
service on as high a level as possible but a level of its own creation,

91

The Library of Tomorrow

without either the peaks that denote the specialist or the valleys
that signify a compromise with its standards as represented in the
level to which it means to adhere. It will be prepared and eager to
multiply and intensify its services upon that level, but will be less
and less concerned with that part of the reading public whose
capacities for the use and enjoyment of books manifest themselves
only in demands for the ephemeral and the inferior.

Indications are multiplying that that part of the entertainment
function of the public library which was fulfilled only by a con-
stant flow of best sellers is plainly subsiding, and, moreover, that
this phenomenon is not, as was for a time assumed, due only to the
failure of the library supply in the years of diminished book funds.
Other attractions aside from the commercial lending libraries
which absorbed a considerable part of this patronage the broad-
cast, the film, the serialization of new novels in the magazines, and
perhaps a whole new conception of recreation and entertainment
in this restless age, combined to decimate the ranks of the library
fiction patrons. And indications are likewise multiplying that the
libraries are accepting these defections with something less than
despair. Recent library reports record the restriction of fiction pur-
chases to a hundred or two out of the fifteen to eighteen hundred
annually produced in this country alone, and bear no evidence of
any consciousness of a loss of efficiency or of self-respect. Their chief
loss will be in the circulation figures, in which millions may for a
time give way to less imposing digits, but their gains will be reck-
oned in the corresponding rebound in the book appropriations re-
leased for services of more permanent effect and satisfaction.

One of the satisfactions thus made possible will be in the heavier
duplication of those new fiction titles that will pass the test and
find their way to the library shelves. But the same principle will be
applied with even greater satisfaction to that other category of
literature known to librarians by the inclusive and most inadequate
name of nonfiction. Here also the process of selection will be a
much more rigid one, resulting in lesser and more deliberate ac-

92

The Public Library Boo^ Collection

quisitlons of the new and a correspondingly more informed atti-
tude to the old. Librarians will become less responsive to the
pressure of isolated and sporadic "demands" for books which from
their nature will be of too limited use to a collection to serve the
common reader upon a common level. The public library will
abandon any ambitions it may have entertained to serve the expert
in any field of research or to assemble complete or "special" collec-
tions in any field of knowledge. It will recognize more clearly than
ever before that its sole duty and absorbing task is that of providing
in the words of the expansive A.L.A. motto "the best books for
the largest number, at the least cost" a duty still valid and a task
still far from fulfillment.

Standards for the book collection in the library of tomorrow will,
it is predicted, place greater emphasis upon its educational function.
Relations with recognized educational activities, both formal and
informal, will become more direct and intimate, and all book serv-
ices to the public institutions, the schools, hospitals and others, will
one day be consolidated in the public library as the center of expert
knowledge and procedure. Library service for children will even-
tually be transferred to the schools, to be combined with the school
library, but both to be conducted by competent members of the
public library staff, trained in the skills and doctrines of the chil-
dren's librarian.

The public library will greatly expand its services to students,
especially in groups, by providing for them their required books in
quantities for group use always excepting the textbooks which
must be the students' constant companions. But the collateral ma-
terial, so far as found in current books, and which plays so large a
part in modern educational practice, will be made more freely avail-
able and will be as heavily duplicated as may be required. The
books used in university extension, and other extracurricular courses
to which the general public is admitted, will be thus supplied by
the libraries to which that public has the right to look for such
service; and it is rashly predicted that this undertaking will prove

93

The Library of Tomorrow

far less impractical and burdensome than is generally assumed.
There will, moreover, be a tendency to recognize seasonal demands
for books which will lead to the organization of quantity supplies,
to be stored against recurring need.

In general, the principle of the heavy duplication of a relatively
small but competently selected stock of what may be called the
essential books on all subjects within the scope of the library and
the interests of the common reader would seem to be indicated as
one of the leading characteristics of tomorrow's library. There will
be a firmer tendency to assert the authority of the institution in
determining what the essential books are, and the addition of new
tides to this nucleus will be a process involving the exercise of a
sound and informed judgment and of complete liberty of decision.
And a second, collateral, and equally important process that of
discarding will be developed to equal efficiency and with equal
judgment, and will be rigorously applied to keep the book collec-
tion up to the standards set for it. The public library, as before
suggested, has no duty to keep books on its shelves that have be-
come obsolete or have otherwise outlived their usefulness. The
function of "handing down" belongs to another type of library and
in the average public library too easily becomes mere hoarding.
This is not to be taken as a warrant for indiscriminate discarding,
of which the classic example is furnished by the Bodleian Library
which disposed of the First Folio of Shakespeare when the second
was received and succeeded in retrieving its error only after sev-
eral centuries. But discarding is, nonetheless, as important in keep-
ing a book collection "alive" as addition, and will one day be as
systematically practiced.

Incidentally, the processes of scrutiny, selection and discarding
will apply with equal force and effect to books offered as gifts, by
authors seeking to honor themselves in honoring the library with
their compositions, or by other persons with motives less simple
and unmixed. The library has the same right to exercise its judg-
ment and follow its established standards in the admission of these

94

The Public Library Bool^ Collection

offerings as it asserts and exercises in its purchases, and will greatly
profit by insisting thereon.

These desultory and insubstantial speculations have no other pur-
pose than to indicate the belief of one observer that the future of
the public library will be characterized by a larger measure both of
conservatism and conservation than it has permitted itself to prac-
tice in the expansive days that are gone; that quality, of the book
collection as well as of service, will hold a larger place in its policies
than quantity, and that numbers of books, as well as of readers, will
become less important than the levels upon which the twain shall
meet. Thereby the public library will not merely consolidate its
present position in the public regard, but will greatly enhance it;
until at long last it will achieve what it has long deserved but only
fitfully enjoyed ready and convinced acceptance as one of the
indispensable services that must and will be maintained and gen-
erously supported for its essential and enduring values.

The Librarian of the Future

BY CHARLES E. RUSH

ACCORDING to the word of G. K. Chesterton, humanity has a favor-
ite game in which the people listen with respect to all that is said
of the future by men who assume, or are alleged, to be wise. Around
the knees of the philosophers and the prophets they gather with
reverence to learn how this and that must inevitably come to pass.
Having heard all the predictions, they promptly set forth to ac-
complish something quite different. They call this game, "Cheat
the Prophet."

Nevertheless., the hope of seeing their dreams realized springs
eternal among those who attempt to forecast events. It seems
difficult to discourage not only a minor prophet but also a modest
dreamer. Even the latter, basing his guesses upon generally known
conditions and indications of the present, may be tempted to
chart probable trends and paths on an imaginary map of an un-
known country without fear of being called to account in person
after half a century. If he can mark a course without pronounce-
ment, if he can indicate lines of accomplishment without being
dogmatic, he may be forgiven if his outline fails to check with the
official guides of 50 years hence.

It may seem strange that 50 years ago the fathers of the modern
library movement in America did not overindulge in prophecy.

9 6

The Librarian of the 'Future

Perhaps pioneers are too busily engaged in hewing virgin timber
and blazing new trails to speculate on the unknown. It would be
stimulating to know what those men visualized for the librarians
o today, particularly in the words of Cutter, the scholar and cata-
loger, Dewey, the teacher and classifier, Poole, the organizer and
indexer, Billings, the director and bibliographer, and Bowker,
the publisher and editor. However, the tremendously significant
achievements of the founders did lay the foundation for the notable
progress of their successors, which, combined with recent advance-
ment, must necessarily lead to certain important future develop-
ments, requiring a personnel of a high order and superior to that
of the present.

Like other pioneers and founders, they were men of action and
achievement. Being not greatly concerned about the future, they
apparently were not exercised over the formulation of a stated
philosophy, or any minute description of their faiths and beliefs.
They simply accomplished results, by using their ideals as targets,
confident that the practice of library science would develop into
the art of librarianship. Doubtless many students will attempt to
delve into their whys and wherefores as a fair exercise in near
future training. Meanwhile, the current call in many professions
for formalized sets of philosophic guideposts will increase until
they are outmoded, just as were their predecessors, the pledges of
organizations, oaths of societies and codes of ethics. Time will con-
vince us that creeds limit action and petrify thought, and that few
other devices in all the world are more difficult to revise and keep
up to date. There are grave implications in trying to follow instruc-
tions on driving an oxcart while attempting to fly a plane.

The future holds exciting possibilities for librarians. Librarian-
ship is a comparatively new educational profession. Little more
than the seacoast of the library world has been explored. Many
blazed trails lead to new adventures in the interior where horizon
follows horizon. Few other social agencies can anticipate as wide-
spread opportunity for general expansion and as great development

97

The Library of Tomorrow

of educational services, not only in new territory and new outposts,
but also in the partially established centers.

We have found that a library is not an end in itself, but a means
to many ends, and that the great need is not for fewer librarians,
but for more good librarians. These will appear in response to the
call for a leadership capable of adapting and integrating library
functions with those of other educational activities, all of which
face common problems and seek identical goals. The opportunity
lies in devising synchronization,

New and changing conceptions of the application of the power
of recorded ideas to the needs of readers will open new areas of
opportunity, and will require of those who serve them the fullest
possible development of personal ability and social understanding.
These will further demonstrate that the library approaches the
ideal of a democratic institution, depending on and contributing
to the enlightenment of the people, and the vitality of their cultural
ideas. The expansion, coordination, adequate financing and direc-
tion of such functions and activities, providing continuous educa-
tional encouragement without compulsion, censorship or bias, will
develop a new type of librarianship, seeking participation with
other social forces concerned with the progress and welfare of the
people. Neither the value of ideas, nor the books which contain
them, can be measured, but a progressive society without benefit of
books is unthinkable. What a man reads he largely is, and the more
complex he finds civilization the greater is his need for guidance
by the best thought expressed in print.

Related new oudooks and fresh approaches to library responsi-
bilities will result in frequent reorganization of existing facilities
and continuous modification of service to provide more equalized
library opportunity, greater diffusion of facts and ideas, guidance
in planning and pursuing individual reading and study, stimula-
tion of intellectual curiosity and interests, encouragement of both
appreciation and production in cultural fields, as well as the pro-
motion of books as useful tools for the student, worker and citizen.

9 8

The Librarian of the Future

The selection and use of reading materials for these enlivening out-
lets will require emphasis on the things o importance and the
curtailment of technical details which year after year seem less
essential.

Frequently we are told that we are living in a transition period.
This hoary discovery is announced by each succeeding generation,
a practice which we f ervendy hope will continue throughout future
ages. Fortunately, youth is impatient and adversely critical, im-
petuously seeking change and improvement. Youth courageously
speaks of revolution and secretly envisages the complete destruction
of current systems and practices, but soon accepts comfortably the
inevitable evolutions which appear in course. At the moment, slow
but far-reaching educational reform is just around the corner. With
it must come important revision of library procedure in which its
functions will rest upon the specific aims of the community or
institution served, but civilization itself and its fundamental in-
stitutions will withstand the storms of immediate dark days. The
younger generation usually fails to realize that the so-called fads of
procedure are logical outgrowths of a preceding development,
which easily can be understood by retrospective study and appre-
ciation. To be constructively critical is a far different and more
difficult matter, out of which come important departures due to
the keenness of young librarians to escape the mechanical aspects
of service, to undertake new ventures, and to view librarianship in
a new light. The extraordinary advances of the library profession
during recent decades have naturally created new problems which
for solution will require the same commonsense approach that cre-
ated them. Application to these challenging situations will produce
a generation of giants in the library field.

Each new profession must for a time endure the barbed criticisms
of other professional groups while struggling for scholarly recog-
nition and imaginary levels of respectability. For librarians this
struggle has been peculiarly difficult, due to their close contact with
other educational colleagues and the wide scope of their activities,

99

The Library of Tomorrow

which serve the life span of their clientele. Librarians are obliged
to be all things to all men and to be encyclopedic in their interests
and knowledge. Out of this necessity there arises the criticism that
librarianship generally is not performed by a learned profession,
and the indictment that it is weak in scholarship and in scholarly
attainment, a frequendy just and lamentably true judgment. But it
ill behooves a specialist in an increasingly narrow intellectual field
to throw stones at those educators whom he considers uneducated,
for he is likely thereby to exhibit his own limitations. A funda-
mental knowledge of subject fields and a familiarity with the
literatures of particular subjects are often better evidences of schol-
arly learning than a facility to manipulate research formulas and
techniques, particularly when the results of the latter seldom inter-
est anyone but the manipulator. More scholarship is needed in
library work, but the need is on the service side rather than the
creative. Librarians, however, cannot encompass all knowledge, but
their daily contact with readers and books of all kinds will neces-
sarily sensitize their interest in all things, liberalizing their own
thoughts, aptitudes and ideals. Few compensations in life can be
greater.

The processes of assembling, organizing, preserving and utiliz-
ing the records of civilization as sources of power and enlighten-
ment require and develop a command of experience and of
judgment, an appraisal of intrinsic cultural qualities, a facility to
stimulate interests and satisfy needs, and a proficiency in the prac-
tical application of books as tools of trade and learning. These
educational possibilities are indicative of the importance of the per-
sonnel element in the library movement. Further development of
the principles of librarianship will appear as the necessary prelimi-
nary and professional training widens to include more fundamental
knowledge, and as administrative responsibilities expand to include
a broad and sympathetic comprehension of the cultural oppor-
tunities within the library field. The purposeful use of print to
promote self-instruction, implement education, and aid research

100

The Librarian of the Future

will stimulate librarians to assert themselves in order to gain their
objectives, and thus cast aside their characteristic timidity. In so
doing some precious heritage of the past may be lost, notwithstand-
ing the biblical assurances for those who are unduly modest. Those
who effectively and unselfishly serve the intellect are worthy of
their hire.

The future librarian will be an interesting composite, having
many of the qualifications of a sociologist, psychologist, teacher,
historian and bibliographer. He will understand people as well as
literature; know reading habits and interests; share his knowledge
of books and their effective use; give counsel and advice regarding
ideas as well as print; be familiar with the best thought in the
fields of learning and instruction; be competent to coordinate re-
lated activities; keep abreast of progress in the arts and sciences;
maintain a constructively critical attitude toward public issues; pro-
tect the right of freedom of expression; participate in cooperative
social enterprises; assist in keeping knowledge up to date in avail-
able and readable form; help simplify the use of an increasingly
complex body of material; lengthen the period of learning with
more universal education at the lower levels and more widespread
education at the upper levels; utilize new means of reproducing
books and related materials, and devise new ways of disseminating
information and ideas. His age will be one of federation and co-
operation; concentration and coordination of resources, local initia-
tive and control; state and federal aid; close relations with other
public services; and special funds for the advancement of knowl-
edge and the promotion of research.

In this development the library will become a dynamic institu-
tion, and be recognized as an indispensable agency, where socially
useful books will be easily accessible to all ages and levels of educa-
tional attainment. The minimum cultural equipment of that future
day would now seem to be maximum extravagance. With changing
conceptions of values and objectives there must come a more com-
petent leadership exhibiting strength of character, intellectual curi-

101

The Library of Tomorrow

osity, enthusiastic vision, forceful personality, administrative ability,
and freedom from prejudice and tradition. Should there be any
question regarding these paragons, look to the future. Leading
spirits will be recruited from the social and natural sciences to
accept the awakening challenge of new library opportunities, if
the successors of our professional library training agencies and
the graduate schools of the leading universities fail to meet the need.

Too much is often expected of new movements, new organizations
and new schools. Enthusiasm is a blessed but hard taskmaster. In
good time we shall see several excellent library schools emerge from
the present critical period in which their nature and objectives are
undergoing searching examination. Similar crises are facing other
types of special schools and institutions of higher learning, includ-
ing the best graduate schools. In the survival of traditional form and
practice, we have seen ideals harden into conventions, routine
become sacred, instruction handicap learning, and fundamental
knowledge and interpretation eclipsed by formalized skills of in-
vestigation. Where the research type of study has succeeded appren-
tice instruction, there is a tendency to over-professionalize scholar-
ship, adopt a protective cover of patter and jargon, lay down speci-
fied patterns of study, accumulate irrelevant facts and unwanted
statistics, and define such increasingly narrow fields of investigation
that the previously replowed ground need only be raked over to
disclose a few dry clods of culture. Such research soon grows intol-
erant and becomes a millstone around the neck of liberal education.
As increasing numbers of vocational groups adopt the phraseology
and patterns of research, the term "research" will fall from misuse
into oblivion, leaving far too many schools on a slender, dry limb of
the tree of knowledge.

In the higher education of a librarian there is a need for genuine,
scientific study, in which the emphasis is placed on the content and
use of scholarship rather than on the techniques of its further sub-
division. In this new approach, artificial patterns and irrelevant
standards will be eliminated, and trivialities will not be stressed as

102

The Librarian of the future

essentials. The prevailing training agencies will broaden their
scope, emphasize fundamental subjects, apply principles rather
than difficult procedure, adapt learning facilities to individual needs
and offer opportunities for intellectual growth, preparatory to an
intellectual career requiring extra-competence, poise and perspec-
tive. We shall see throughout the realm of higher education a
breaking away from the stereotyped conception of the doctorate,
and a decreasing valuation of the typical M.A. degree. Learning
will gain new significance and value, and advanced training will
become an opportunity to stimulate special interests and strengthen
conceptions of first principles.

As long as we have changing intellectual needs, we shall have
disturbing problems in professional education, for the latter seldom
keeps pace with the former. Library training is still in its formative
stage, confronted with the widest of fields and a shortage of funds,
attempting to include in its curriculum not only its own body of
subject matter and techniques but also instruction relative to com-
munity organization, local government, educational objectives and
a score of related subjects. Unquestionably, this wide variety of sub-
jects and diversity of methods are its most hopeful indications for
the future. The nature of the future is foreshadowed by a breaking
down of teaching methods in favor of learning opportunities, and
much of that which is traditional and perfunctory in favor of inde-
pendent study by those of recognized ability and capable of assum-
ing responsibility for their Own freedom. There are indications, too,
of a more nearly complete integration of the schools with the life
of the universities with which they are associated. Perhaps a few of
the present library techniques will survive the demand that they be
both efficient and fit specific standards. As in the schools of educa-
tion, there is a reaction against dry-as-dust courses and the tend-
ency to evaluate training above competency, and education above
knowledge. Library training at its worst has been better than the
training given to college and university teachers. Higher educa-
tional institutions have depended on luck for their Bliss Perrys and

103

The Library of Tomorrow

Billy Phelpses, but the same has seemingly been true of the library
field, with its Bishops, Lydenbergs and Wilsons. Library training
has savored too much of the vocational school and apprentice class,
offering too little of a true professional teaching agency centering
on creative and reflective thought. The creative sidelights of librar
ianship are being discovered and utilized, out of which will de
velop a content rich in intellectual discipline.

Further emphasis in graduate library schools will be laid on ade
quate qualifications for admission, on standards of performance,
and on type and quality of instruction. Good teaching by leading
spirits of the time, and an adequate conception of what a profes-
sional school should be, are two all-important problems for early
solution. Library work is far from being a homogeneous career, as
it demands a great variety of qualifications, temperament and even
physical characteristics to satisfy its diversified character. In training
there will be a clearer separation between preparation for work in
popular libraries and that in research libraries. The schools will be
affected by a probable new and unofficial grouping by the profes-
sion itself, in which there will be distinctions between professional,
technical and clerical workers. The first of these three classes may
not be trained as routine operatives, receiving misplaced emphasis
on materials, devices and methods,, to the exclusion of interest in
subject matter. The problem then will be how to train workers,
stimulate leaders and teach scholars. Nevertheless, far into the fu-
ture the quantity need will call for intelligent and socially minded
librarians who are prepared with fundamental knowledge and
technical skills, but whose preliminary education and purpose limit
their early fields to assistantships. Certification by state laws to im-
prove service, raise standards and discourage unfit appointments
will play an important part in this picture. Similar to the breaking
away from technical courses in other professional schools, the rou-
tine instruction in library schools will be transformed into desirable
means for mental development, by approaching processes as illus-
trations of principles and ideals, and by leaving syntheses of appli-

104

The Librarian of the Future

cation to the student. Much of library method can be learned in
practice and such experience has value, but true and full weight
cannot be given it without an understanding of its character and
its application elsewhere. As the schools broaden, grow less com-
plex, adjust themselves to changing conditions, provide basic offer-
ings and develop opportunities for specialization, there will be less
inquiry into ways and means to encourage those who seek an indi-
vidual approach to library service through other training agencies
than the library school. Even so, a master of a sloop must know his
ropes, a doctor must study beyond purpose in medicine, and a
lawyer must base his practice on more than legal theory. Librarians
likewise must have adequate practice in knot tying, case study and
internship service. Otherwise they may not be prepared to with-
stand the confusion in the temples of knowledge, the famine of
thought in the land, the babel of partial comprehension, and the
thirst for the fullest dissemination of ideas in the midst of plenty.
There can be no settling down in comfort among permanently
established procedures, for the utilization of organized knowledge
in educational service suited to the needs of society requires constant
adaptation. In the past librarians have been tempted to "glorify
their faults under blazing banners of tradition." Custom, tradition
and previous practice will rise and fall, but their hindrance to prog-
ress will gradually decrease. We shall witness less temptation and
glorification. Also there will be less confusion of ideals and illusions.
An ideal, born of an idea and fused with feeling, influences action
and becomes real when it vitalizes conduct. The librarian of the
future will be rich in opportunity, ideas and enthusiasm. He alsc
will be blessed with the human capacity to dream dreams and the
good fortune to see many of them realized. He will be measured by
the degree with which his library provides intellectual stimulation
and liberalizing culture, leading to a better understanding of life's
problems and joys. His most important duty will be to live help-
fully. In that activity he will rejoice exceedingly in his calling, and
retrospectively understand the confident hope of his predecessors.

105

Housing Tomorrow^ Library

BY JOHN ADAMS LOWE

HE WHO PLANS the building of the public library of the future has
before him an adventurous experiment. He will be called upon to
house a "center of creative learning."

The public library is today in what has been called "the stage of
envisioning possibilities" as to its scope and functions. But it has
sufficiently established itself as a creative agency in the intellectual
movements of the community to warrant planning on the lines of
informal education.

The day was when the builder of a public library was asked to
plan a storehouse of books in which the records of human knowl-
edge might be collected and preserved. Later, librarians had a domi-
nating purpose to circulate books. Their ambition was to find a
reader for every book on the shelves, and a book for every reader
in the community. This gave rise to branch libraries, distributing
and delivery stations for the purpose of increasing the accessibility
of the resources of the library. Results were measured by statistics
of books circulated. From a passive receptacle the public library
became an aggressive agent for distributing information.

As an instrument of communication, the public library is now
moving into a third phase of development, a qualitative one, in
which it seeks to serve as a guide to the records of human knowl-

106

Housing Tomorrow's Library

edge. Circulation alone is no longer its comprehensive function;
rather it offers to direct the individual to books which serve his par-
ticular needs of the moment. That is, the library is not only an in-
strument of informative education; it is also^ in fact, a method of
education. Libraries, like laboratories, are workshops which operate
under the direction of a trained personnel. In them, the individual
may learn to solve the problems of his particular social situation by
recourse to the accumulated experience of others.

The function of the library of the future will be to supply the
opportunity and the means for self-education, based on the truth of
James Russell Lowell's dictum that "the better part of every man's
education is that which he gives himself." This ideal presupposes
authoritative book knowledge on the part of the librarian and an
arrangement of the library's resources that makes them conven-
iently accessible to the reader. By such means are skilful guidance
and wise selection of reading made possible the reading guidance
of groups as well as of individuals.

Attainment o this goal will definitely affect the layout of the
library building. In the small library with limited book collection
and relatively few demands made upon it, only a limited specializa-
tion will be necessary. Larger institutions, however, will require
specialization of staff and segregation of the books in order that
each member may know the literature of his own subject more inti-
mately than he could possibly know the entire collection, and that
all resources may be brought together as closely as possible for con;
venient use.

There are tendencies in the development of the library which
clearly indicate that this ideal is entirely sound and practical Grad-
ually larger and larger book collections have appeared on open
shelves, and the reader has been given more and more access to all
resources. Some of the larger buildings of the past decade have been
planned for the arrangement of the books on open shelves in a
segregated subject division arrangement, with the purpose of more
intensified personal service to readers. So satisfactory has this type of

JO/

The Library of Tomorrow

assistance been found by the public which has had the opportunity
to experience it, that it may be expected to be the basis of public
library planning in the future.

The subject division idea is based on the obvious fact that intelli-
gent service to the public will result if all the material- circulating
and reference books, bound and current periodicals, documents,
pamphlets, vertical file material dealing with a given field is col-
lected in one place and is administered by assistants especially
trained in that subject and familiar with its literature.

This would indicate that in future buildings provision will be
made for adequate storage of books and ample space be allowed for
their distribution, as formerly, but books will no longer dominate
the layout of space. Consideration will be given primarily to the
convenience of the people who are to use the building. The idea
of monuments has given way to the idea of utility. The main serv-
ice floor, for example, will be placed as near the sidewalk level as
possible so that readers will not have to climb unnecessary steps.
The books will be arranged in subject divisions on the main floor to
provide specialized guidance service. The book storage stack will be
placed directly beneath the main service floor and horizontal rather
than vertical through the building. Interior bearing partitions will
be sparingly used, in order to insure good ventilation, diffusion oi
light, flexibility of layout and ease in remodeling to meet new func-
tional demands. Artificial illumination by direct and semidirect
fixtures will do away with shadows, unpleasant glare, eternally
unsatisfactory table lighting fixtures and impossible card catalog
lighting. Every building of any considerable size will be adequately
air conditioned to control both humidity and temperature. This
will include the stack. Sound-absorbing materials on walls, ceilings
and floors will assure quiet for readers everywhere. Large or small,
the building will present a friendly and inviting openness and
beauty, without and within.

A reader may expect to walk in on the sidewalk level, just as he
is accustomed to do in banks, stores, theaters and other buildings

108

Housing Tomorrow's Library

planned for tie accommodation of many people. He will pass
through a vestibule and come at once Into a central hall, encircled
by a series of divisional reading rooms.

The open space of the hall permits the centralization of traffic and
control in this area. It offers great advantages over the arrangement
which placed the stack in the center, necessitating corridors around
and through which people must go to reach any part of the build-
ing. Just inside the entrance to this room are the Circulation and
Registration desks, at which are concentrated routine and distribu-
tion. The Information Assistant and the Readers Adviser are
prominently located near the main catalog. Readers cross and re-
cross in going from one division to another without disturbing
anyone.

From the central hall one looks directly into the divisions. These
are practically rectangular rooms made by wall shelving arranged
straight along one side and in alcoves along the other. Tables and
chairs between facilitate consultation and study of the books on the
shelves. Near the entrance of each division is the desk of the librar-
ian. Immediately behind it is a glass-screened workroom or office.
Here routine is carried on, but any staff member so employed may
be called to the desk instantly as need arises. From the workroom a
short stair leads to the stack beneath and makes quickly available
all the storage collection of this subject. Vertical files and card cata-
log cabinets are near at hand. Bulletin boards and display racks call
attention to timely reading. Some divisions will gather collections
of pictures and maps as part of their equipment, while others will
need special tables for industrial and financial services and period-
ical indexes. When he has found what he wants to take home with
him, the reader stops on his way out and has the book charged
near the exit in the central hall.

The number and nature of divisions will depend entirely upon
the size of the library and the funds available for maintenance. It
may be that some fortunate librarian will find that he can carry his
divisions through the entire collection and arrange for fiction, liter-

10$

The Library of Tomorrow

ature, biography, history, education and religion, social sciences,
business and economics, science and technology, fine arts and even
local history. As the library grows some divisions may become more
important than others, because of the local interest or because of an
endowment.

Many readers will be coming to the library who do not wish to
study in the divisions but merely to read the popular magazines.
They will not require tables on which to make notes or compare
texts. The library o tomorrow will provide a popular magazine
reading room with comfortable chairs arranged in groups around
small tables, giving something of the appearance of a club lounge.
Current magazines will be found in transparent covers on sloping
shelves along the walls. Even among these casual readers the assist-
ant in charge of the room will find some opportunity for guidance
by becoming acquainted with their tastes and interests.

Every library will need a Young People's Room. This may well
be considered a part of the adult divisions and placed close to but
separated a litde from the fiction division. Thus it will emphasize
to the adolescent the library's recognition of his complete inde-
pendence and his attainment of "adulthood." It it not another de-
partment through which he must pass before he achieves full use of
the entire library. Its use is optional, not obligatory. When he leaves
the Children's Room and becomes an adult borrower, all the re-
sources of the library are open to him. This room, providing in its
book selection a well-balanced cross section of all adult divisions,
serves merely as an introduction to them. Arm chairs, individual
tables, comfortable upholstered leather benches, floor lamps, and
books everywhere, at one's elbow, on low shelves, create an atmos-
phere conducive to browsing and leisurely reading. The staff of this
room will have a special sort of information about adult books suit-
able for the reading of young people of high school age. Equipment
must be provided for bibliographies, indexes, and pamphlet mate-
rial which will come into play here as it does in the other divisions.
Reading clubs will probably develop among the patrons of this

110

Housing Tomorrow's Library

room and one or more club rooms might well be considered In con-
nection with. it.

Librarians will continue to stress the importance o work with
children. Indeed the principles behind our ideal library of the fu-
ture are as applicable to boys and girls as they are to adults. More
and better space is going to be assigned to children in the buildings
of tomorrow. There may come a need for several adjoining rooms,,
instead of a little cramped space in the basement. I should like to
see the Children's Room made one of the most charming in the
building. It must not be a nursery, but a room whose memories will
always create for the child something of loveliness associated with
reading.

Perhaps it will be possible to plan this room where it may have
ample windows with a sunny exposure. Bright draperies will add
to the cheerfulness. Walls of soft greyish blue will give a pleasing
background for bright books in recessed wall shelving. If a fireplace
is permitted, make it generous and let it accent the entire room and
gather round it comfortable davenports in bright leather. Furniture
may be as casual as you like, anything that makes the room home-
like and friendly to children. Rich yellow-red maple in early Amer-
ican design may work in well with the scheme and be found prac-
tical for wearing qualities. No long tables with chairs pushed stiffly
under them belong in this room. Armchairs, individual tables,
showcases, sloped-top tables with benches for small readers, and
sloping shelves for heavy books like encyclopedias and dictionaries
meet demands made by the various ages of readers who will gather
here. And of course there must be a card catalog and a typical circu-
lation desk at which books may be charged and returned, for chil-
dren must get acquainted with routines they will have to use later.

Some librarians will tell you that children should never go up-
stairs and that they should have a separate entrance. I am convinced
that boys and girls can be taught to come and go in the building
without annoying adults. They will come to know the restrictions
the building imposes upon them and the reasons for them. They

III

The Library of Tomorrow

accept them and feel at home and content In their own rooms. Stair-
ways and corridors can be built so that little sound is carried. I
would advocate only one entrance for the entire building. This is
for economy and ease of administration, but it Is also a recognidon
of the right of all the people to use the building on a common basis.
Not all rooms are now open to the boys and girls, to be sure, but
they should be admitted here with the adults in order that by com-
ing into contact with those parts of the building not primarily in-
tended for their use they may acquire an understanding of the
purpose and arrangement of the whole institution merely by seem-
ing, thereby, to be a part of its life.

Adjacent to the Children's Room will be another room, fitted and
equipped for story hours, dramatics, and possible exhibitions. Read-
ing clubs may wish to meet here also. Boys and girls will make
marionettes and puppets from instruction they find In books. They
may even do this in a library workshop. Equipment should be pro-
vided for a small stage for dramatic performances. Children may
write their own plays and produce them, making their own stage
sets.

Nearby another room will be required for a consultation book
service for parents, teachers and others concerned with childrens'
reading. Expert service will be given here, offering an approach to
a psychological clinic. The room should be furnished with plenty of
shelving, card cabinets, vertical file cases, a desk, tables and chairs,
bulletin boards and display rack. Here will be gathered collections
of model grade libraries, various editions of standards, books on
storytelling, plays, books for reading to preschool children, foreign
books, notably illustrated books and the best of the current output
Bibliographies, lists and pamphlet material will be at hand all
under the guidance of an experienced children's librarian.

In its program of self-education the library may find use for lec-
tures, forums, book talks, exhibits of all kinds, and music. A small
auditorium will be found essential. If it is planned with a level floor,
movable chairs and a small stage, probably without curtain or scen-

112

Housing Tomorrow's Library

ery, It will meet most demands. It should be equipped with ade-
quate ventilation, proper lighting and sound treatment. This pro-
vision is not expensive and when well done pays good returns in
satisfaction. Here must be found the latest equipment for radio
reception and for showing pictures. Attention should be given to
the details of decoration; however inexpensive and simple, let them
be in good taste and worthy of the educational use to which the
room is put.

Rooms will be needed, too, for conferences of small groups of
readers and for study clubs. It may be that the library will extend its
program to include actual instruction to adults in the use of books
and the art of study. In such a development carefully planned rooms
should be provided.

Museums and art galleries have functions entirely different from
that of the library and should never be combined. Though they
have much in common and may advantageously cooperate, each is
important enough to work separately in its own field without being
subordinated to the other. For this reason, the library will not be
expected to make a permanent art collection nor to keep anything
permanently on exhibit. If any exception be made to this rule, it
might be that every library of importance should have a permanent
exhibit of the history of the book, including fine printing. Such an
exhibit has an appropriate place here.

On the other hand, temporary exhibits are absolutely essential to
the library's welfare. These should be presented primarily for their
educational value, even though they will always be intended to
stimulate reading. Most exhibits will be borrowed or assembled for
the occasion, installed and temporarily shown. Interest will be dis-
played chiefly in exhibits of the graphic arts prints, photographs,
illustrations, printing, binding and allied subjects. A gallery will be
most advantageous if it can be included in the building plan. With-
out it, recessed wall cases may line the corridors and even appro-
priately be placed in some of the rooms. Exhibition windows and
sidewalk bulletin boards may be used to acquaint passersby with

113

The Library of Tomorrow

the resources and services of the library. It is of importance that this
equipment be well constructed, in accordance with the best meth-
ods produced in art galleries and museums. The library of tomor-
row will not tolerate much of the makeshift equipment and home-
made methods used in too many libraries today.

Music will play a more vital part in the new library, and rooms for
its production should be planned. Radio reception of selected pro-
grams will be provided in "listening rooms" for individuals and
for groups. Collections of records will make desirable a group of
small soundproof rooms in which they may be played.

Photography also will come into an important place in the li-
brary, for photographs, like books, are records and are the literature
of an art. Films will be stored and borrowed. Microphotography
will so modify many phases of the library's activities that the library
architect must be fully informed as to its possibilities. The showing
of pictures on film, stills or movies, will fit into the library's educa-
tional scheme.

It may be necessary to provide a soundproof room in which talk-
ing books for the blind can be used by sightless readers. This will
depend upon the library's resources, and the number of blind people
in the community. In the past, service to this group has been difficult
for both reader and library. It has been found that readers enjoy in
their own homes the books sent them through the mail by special
libraries for the blind, but as blind people come to have greater facil-
ities for getting about the city alone, they may wish to listen to talk-
ing books in the library rather than read Braille at home.

Radio has endless possibilities. The library will do much broad-
casting as a part of its extensive program and hookup with a broad-
casting station will prove a great asset in presenting programs. It
will save time which otherwise staff members must spend out of the
building for rehearsals and broadcasts.

The public library of the future will go much further than the
present generation has with expansion through branches. Urban
areas will be completely served, although the branches will be per-

114

Housing Tomorrow's Library

haps less permanently built than today, in order that they may be
abandoned as the community changes and reestablished more stra-
tegically elsewhere. They will always be neat, bright, convenient
and inviting places. Self -education will be the basis of their service.
I doubt if they will ever be community centers of amusement. They
will be planned with more attention to the reading and study needs
of three definite groups adults, young people and children, and
emphasis will be laid upon earnest work rather than merely upoa
distribution of books for home use.

I have discussed only the public library because that is the type
with which I am most familiar. However, many of the principles
would apply also to the college, and perhaps the university library,
in spite of the demands of special consideration made upon the
latter because of differing function and clientele. Just as the children
are separated from the adults in the public library, so a provision
for segregation of undergraduates and graduate students may be
essential. Branch libraries correspond to laboratory and depart-
mental libraries. The problem of storage of books not frequently
used is greater in a college library than in some city libraries.

New methods of construction and new building materials will
make possible entirely different structures. We shall build more ef-
ficiently, less expensively, equally permanently, if permanence
shall still be considered altogether desirable. New metals are used
to give lightness and strength to construction impossible in the use
of steel beams and stone blocks. Bearing partitions are no longer
necessary. Elevators make second and third stories as valuable as
street floors and with the increased use of escalators and ramps
stairways may disappear.

Engineers have found ways' of bringing more and more sunlight
far into the building. Skylights will be improved beyond belief.
They will not leak in winter rains and snows, nor will it be difficult
to keep them free from dust. Glare will be eliminated, the light
will be so scientifically refracted that the right intensity of light in
full sunshine and the desired hue will be produced and rooms will

The Library of Tomorrow

be transformed. Light is more vital than style. Glass is more essen-
tial than steel Among the important contributions to present-day
architecture made by the glass industry, the glass brick is destined
to have a far-reaching effect. It has remarkable structural and in-
sulating properties, and its decorative possibilities are practically
limitless. Used in wall or window, glass bricks give ample, diffused
light, complete privacy, keep out a large percentage of sound and
reduce heat losses.

Windows will be enormously improved by an entirely new
window glass about to be used which will make great changes in
the amount of light admitted without glare or heat. New materials
for draperies will make possible exquisite hangings inexpensively
procured and economically maintained. Sunf ast, mothproof, wash-
able materials will be as available for huge windows in public
buildings as they are today in well-furnished living rooms. Vene-
tian blinds are transforming daylighting possibilities but some day
Venetian blinds will be made of some such material as Kodopak
instead of wood, and this beautiful translucent substance will
brighten the gloomiest corners of an otherwise dark room, while
delicate jade harmonies in a south window will make the light so
soft and cool that readers will bask in its loveliness and never guess
why they like to read there.

Electricians have created artificial lighting arrangements which
almost perfectly reproduce daylight, with absolute control. Flood
lighting from the ceiling, and from the tops of cases and beams,
and from behind pillars, will be so perfect that it will not be
theatrical but will produce a properly measured amount of light
at any given point, without glare, reflections or shadows. Indirect
lighting for the entire room, suffused from batteries of lamps or
tubes in suspended ceilings, will give such satisfaction that those
who know it will look back at our fixture-cluttered ceilings in much
the same disgust as we think of the old gooseneck gas fixtures with
their ashy Welsbach mantles and fluted-collar porcelain shades.

Air-conditioning systems give us fresh air, moving in proper

116

Housing Tomorrow's Library

currents, guaranteeing satisfactory degrees of humidity, dryness
and temperature, for the comfort of the stall and readers and for
the preservation of books and papers. Great advances will be made
in future installations and we are assured that perfect conditions
may soon be available in both large and small buildings. The great
advantages which lighting and ventilating engineers have pro-
duced lead some planners to consider the elimination of all win-
dows, which they deem useful only in admitting light and air.
There is still something left in man belonging to the out of doors
which makes him unhappy when he is completely shut off from
contact even by sight with sky, sun, stars, and fellow beings going
about their ways. There is still a value to the exterior design in
windows as openings in the walls to make an intimate connection
between what goes on without and what goes on within.

The engineers of sound will probably present the greatest
changes. No echoes, no din, no reverberation will be allowed in
places where quiet is required. In other parts of the building per-
fect acoustics will make it possible for librarians with their low
voices to be heard distinctly even at the very back of the hall. In-
stead of silencing people, as the present custom seems to be, we shall
let them talk naturally and normally, and we will silence the
walls which allow their voices to go further than we think they
should. It will be easier on the patron.

Coalbins and boilers have given space to oil heaters and more
cleanliness is thus secured. But tomorrow gas and even electricity
in many places will have made more space and more neatness pos-
sible. We buy steam from the public service. The day may come
when the city will furnish heat and light from its own plants. The
electric eye will count our patrons as they come and go, and will
open doors noiselessly for the convenience of those in a hurry.
Everyone will read files of newspapers and magazines, and possibly
many books, from rolls of film. The library distributing automobile
will drive into the Extension Department workrooms and there
load, directly from the shelves, books for the stations, hospitals,

JJ7

The Library of Tomorrow

schools, and even for the book wagons which will cover distant
parts of the city and county. In regional libraries the shipping of
books to other institutions will require special planning.

Encouragement is to be found in the fact that there will be avail-
able, more and more all over the country, architects skilled es-
pecially in planning library buildings. They will specialize, and
they will have gained more experience as they build more libraries
scientifically. We do not maintain that these buildings are basically
different from other structures, but we do believe that there are
applications of planning and construction techniques which pro-
duce particularly satisfactory libraries. With more certainty than
ever the librarian will take his problem to the architect and with
confidence await his solution of it.

And what is to be the librarian's contribution to the library build-
ing of the future? Everything. He will be quick to catch the sig-
nificance of the trends of his work. He will choose the best of his
day and project it into the days ahead. Disregarding stock patterns,
he will work out one for his own setting. He will be practical in
planning the essentials for real book service. To his own good taste
he will add that of the architect, to the end that the building in de-
sign and furnishings may always have a stimulating message of
beauty. He will demand excellence in the details of its construction.
He will stamp upon it his own personality. And so will the building
of tomorrow be supremely suited to meet the challenging demands
which the future will put upon it.

118

The TruHee of the Future

BY WILLIAM E. MARCUS

PROGRESS in all human effort is the result of the leadership of those
who have the courage, the vision and the energy to lead and to
point the way. Leaders are never satisfied with results which do
not represent a reasonable approach to desirable attainable objec-
tives. They never forget that the present is tomorrow's past, that
whatever heritage remains for future generations is the product of
today's activities, and that real progress can be obtained only by
applying sound principles, unfailing energy and intelligent effort
to predetermined worth-while goals.

The present generation in America has been reared with a whole-
some respect for the institutions and precepts which have produced
one of the most highly developed civilizations in the world, the true
measure of which has been the steady increase in the physical com-
fort and opportunity of the average man and woman. The advances
have become a vital part of our lives and are the background of
our ambitions and our aspirations.

Among the benefits which are regarded as universal prerogatives
are those of education, adult as well as juvenile, and equal oppor-
tunity, regardless of race, creed or sex.

The education we speak of as adult, which our generation has
come to regard as a birthright, is access to free public libraries,

The Library of Tomorrow

although, unfortunately, there are still 45,000,000 people In the
United States who are unable to claim this birthright because no
library services are within reach. Most learning, which for the vast
majority of the people of America takes place after the school age,
is concerned in some way with the books and services of public
libraries. Since the public libraries of America are an integral part
of the educational system of our country, a correspondingly large
responsibility rests upon the trustees who direct the affairs of these
libraries.

It should be indeed a sobering influence for trustees of libraries
all over the country to realize the responsibility they have assumed.
Library trusteeship Is an honor not to be accepted lightly, and
should never be undertaken except with a determination to make
the library a vital part of the recreational and educational system
of the community. For this reason there is a grave duty resting
upon the appointive officer to be certain that an, appointee is the
best available citizen to supplement the talents which already exist
on the Board of Trustees. Political appointment of a library trustee
should be unthinkable.

Apparently more public libraries are handicapped by unqualified
trustees than by ineffective librarians. A study of the most success-
ful libraries in America reveals the fact that their leadership is the
result of forward-looking, alert, intelligent trustees, associated with
a librarian competent to administer the internal affairs of the li-
brary. However, as the trustees direct the policies and are entirely
responsible for obtaining funds to meet the costs of operation, surely
no ordinary citizen is qualified to direct a business affecting so
vitally the lives of so many citizens of all ages.

No modern business can hope to compete successfully whose
management is not aware of the new techniques and changing
policies of the leaders in the field. This means frequent contact with
other executives, visits to other plants and regions where new
methods have been adopted, a constant reading of trade journals
and all printed material which bears upon the business. Competent

120

The Trustee of the Future

trustees will regard it as their absolute duty to meet often with
other trustees, to visit numerous other libraries during the course
of each year, and to read everything available which may tend to
increase their knowledge of library management. It will be taken
as a matter of routine that the expenses of at least one trustee to
library conferences, both state and national, will be paid, as trustees
do not always have financial resources to meet these expenses.

Library trustees of tomorrow will be defintely confronted with
the responsibility of obtaining larger appropriations for libraries,
if our whole system of adult education is to develop and meet the
needs of our people. A higher scale of remuneration to librarians
is indicated, larger book purchases, a sound system of meeting the
costs of retirement, and a method of financing new buildings and
capital expenditures. Failure to meet these obligations, especially
reasonable compensation for all grades of librarianship, may be ex-
pected to lead to some form of group action or organizing among
library personnel. We are living, today, in a world of new concepts
in relationships of employees and employed, and it behooves the
directors of the destinies of libraries to plan wisely and promptly
how their obligations to librarians can be met with justness and
fairness.

Many o the problems of libraries revolve around the need for a
definite program, which is another term for "planning." Wise
planning requires leadership, and leadership requires competent,
broad-minded envisioning individuals (trustees) who recognize
the importance of planning. The only hope of carrying out a pro-
gram is to understand its objectives and implications, and to recog-
nize clearly the obstacles and limitations which retard approach to
fulfillment. Most human effort and ambition are directed and ac-
tivated by the basic idea of reaching goals. Successful businesses in-
ject into the conduct of their activities sales quotas and objectives.

When programs and planning are under consideration for librar-
ies, trustees and librarians have found it essential to start with a
firm foundation, from which to move forward and measure prog-

121

The Library of Tomorrow

ress. This fixed Immovable base is an outside survey which gives
a complete picture of strengths and weaknesses, and establishes how
far one has traveled toward desirable objectives. It is a looking
glass and at the same time a measuring rod. Successful trustees of
the future will insist upon operating with the indispensable help
of a survey and a definite program. They will recognize that prog-
ress is the result of trial and error, will be eager to experiment with
new ideas, and will be determined to have their library excel. If
trustees all over the country would only realize that larger library
budgets are their responsibility and not that of librarians, and if they
would use sound practical sales methods, there would be many
more libraries rendering adequate service and justifying larger
appropriations.

The technique of "selling the library" to the community will
involve the expenditure annually of a regular budget to be used to
foster public relations and create general familiarity with the serv-
ices available at the library. The taxpayer must be sympathetic
with the needs of the library and its aspirations, and will be taught
that annual increases in the budget are necessary if the library is
adequately to meet the needs of the people. The right kind of
publicity (which some day will be called "public relations," instead)
will go a long way in causing local appropriating bodies readily to
grant a liberal budget to the library. There will be in all probability
a national library "public relations bureau" which will collect and
disseminate, wherever requested, the best examples of successful
public relations material. Such material will differ from the kind
used in the past, and will stress, in addition to the services available,
the attitude of the library towards its patrons. It will not attempt
to impress with emphasis on quantity but by accenting the quality
of services. These are indeed challenges for trustees.

There will be found new methods of regional cooperation ways
of pooling certain resources to give broader distribution in areas
lacking in library facilities. Municipal, county and state boundaries
will cease -to have importance, and whole regions of logical geo-

122

The Trustee of the Future

graphical proximity will be serviced through newly devised sys-
tems of pooling and cooperation. These new methods will be
developed by trustees who have vision and determination to find
ways and means of parting from past precedents and who will
dare to go forward fearlessly and with confidence that such objec-
tives can and will be attained.

The days to come will require forward looking trustees whose
wagons will be hitched to new stars and who will not be content
with inadequate budgets and the averages of mediocrity. Their
credo will be found in the ageless sentiment expressed by Goethe,
who recognized so vividly the difficulties of "beginning" :

"Spend this day loitering, 'twill be the same story
Tomorrow, and the next more dilatory.
True, indecision brings its own delays
And days are lost lamenting over days.
If you are in earnest about a thing, begin it,
Beginning has genius, power, magic in it.
Begin it and the mind grows heated,
Begin it and the wor}^ will be completed"

123

The Library's
Responsibility to the Child

BY LILLIAN H. SMITH

"THERE are few things more wonderful to me/' wrote John Ruskin,
"than that old people never tell young ones how precious their
youth is." Over half a century has passed since Ruskin recorded his
sense of the failure of an older generation to bear witness to the
preciousness of youth. Meanwhile the intervening years have seen
such changes that a mere list of the opportunities provided by later
generations for young people today would fill with wonder the
mind of Ruskin and his contemporaries.

Probably the greatest development has been in the field of edu-
cation where the ideal of equal opportunity for all has been the
achievement of the widespread public school system. Preoccupied
with the accomplishment of their aim, it is possible that education-
ists were unaware of the corresponding pouring out of printed
matter from the press which kept pace with the growth of a new
reading public and which catered to their supposed interests and
tastes. Ramsay MacDonald once said that British schools "are send-
ing out millions of people whose capacity to read makes them the
prey of the most worthless and mentally devastating printed mat-
ter." At the same time Stanley Baldwin, speaking before the English

124

Responsibility to the Child

Association, recalled his early youth: "I can look back through the
ages to a small boy. I can see him far away in Worcestershire read-
ing all day in that most comfortable attitude, lying on his stomach
on the hearthrug in front of the fire. . . . When I look back on
those far-distant years I think I can recognize my own good fortune
which may have been shared by many here. I was left to find my
own provender in the library."

To provide an equivalent of a library at home for less fortunate
children, at least in the opportunity to "find their own provender,"
the public library children's rooms gradually established themselves
as an integral part of the public library, and their fundamental
importance in the general scheme was fully recognized.

It is idle to suggest that children's reading began with the chil-
dren's library idea. Children were reading Alice in Wonderland
and Water babies, Robinson Crusoe and The Arabian nights long
before there were children's rooms in public libraries, and the chil-
dren to whom books are available will continue to read them
whether public libraries exist or not. The important point to re-
member is that children's reading, unlike that of adults, is condi-
tioned by what is at hand. Whether they find books, as did young
Stanley Baldwin, in the well-chosen libraries of their fathers, or
whetheiifehey become "the prey of the most worthless and mentally
devastating printed matter" for lack of such a library, one thing is
sure, and that is that children will read something. "Take what you
will, quoth God, and pay for it," And they do pay for it, these
children who through no fault of their own take what is cheap and
shoddy because it is at hand, and so go maimed all their lives. Here,
I think, is the first responsibility of the public library to the child,
the responsibility for the books that are made available to him;
and the second is like unto it in importance since it is the channel
through which the books reach the children. That channel is a
person, concerning whom 1 shall have more to say later on.

Since the days of John Newbery the field of children's books has
widened to an extent that would astonish that enterprising dis-

J2J

The Library of Tomorrow

penser of "pretty little pocket books. 55 In those days the choice was
simple. Newbery offered his little collection and besides that there
was no other "milk for babes." The children turned then to the
strong meat o English literature, thus profiting by the limitation
o the field. Today there is no chance that a child, even if he remain
a child forever, could exhaust the thousands of "juveniles" printed
for consumption and which are increasing annually with the speed
and volume of a snowball rolling downhill. Never before have there
been offered to children so many original and beautiful books, and
on the other hand never so many that are worthless and tawdry.
If it does not matter what children read, if the Patty and Betty, the
Tom and Dick of the moment, at home, at school, and abroad, can
give as much abiding joy and richness of experience as Little boy
lost and Kipling's Jungle boo\, there is no problem of selection, for
then the distinction of the one has no advantage over the lack of it
in the other. "We only perceive that to which we are attuned," said
Conrad Aiken, and if some children are attuned to the mediocre
it may be it is by reason of the failure of the grownups, on whom
they are dependent, to provide bread in place of stones, even though
they may be "stepping stones."

There is plenty of interest today in children's reading. We have
books and articles, surveys and lists pointing out what children read,
but mainly from the adult point of view. We are in danger, I think,
of overlooking the importance of the child's opinion of the books
he reads, and perhaps too of forgetting the lovely taste of an un-
spoiled child. A children's librarian once told of seeking favor in
the eyes of a four-year-old by offering to tell him a: story as he lay
in his crib at bedtime. "George," she said, "do you know the story
of the Little Red Hen?" "Yes-s-s," he said, politely but without
enthusiasm, then added with an eager change, "do you know 'Unto
the hills mine eyes?' Daddy says that to me, 'the Lord my shep-
herdnot want.' Say that." "I was ashamed," said the children's
librarian, "me, with my Little Red Hen!" Already, though he was
only four, the sonorous rhythm of the intoned psalms had beaten

126

Responsibility to the Child

its way into his consciousness. What a comment on the generally
accepted idea of an appropriate bedtime story!

The only valid way in which we can test our conclusions con-
cerning children's reading, however confident and serene, is to
enter a child's mental world through gaining his confidence by
some method best discovered by ourselves. If we can do this, and
if we record the answers to our questions when we ask children
what they think of the books they read, and if we can find out what
is uppermost in their minds, what enriching or vitiating influence
is at work on their imaginings as a result of the reading of a book,
we shall have a sounder basis for our pronouncements regarding
children's books. And we shall also have the nucleus for a body of
evidence on what children like and dislike in their books, and know
what happens to a book over a period of years that confirms or
denies its value in children's reading. I do not believe that such
records taken down in the children's room are very generally pre-
served but where they are they have dispelled a certain vagueness
of generalization and have informed the children's librarian's ex-
perience of the reading of boys and girls.

I have never found any better way to choose books for a children's
library than by finding out from the children themselves what they
like. It is impossible, I think, for the grownup to know this who is
not in the confidence of the child who reads. Failing his confidence,
the grownup falls back upon her own standards and personal
preference or prejudice. In such a case one can only quote Quiller-
Couch, who says, "If we limit the children of the next generation
to what we admire ourselves we pauperize their minds/' or, one
can offer the argument that the new psychology of childhood has
given it a place of its own and has banished forever the old-fash-
ioned psychology that considered boys and girls as immature or
miniature men and women. The needs and requirements of the
two "publics" with which the library deals, the child and the adult,
are as separate, distinct and different in their nature as if we held
parley with two races in different worlds. Perhaps our failure as

127

The Library of Tomorrow

adults to realize this need for knowing the requirements of the
race we call children is responsible for the oblivion into which
some of the books that have won the Newbery medal have fallen.
I know of no better example of the discrepancy between the
world of the child and the adult than an incident that occurred
in a children's room placed in what would at once proclaim itself
to a grownup as a converted cellar, which as a matter of jact it is.
But the truth, to a child, is that it is Aladdin's cave. He rubs his
lamp three times and he has what he will from the universe-
romance, courage, beauty, a new heaven and a new earth. Children
perceive this. Witness the ten-year-old boy who sat down with an
opulent sigh in this same basement room and, crossing one knee
judicially over the other, leaned back and surveyed the rows of
books before him. "Jim," he said to a friend, "how would you like
to live in a mansion like this all the time? Want to read? All you
have to do is to reach up and take a book off the wall!" Sighing,
the friend agreed that it was magnificence. Apparently the vista
opened up deprived them of speech, for they continued a long time,
for boys, to gaze on the shelves in silence.

''Before me shone a glorious world
Fresh as a banner bright, unfurled
To music, suddenly. . . /'

Children have by nature been always the same. Stevenson, writ-
ing to his friend Henley about his book, Treasure island, said, "If
this don't fetch the kids they have gone rotten since my day." They
have not "gone rotten" these many years, if the steady sale of
Treasure island is any indication. Today they still love brightness
and beauty, high adventure and all that is alive, just as they did
when Treasure island was new, and they still interpret the impres-
sions and experiences which they meet, in their own way, and
make from them their own world of idea and thought. There is
no limit to a child's imaginative grasp, and it is well to remember
this in these days of vocabulary tests and reading skills, and other

128

Responsibility to the Child

"verbal wily-beguilies" at which I would like, with the seventeenth
century poet, "to flap my ears."

No explanation or definition is necessary to tell a child the mean-
ing of a Psammead. Aegis-bearing Zeus may not convey to a boy
or girl the picture that the pedant might wish to have it convey,
but the child's enjoyment of Odysseus is none the less keen, and is
gained at the time when the spirit of the storytelling poet is most
akin to the heart of a child.

I suppose the ruling desire of every librarian, adult or children's,
is to have the library with all it stands for occupy as large a place
in the lives of its patrons as possible. For this reason I have grown
to dread the word "standardization" as I do "regimentation."
"I believe in individual people, I see salvation in individual person-
alities scattered here and there," says Chekhov. The children's room
is about the only place where a child comes as an individual, with
individual tastes and interests. Is it not the library's responsibility
to provide the books that will give his imagination, intelligence,
curiosity and experience satisfactory material to grow on, and that
will provide an escape from the standardization which lessens his
opportunity to develop his own ideas or to trust his own imaginings ?

One day, as I was coming out of the library, a tall youth with
college texts under his arm stopped me, saying I had probably
forgotten him. It was only when he gave me his name that I re-
membered a little boy who used to bring me his inventions to
admire, and finally capped them with a play in three acts. To my
embarrassment he had watched me as I read it, and I was so con-
founded by the sordidness and melodrama a rehash of the worst
type of motion picture, told by a child that the only thing I could
find to say as I laid it down was, "Why, Frank, you have killed
them all!" That was Frank at eleven. Now, in his third college
year, he wishes he had some way of letting the librarians know
what they meant to him and to others like him. "I often wonder if
librarians have any idea how much their sympathy with a boy's
interests means to him, especially if he meets with none at home,

12$

The Library of Tomorrow

I wish I could make them understand what it is they are doing
for the children who go to the library." It was significant, I thought,,
that it was the librarians he spoke of, not the books.

The choice of a children's librarian is in the last analysis the
measure of the success of the library's children's room, a success
that must depend on the effectiveness of the channel by means of
which children and books are brought into the right relationship.
There was a time when libraries, thinking that children's books
were easy to work with, and that children were immature and
uncritical, considered the youngest and most immature member of
the staff the most suitable person to be given charge of this work.
The pendulum has now swung in the other direction to such an
extent that it is as well to draw attention to the fact that the excep-
tional person, for whom every library is looking, is perhaps dis-
couraged by the paper qualifications of the academically ambitious.
It is well also to remember that the ability to pass examinations is
no indication of ability to change books from dead things on the
shelf into living breathing realities. When I peruse the certificates,
diplomas and mounting degrees which I am asked to accept as
predicating all needful qualities for children's work, I am reminded
of Charles Lamb's making a little scale of titles of honor, with
himself the recipient: i, Mr. C. Lamb; 2, C. Lamb, Esq., etc.
"Sometimes," he says, "in my dreams I imagine myself still ad-
vancing, as, pth, King Lamb; loth, Emperor Lamb; nth, Pope
Innocent; higher than which is nothing upon earth."

I am not suggesting that knowledge is not a professional asset,
but so far neither university nor library school degree holders, ob-
served over a period of years, give evidence of any great stress laid
in these institutions on a knowledge of books other than texts, and
of their vital relation to human nature.

The children's librarian today has a much more complicated job
than she had 20 years ago. The possibilities of her work are only
equaled by the care that must be taken to preserve its integrity of
purpose in the face of the demands made upon it from outside. As

130

Responsibility to the Child

library work with children is now developing, books connect them-
selves with almost every other form of art or knowledge or social
activity. Many children's librarians can hardly escape the claims
that social and economic problems, at present to the fore, make on
their sympathy and interest. Their minds are exercised with the
problem of how to help socially, through the library and the ad-
vantage it offers, children who have,, perhaps, very few other
advantages.

From the school comes the most insistent demand on the chil-
dren's librarian and her resources, strongest of all because of the
pressure of sheer numbers behind it. The public library children's
room has become a recognized element in the education of boys
and girls today, and parents, teachers and other adults interested in
the training of children recognize and respect the work of the
children's librarian.

Questions of policy, of organization and of cooperation beset
the children's librarian on every hand. The one thing in danger of
being forgotten is the book. Just as paint is the medium of the
artist, and combinations of sounds that of the musician, so books
are the medium of the librarian and not just her stock in trade. It
used to be said by children's librarians that their profession had
this advantage, that the smallness of the field of children's literature
made it possible for them to know all the books in the collection.
I think this advantage no longer holds. To select from the publish-
ers' output of juveniles for one year means reading hundreds of
books and, in some cases, the rereading of older books for compari-
son. How much time is left for rereading and re-evaluating the
books now on our shelves? Can a children's librarian be said to
know her collection when her knowledge of the individual books
involves an act of memory, reaching back through years ?
"What a man works at, it is his duty to study," and when I think
of the future I visualize children's librarians returning as students
year by year to learn more and more of what it is to their advantage
to know, from other children's librarians who have made one spe-

The Library of Tomorrow

clalized field of children's books their own, whether it is the critical
evaluation of modern writing for children or whether it is the
ancient sources that provide the material for new versions of epic
hero tales.

In a profession whose chief handicaps, particularly in smaller
communities, is often the sense of isolation felt by a children's li-
brarian who has little opportunity to check her ideas and knowl-
edge with others in the same field, such an opportunity to enlarge
and extend her personal equipment and prepare her to meet ade-
quately the increasing demands of the work, will go a long way
toward preventing the blight of superficiality from invading our
field. The keynote of the whole work of the children's librarian is
opportunity. Opportunity if a children's librarian can keep her
spirit clear and alive, to become a sort of channel through which
some hint of the glory of the universe can get through to the chil-
dren by means of the contagion of her own unfeigned enthusiasm
for books.

School Library Service: igyo

BY MILDRED L. BATCHELDER

FROM the school library windows, children could be seen pouring
out of the busses and running to the school entrance. Earlier ar-
rivals had already put away their wraps, were returning books to
the library and borrowing others for the morning's work. Quite as
busy as the three librarians were the six members of the student
staff who had hurried in for the few minutes before school to per-
form their several duties. In addition to the children searching for
books for personal needs, a loth-grade teacher, a 7th-grade boy, and
a girl from the primary grades were each assembling books to take
to their classrooms. The boy left his pile to ask about motion-picture
films showing a New Orleans Mardi Gras. While no such film was
at hand, the librarian found through her lists of films available in
the district that the regional library had one. It would be sent to the
school the following day.

The small girl who had been choosing poetry books was also
looking for transcriptions of A. A. Milne and Robert Louis Steven-
son, reading their own poems. Milne records were supplied but, to
the girl's surprise, Stevenson had lived before the day of radio
recording.

When the teacher had completed her selection, a student staff

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The Library of Tomorrow

member saw that the books were charged and sent to her room.
As the teacher left, she invited the librarian to join her in talking
with her class about personal ownership of books. An alert student
assistant who happened to have responsibility for library exhibits
overheard the request and suggested that 3 or 4 members of the
class each choose about 15 books which he would like to own. The
books would be displayed, and possibly lists of them with the
reasons for their choice could be made in the print shop.

On this spring morning in 1970, one observer watched the scene
with intense interest, at the same time that she took part in it.
Eight months before, she had started her year's internship in the
library of this consolidated school. She must soon decide what kind
of school library work had most appeal for her; which position of
the three open to her she might best fill Thoughts of next fall
pushed forward on this particular morning, when the air seemed
alive with beginnings, and the world waiting for enthusiastic and
vigorous workers in any field. Today she would have another
opportunity to get her impressions in proper perspective, for she
was again to go on the book truck on its twice-a-week visit to two
remote elementary schools. There were three of these small schools
whose children would later come to the consolidated school. Each
of the three had regular and frequent visits from one of the school
librarians. During the trip, the intern pictured to herself all the
kinds of school library work about which she knew, and discussed
them with the enthusiastic school librarian who was her companion.

In the first place, the experience in the consolidated school had
been so vivid and exciting, it was doubtful whether any other kind
of service could overshadow it. There the friendly library rooms
were both working and reading rooms. From the time the school
doors opened in the morning until they were closed at night, chil-
dren of all ages came, sometimes seeking specific information but
often just to read. The older children those from yth through loth
grades found their books and magazines in one room, while those
for the elementary grades were in a room adjoining. There were,

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of course, many occasions during the day when children from one
group needed and used the other's materials.

In the classrooms, there were still more books. Whether a room
were devoted to home economics, shop, music, dramatics, kinder-
garten, third grade, science, social studies or mathematics, it was
certain to have books readily at hand. These books were not fixed
collections, o course, for it was essential that they be changed con-
stantly to fit the specific and present needs of the class. This meant
that all the books in the classrooms emanated from the main
school library. The children, the teachers, and the library shared the
responsibility of keeping class libraries fresh and suited to the needs
of the groups. The classroom bookshelves and the two or three
reading chairs made for each room a popular corner, and it was
unusual when absorbed readers were not to be found there.

Part of the intern's work was to help the librarian visit classes to
learn of their needs for books, pamphlets, films, transcriptions, mu-
seum material, or exhibits. She remembered one visit to a mathe-
matics class where students were studying tax support for schools
and libraries, and were looking into the relative economy and effi-
ciency of small and large school or library districts. A class com-
mittee had gone back to the library with her to look up some
pamphlets and reports on their own state as a basis for their calcu-
lations. During a visit to a social studies class, the students were
asking about contemporary opinions on certain "historic" events at
the time when they took place. As a result, microfilm copies of
newspapers of Revolutionary and Civil War days were borrowed
from the regional reference library. Arrangements were made to
have the school's reading machine in the classroom, so that any
students who wished might examine the old newspapers.

The intern thought back to her training for work as a school
librarian. Great stress had been laid on the school library's integral
relation to the whole school program. Its effectiveness, she had
learned, would depend on the extent to which it helped in achieving
the school's educational and social purposes. In the consolidated

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The Library of Tomorrow

school she had seen a demonstration of the library's many contribu-
tions to those aims. Through the library's resources, many books
and other printed materials were made available for the experience
in reading which is a necessary part of learning to read. Children
found a wide variety of books to explore and through them were
able to discover and extend their interests and tastes. From the
library and classroom, there was constant and guided use of books
which would lead many to a permanent habit of reading and to
discrimination in the acceptance and appreciation of the printed
word.

Somewhat amused at her own seriousness, the intern turned her
attention to other activities of the school library which seemed to
her to contribute to the school's objectives. The student staff was
one. Student participation in services valuable to the group and
familiarity with community institutions and services were definite
school objectives, and the experiences of the library student staff
under the librarian's guidance contributed toward both aims. Here
on the truck today, for example, were two ninth-grade staflf mem-
bers going out to help on the book truck and in the two small
schools that would be visited. On any trip there would usually be
one or two students. Back in the library, the members were not
only able and responsible assistants in matters of routine, but the
group endeavored to interpret the library's purposes and services
to the school community and to bring back to its staff meetings
needs or criticisms which came from the other students.

A second activity went outside the school to the entire com-
munity. The school library not only tried to help students to learn
how to use libraries, but to know the citizen's responsibility for
good library service and the avenues through which it can be ob-
tained. The intern reflected on last week's meeting at which the
student staff entertained the regional library board and discussed
community library questions. She remembered the board's appre-
ciation of the questions and interest of the young people, and its
return invitation. She thought of the plans made for a discussion

School Library Service

on young people's reading at the next parents' meeting. In the panel
of young people and parents gathered to consider the subject, what
would be said about the influence o library and teacher reading
guidance on reading habits and tastes, what would be indicated as
the problems, as well as the most significant values o the reading
which boys and girls were now doing? From their experience with
libraries available to them throughout their school careers, the par-
ents would perhaps discuss the effect on their adult reading o their
own school library reading experiences. However discussion turned,
it would surely be provocative, and teachers and librarians would
join the parents in the audience in the general discussion to follow.

The regional library was the parent- library for both the consoli-
dated school library and the community branch in the village. Be-
cause buying, preparing, cataloging and rebinding books could be
more economically handled in a central office than through indi-
vidual small school and public libraries, all schools in the area
through cooperative arrangements had centralized these activities
in the regional library. School librarians, however, like other faculty
members, were on the school salary list. Where school buildings
were also used as community centers, the regional library branch
was housed there, adjacent to the school library and sharing many
of its facilities. With additional staff and books, it served the com-
munity in the afternoons and evenings during vacations, as well
as in the school year.

From her correspondence with classmates, as well as from her
training, the intern realized that the development of school library
service to children in rural areas had been tremendously stimulated
had really come into general existence with the inauguration
and increase of federal and state aid for libraries and for education.
Such aid was taken for granted, and it was difficult to think there
was a time not many years back when the federal and state govern-
ments did not recognize the responsibility to provide library service
as an essential means toward self -education and toward the good
use of leisure.

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The Library of Tomorrow

It was also as a direct result of federal and state aid, she had
read, that county supervisors of school library service were added
to the staffs of so many county and regional libraries, and to the
offices of county superintendents of schools. Even though consoli-
dation of schools had proceeded apace, there were still numbers of
schools too small for a separate library and librarian. To them, itin-
erant or supervising school librarians made frequent visits. In this
state, as in others, county and local school librarians had received
stimulation and leadership from state school library supervisors.

Reviewing this rural situation, the intern realized that, in reality,
the services given by school libraries were similar in every school.
Differences lay in the adaptation of each individual library to the
specific purposes and the needs of the school it served. The varia-
tion in type of administration controlling the school and its library
was the machinery through which individual adaptation was
worked out. Although the services were the same in rural and
urban schools, the method of accomplishment varied in accordance
with the school administrative pattern and the type of school library
organization which fitted into that pattern.

She was suddenly aware that she had been silent a long time and
that the librarian at her side could help her in the decision which
that morning seemed so imminent and so imperative. A few ques-
tions brought them to a discussion of city schools and their library
systems, some of which she had visited. In the city, each elementary
and junior and senior high school had its library rooms. Sometimes
two very small elementary schools shared one librarian. The super-
visor in charge of the central department of school libraries was
responsible for the frequent ordering of books selected by the
schools, each librarian having coordinated all requests from her
school. Preparation, classifying, cataloging and rebinding were also
handled in the central department, and books delivered to schools
when ready. More significant than the administrative economies
of the central department were the guidance and the stimulation of
the school library supervisor. Through him, library implications

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School Library Service

of program and curriculum changes were studied and discussed,
library needs interpreted to administrators and parents, and effec-
tive ways of providing library service shared through library staff
cooperative study.

The various social services within the community were carefully
coordinated through interlocking boards and councils. Public
schools and public libraries, both institutions intimately concerned
with education at every level, had worked out their programs
cooperatively that they might supplement each other and provide
young people and adults with satisfactory and efficient book services
and reading guidance. Because local groups determined the details,
the method varied among communities. Central book purchasing
and preparation was common. Public libraries usually gave special
emphasis to books and reading advice for preschool-age children,
for parent education, for young people when they left school, and
to all children when school was not in session. Most public libraries
seemed to have very active school reference departments which
looked up unusual information not available in school libraries and
sent it out on the daily school deliveries with interlibrary loans
which had been requested. The old practice of classroom deposits
had long since disappeared.

The librarian asked the intern if she had visited any of the large
city secondary schools for nth through i/jth grades. She described
one located in a seven-story building with a library room on each
floor. The interesting feature was the arrangement of all the librar-
ies in one tier, with special elevator service and book conveyors.
The main school library, located on the second floor near the school
office, was larger than the others and, like many school libraries,
had a stack room adjoining it. With the increased quantity of
books necessary to supply classroom libraries, book rooms had be-
come as much a part of a school library suite as conference and
listening rooms, browsing room, or workroom. The branch li-
braries on the other floors emphasized in their book collections the
subjects in which classes meeting on that floor were interested.

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The Library of Tomorrow

As they talked, the question of which kind of library work the
intern might choose became more engrossing, although more com-
plex. Even so, the librarian mentioned one further interesting type
of school library that in the demonstration school of a teacher
training institution. Almost without exception, these libraries were
well equipped and well staffed. Usually they insisted on experience
beyond internship before considering applicants for positions. In
them, librarians working with outstanding teachers experimented
to find effective ways of guiding reading and of helping children in
their search for information. Through observation and use of these
libraries, young people preparing to teach and those preparing for
school librarianship gained an understanding of children's use of
books, and were ready to effectively provide and use school library
service in the schools where they would find positions. The growth
of the demonstration school libraries had been stimulated some 30
years before by a study which more than justified its cost and whose
recommendations became the basis for state and federal subsidies
for the training of teachers.

Finally, the school at which the book truck was to make its first
stop came in sight. As they rode up the last hill, the intern put into
words an impression which was gradually becoming clear to her.
Would it matter so much, after all, which type of school library
work she chose? Her decision might be guided by certain geo-
graphical preferences and by a personal aptitude for working with
certain age groups. Basically, all school libraries worked to achieve
the same purposes: to help young people to an understanding and
efficiency in the use of books and other library materials, and to
pleasure and appreciation of values in reading for its own sake.

The way in which those purposes could be gained might be dif-
ferent in one place or another, but very important was the recog-
nition that any particular administrative pattern was merely a
means to an end, not an end in itself. To be sensitive and responsive
to the present and potential book experience and book needs of the

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School Library Service

Individuals in a school would require inspired imagination and
adaptability, in addition to all her training and background.

If this was school library service in 1970, what would it be in
I0 20 or more years? It was difficult to prophesy, but certainly
school librarianship, this field o work which she had chosen,
promised to have a stimulating and exciting future.

141

College and University Libraries

BY HENRY M. WRISTON

CERTAINLY the "safest and probably the most significant comment
that could be made about the college and university libraries of
tomorrow is that they will reflect the nature of the institutions
themselves. They cannot rise much higher than the source of their
energy. Libraries may, of course, initiate policies and provide serv-
ices which will assist colleges and universities in finding their
proper directions, but in the long run they cannot perform effective
services at variance with the programs of the institutions.

When the American college was established, and for 200 years
thereafter, the curriculum was simple and the library was small.
The students read relatively few books, but they read them with
an intensity and with a thoroughgoing analysis which today is rare
indeed. When the curricula of universities became infinitely di-
versified, when the numbers of students mounted up into the
thousands, and when the purposes of the institutions became dif-
fuse, libraries were compelled to gather material upon an enormous
range of subjects. Many of the newer fields of study had no ade-
quate literature and the mushroom writings inevitably were lacking
in permanence. There were no standards such as had existed in
the older and more stable subjects of study. Therefore, it was neces-
sary to incorporate much material which was not very good, while

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College and University Libraries

some that was bad found its way Into the libraries. Many of the
subjects became so specialized and their growth was so rapid that
departments and various divisions of the university set up their
own collecting agencies. In consequence, there frequently ceased
to be such an institution as a university library. Instead, there were
many libraries, often quite loosely coordinated, as was the univer-
sity itself.

The era, some aspects of which have just been described, was by
no means wholly bad. Looking back, it resembles the period of
exploration of the continent of North America. A good deal of the
motion now appears to have been aimless, but the explorers did not
have maps and their wanderings provided the basis for accurate
surveys which could follow only after the principal characteristics
of the terrain had been covered. If the American university and
its library have likewise appeared to explore new subjects without
much design or pattern and without coherent purpose, it must be
remembered that the field of scholarship has expanded enormously
during the last century, while the whole definition and technique
of professional preparation have also been altered.

The time has now come for a redefinition of the several re-
sponsibilities of colleges and universities. The universities grew out
of liberal arts colleges, but it can no longer be said that the liberal
college is at the center of the university. There are all kinds of
undergraduate institutions carrying the name of college, and that
number will be diversified still further as time goes on unless there
is an unforeseen revolution in the offing. It is to be hoped, however,
that institutions will make their choices somewhat more clearly
and, it must be said, somewhat more honestly. When made, those
choices should be reflected in the libraries. A collection of books in
a teachers college ought not to be the same as the assortment of
volumes in a college of liberal arts, and an undergraduate school
of business administration should not be expected to make the same
selection as an engineering college.

If this day of clear diversification ever dawns, libraries will no

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The Library of Tomorrow

longer be judged by the number o volumes they contain, a number
which can be surreptitiously padded by counting uncataloged and
virtually inaccessible government documents. Nor will much im-
portance be given to the gross number of periodicals, including
company house organs contributed by way of advertising, which
often swell the count of periodicals without adding to the real
service of the libraries. It is to be hoped that the era of measuring
institutions of higher education by their size is drawing to a close,
and that henceforth the quality of their work, the integrity with
which they specify and then pursue their aims, will play a larger
part When this time comes, certainly judgments regarding their
libraries will no longer be based upon the number of volumes
that they contain, but upon the uses for which they are found
adequate and to which they are put.

Considering the enormous rapidity of their growth and the
demands which have been made upon them, it is remarkable how
libraries have already improved in quality. The professional spirit
among librarians preceded professional training, but professional
training has also made great strides. Nevertheless, the rapid growth
of libraries in size and their improvement in quality have not been
accompanied by as large an increase in student reading, either in
amount or in quality, as might reasonably be expected.

It is one of the tragic paradoxes that the larger a library is and,
in a sense, the better it is, the more difficult it is for students to use
it, and particularly for those who need it most. The larger and
better the library, the more precise must the student be in calling
for a book of the existence of which he may not know, the longer
he must wait to get it, and the less chance he has to see it on the
shelf, to see other books in the same classification, and to handle
books freely. Moreover, while it is true that the quality of libraries
has improved, it is equally true that the books which would have
the deepest and most enriching significance to students are more
and more buried in the mass*

Furthermore, the problem of theft in the big libraries, especially

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College and University Libraries

those located in large dues and with scattered student bodies, is
such that access to the books is almost always severely restricted.
One prominent librarian, when asked what he would advise, said
he would allow access to the stacks and then search everyone to
the skin. He advanced that rather as an ideal than as a practical
suggestion! After bitter experience with losses, the question of cus-
tody is apt to receive more active and sympathetic consideration
than the matter of circulation. In fact, since access to books has
become so complicated in large university libraries, it is fair to say
that undergraduate students actually have more direct and broader
contact with books in some of the best smaller liberal arts colleges,
whose libraries do not compare in size.

Administrative problems, too, have become more and more seri-
ous as libraries have grown in size. Large-scale production brings
economies to industry, but large-scale collecting does not have like
benefits. Few things are more mysterious to a layman than the
vital process of cataloging. As the library grows, those mysteries
become, not simpler, but ever more esoteric, so that the cost of
cataloging inevitably advances. In one great library the cost of
refusing a book that is, checking to see whether the library pos-
sesses a copy of as good an edition in as good condition, whether
it needs or can use duplicates runs to a sum of money often equal
to or greater than the cost of the book itself.

Many college libraries and nearly all university libraries contain
special collections. At their best these are of great value, at their
worst they are practically useless; but in any event they greatly
complicate the problem. If a special collection is spotty, it is of
little value. If it is complete, the passion for completeness tends to
become almost a mania which dominates the administration. Ques-
tions as to quality are brushed aside on the ground that it is
necessary to have everything in the field. Gathering, cataloging, and
storing sometimes so completely exhaust the resources that utiliza-
tion of the collection falls into second place. It is reminiscent of the
government's policy of paying a high premium to miners to mine

145

The Library of Tomorrow

gold, buying it at a high price, and then sterilizing it and burying
it somewhere eke.

So complicated has the structure of the large library become that
it has seemed more convenient to split it up into departmental
libraries so that the books could be close to those who use them and
more readily available. This is, however, a specious simplification,
for it tends to isolate the books from a wider range of use and the
students in the departments from a wider range of reading. Fur-
thermore, it requires that the catalog shall be duplicated in several
places if persons are to ascertain conveniently whether a book is
available. These duplicate and interdepartmental catalogs inevi-
tably advance the cost. The expense of the necessary messenger
service is also greater than that involved when the books are all
in one place.

In order that a reasonable number of books among the enormous
mass might be made easily available to students, the system of
having certain books put "on reserve" was adopted. This practice,
also, has its serious defects. In the first place, the reserved books are
almost invariably connected with a course. The significance of the
book as a whole is lost; it becomes a slave to one or two courses.
Assignments to such books are usually for a few pages or a few
chapters; only those parts peculiarly necessary for the immediate
matter in hand are stipulated. Moreover, the existence of a selected
group of books put upon special reserve singles them out as the
"important" books, and puts others at a discount in the eyes of
students. Their firsthand knowledge of the resources of the library,
and how to use them, is limited. Using the reserved books, they
face no problems of choice or selection, of search and sampling.
Incentives to initiative in the utilization of books are impaired or
destroyed. The reason often given for having a reserve shelf is
that more students can use the books. That is not necessarily the
result; actual study has shown that many books circulate not only
more freely but also more frequently when made available for
home use. Numerous devices looking toward simplicity and the

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College and University Libraries

more ready availability o books have made them actually less
available and have created more problems than they have solved.

Many of the problems which librarians face are symptoms of a
serious disease at present attacking American higher education.
The malady involves the disintegration of institutions into depart-
ments until universities, and even colleges, become merely the sum
of their parts. It seems obvious that the next 10 years must see the
reversal of that tendency, because an institution should be a cor-
porate entity which, properly conceived, is much more than the
sum of its parts. The library, therefore, is not merely a separate
administrative division with its own budget, its own staff, its own
rules, its own procedures, and its own ideals. It must, of course, be
all those things, but it must be infinitely more an instrument of
instruction, rather than an obstacle to instruction.

Furthermore, all too often, the librarian is looked upon as an
administrative officer. Although he has many administrative func-
tions, he is, in the most genuine sense, an officer of instruction. He
should have, therefore, the scholarly interests and tastes which are
expected of other members of the faculty and he should enjoy the
faculty status of a full professor. That ranking involves the penalty
of participation in all committee work, but it also confers the privi-
lege of joining in discussions relating to academic policy. The least
important qualification of the librarian is his training. While he
obviously should not be a stranger to library procedures, the in-
sistence in every case that he have formal graduate library courses
might deprive some institution of the services of a person of rare
gifts. The individual with ideas and appreciation of problems, with
resourcefulness and energy, can learn many of the technical things
which were omitted in his training as he administers the library,
but all the courses in the world will not supply imagination or tact,
industry or scholarly feeling.

The present situation of the library, it must be emphasized, is
only one evidence of the tendency to disintegration which has
marked the American college. The junior college movement is

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The Library of Tomorrow

another. It cannot be said with any plausibility that this movement
has centered its activities in strong libraries or that it represents a
fundamental belief in the power of good reading. As a gesture of
weariness, some educators have even suggested that the bachelor's
degree should be conferred at the end of the second junior college
year, on the ground that the degree has ceased to have any genuine
significance and that people like degrees. They look forward to
the master's degree as the real undergraduate degree, while many
graduate schools feel that the master's degree has become merely a
foundation for graduate work and does not represent anything
substantial in its own name and in its own right.

Several other evidences of institutional disintegration could be
cited. Enough has been said to indicate that the effective integration
of the library with the central task of the college is something
which does not stand by itself. The acuteness of the library's prob-
lems is only symptomatic. The real task is the complete integration
of the total structure. Then, and only then, can the library play
its proper part.

It is fair to say that even now the libraries are better and more
effective than the curricula of many institutions of higher educa-
tion. Taking them in the large, it is certainly safe to say that the
libraries are better than the quality of the students to whom they
are called upon to minister. Indeed, the libraries, though I say it
with regret, are often better than the faculties. One might go a step
further and say that the libraries are even better than their own
administrations. The accretion of the years has brought them rich-
ness which we have not succeeded in using effectively.

For the college library, the first and central reform is to clear
away the obstacles which prevent access by better students to
greater books. This means, so far as undergraduates are concerned,
a yet more intelligent and more discriminating selection of books,
matched by a like selection of students. The selection of students
has not been going forward nearly so effectively as the selection of
books. Human beings can be handled less objectively, they can be

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College and University Libraries

analyzed less effectively, and they can scarcely be cataloged at all.
Unhappily, moreover, the advances which might have been made
have been retarded by false and sentimental views of democracy
and by misinterpretation of the quality of opportunity. The schools
and colleges have been expected to do things for which they are
not adapted.

There is a word in currency today which I never hear without
acute pain. Men speak of the responsibility of schools for the "cus-
tody" of American youth, and the schools have been loaded with
all the noneducational implications of that word. Colleges and
universities have had sent to their doors young people without
intellectual interest or intellectual capacity, with neither the taste
nor the aptitude for vigorous intellectual work. This is indeed
making educational institutions places of "custody." There are
other and more fruitful methods of employment of those with no
taste or aptitude for college. It would be vastly better for many
if it could be said of them as once it was of artisans of old: "All
these put their trust in their hands; and each becometh wise in his
own work. Without these shall not a city be inhabited, and men
shall not sojourn nor walk up and down therein. . . . They will
maintain the fabric of the world; and in the handy work of their
craft is their prayer." It is an abuse of people who cannot read books
and who cannot find in books the instruments for the enlargement
of life to insist that they attend institutions of higher learning
solely because society is supposed to have an obligation to take care
of them. There may be such an obligation, but it is not one which
the college and university library can discharge.

Education proceeds with a student, a book, and a mediator, who
stimulates the student to read, who guides him in his reading,
and who shares with him in the effort to interpret and assimilate
what he has read. The better the student, the better the book, the
better the mediator, the better the education. It is conceivable that
the mediator might be omitted, for education can proceed with a
good student and a good book. The student need not be a genius,

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The Library of Tomorrow

for a fairly good mind with a great book can still find wisdom. But
if die book be poor, the mediator has nothing with which to mediate
and the student has nothing with which to study.

It cannot be contended that students read as many of the classics,
as many of the great books, as they used to read. Indeed, if the
growth o libraries and the changes in methods of instruction had
yielded the fruits which we might reasonably have expected, text-
books would have all but disappeared. Honors courses would not
continue to be an advertising medium rather than an important
aspect o student life. Individual work by students would not be
so much at a premium, nor tutorial instruction be so expensive.
Large courses would not have syllabi so explicit in their reading
lists that students have no experience in making bibliographies
for themselves- In fact, cut and dried education would disappear.

The primary schools have already begua to shrink in size and
high schools will have reached their peak in the not-distant future.
Even if there is no recession in the number of students going from
secondary schools to institutions of higher education, there will
inevitably be a filtering off of those with high intellectual capacity,
a separation from those with lower capacity or without intellectual
interest. There will always be ambitious, or one would perhaps
better say pretentious, institutions which, without resources or
standards, seek to be all things to all men. But the solid and sub-
stantial institutions will more and more attempt to minister to the
particular kind of students whom they can best serve. Their cur-
ricula will mature into better organized and more coherent struc-
tures. Knowledge will continue to grow and to expand, but it is
not likely to discover whole new continents nor vast uncharted
seas. During the period of settlement and exploitation there comes
a quality of change which is more readily followed, if not controlled.

As institutions differentiate their functions, the libraries of those
institutions will be encouraged to do likewise, so that, with the
enormous improvement in their administration which has already
taken place, their position within the structure of the college and

IJO

College and University Libraries

university will be much more satisfactory. Moreover, we are stead-
ily losing faith in mere accumulations of facts and are rediscovering
the ancient truth that the disciplines are more significant than data,
that reflection is more rewarding than information, and that wis-
dom is more than knowledge. As these ideas crystallize, teaching
will have less and less the aspects of stuffing; it will take on more
and more the character of stimulation and guidance. Whenever
that occurs, books of substance and character will come into their
own; the better currency of worth-while literature and of scholar-
ship will drive out the debased currency of the textbook.

Educating the
Community Through the

BY LYMAN BRYSON

EDUCATING a community or trying to is like trying to feed a
Hydra. The more you give the monster, the more ravening mouths
it develops. Your success only makes your task more difficult. How-
ever, the libraries have accepted responsibility for this seemingly
impossible business. They have to face it, unless they want to retire
again into being mere keepers of books as they were once long,
long ago supposed to be. Of course, librarians cannot be expected
to be far in advance of die other educators of adults in understand-
ing the nature of their common work. In fact, they are probably
less well placed than others when it comes to calling on psycholo-
gists and other technical specialists. They have few helpers to whom
they can assign definite segments of their problem in the hope of
building up piecemeal a system of facts. But they have passed be-
yond the stage of supposing that all that is needed to educate a
community is a librarian with a few books and an impersonally
ardent disposition. To a layman it appears that most of them are
in the discouraged second stage, when all one's first illusions have
withered and mastery has not yet grown in their place. This is a
very healthy state to be in. Now stock can be taken, the instruments
looked over and ultimate aims somewhat better defined.
In the first attack on almost any problem people start with a

IJ2

Educating the Community

formula, or several of them. For educating communities there have
been two, both popular. They are: Find out what they want and
give it to them; and. Decide what they need and give it to them.
Neither one is much good but both have to be looked at, because
both have bedeviled our thinking.

May we examine first the more generous and amiable of the two.
Find out what the people want and give it to them. Do people know
what they want? Perhaps they do, but if so it is only in relation to
a known series of choices. People, even very intelligent or culti-
vated people, are not bundles of articulate and eager desires running
around looking for clearly foreseen satisfactions. Nobody can want
something that he never heard of. Very few people are able even to
take the first steps toward making up their minds until after there
has been a parade of choices from which they can take things to
examine and test out. You cannot find out what people are inter-
ested in by asking them simple questions. Moreover, most of them
react only to real choices, not imaginary ones. Consequently, any
educator, a librarian or anyone else who undertakes to meet the
"thought" of the public, will have to send out a catalog, not of
things that people might want but of things he is ready to give
them, before he can expect to make a beginning.

Suppose that is done. The librarian has taken the first step of
providing for his potential customers a series of real choices. Can he
find out by that device what it is that they are interested in? Do
people know what they want even when they see what can be had?
Many do, of course, and many do in certain areas of possible in-
terest but not in others. For educational purposes, the useful point
to be noted is that very often what has greatest educational poten-
tiality, that is, the interest which has the greatest possible develop-
ment for a person, is the one most obscure and inarticulate in his
mind.

Practical workers advise us to learn what people want by looking
at what they have taken. Librarians can look at circulation records
and squeeze out neat patterns of readers' interests. No doubt that

The Library of Tomorrow

all helps; I am a firm believer in the development of the sociology
of reading by all the devices and techniques the sociologist knows.
But there are facts that shake one's faith in circulation figures as
records of general community interest. In the first place, as librarians
know but like to forget, half of all the circulation in the average
public library is among students who are enrolled in some educa-
tional institution and read mostly by assignments from teachers.
Worse it is known that about 63 per cent of all the reading re-
corded in the average public library's circulation lists is done by
about 10 per cent of the readers. It is easy enough to find out what
a small part of the community has taken and tried in the past. But
the 90 per cent who read only a third of the books are those whose
interests we ought to be able to discover.

. All this is not to say that there is no good at all in trying to find
out what people want. Educators of communities should study with
sedulous care every indication of areas in which people might be
responsive. But it may be useful to cry a warning against relying
on the formula. Giving them what they want is not so easy, even
supposing that we have all the money and all the people necessary
to meet the need if and when discovered.

In spite of difficulties one may still believe that the librarian's
responsibility for educating the public and the community is deter-
mined by the essential meaning of this first formula. If so, the
library must provide a dynamic pattern of choices which will pro-
vide chances for occasional coincidences with parts of the dynamic
patterns of personal interests. For it is not only that the public is a
changing group of people; each person in it frequently changes.
He changes in the most placid of existences because he must some-
how and in some measure grow up. He changes because he exhausts
one interest and looks around for another. He changes when some
subject is explored far enough to show that it is not at all what he
thought it was. He changes because of events in the world and
because of events in his own life.

Well-regulated art museums keep much of their material, good

Educating the Community

material, that is, in storage. No more is exposed to visitors than can
be displayed with proper emphasis on its importance or in some
design that will give it significance. But the material in the storage
vaults is constantly being searched to make up new designs and
new displays. The community being educated by the museum is
offered only a reasonable segment of all that the museum might
offer, no more than can be swallowed at a time, and the museum
itself is constantly changing itself into a new place by drawing
upon its concealed riches. A library does this, of course, with open
shelves where books march before the passing readers' eyes. The
point I am making here is only that if one really expects to explore
the interests of the public he must do it by the greatest possible
development of changing displays. It is good for confirmed readers
to feel that the library is home, a place full of friends. But it is also
necessary that this pleasant place shall be constantly renewed and
rearranged. Sometimes one thinks that it might be an excellent
idea for libraries to appoint docents similar to those in museums.
They could perambulate little groups of readers up and down
among the stacks, pointing out what is in them (if readers could
be persuaded to follow such a mentor), bringing as many people
as possible within actual reach of as many books as possible. If you
want to give people what they want you can do it best by con-
stantly reminding them of all the riches there are in the world
that can be wanted.

The other formula deserves also a certain amount of considera-
tion, inadequate though it may be. Shall we decide what people
need and give them that? Librarians cannot avoid exercising a
certain amount of choice as to what intellectual experiences other
people shall have. No library can contain all the books in the world;
no library could possibly bring all books to the attention of all
readers even if it had them. With the most scrupulous fair-minded-
ness and desire to be hospitable to all points of view, the librarian
still has to choose which books shall be made available to the con-
sumer. But he can be a humble, studious and honest person at this

155

The Library of Tomorrow

task. He need not be either arrogant with superior wisdom or
timid with self-distrust. In these two extremes he is still exercising
the function of educator but doing it badly. And I think he is doing
best when he says that what people really need is the greatest
possible opportunity for finding out what has been written on all
the subjects they can find enticing. By that definition of "need" the
librarian can follow the second formula, provided a modicum of
good taste goes with it.

This matter of deciding what people shall read is only a small
part of the general question, how can libraries or, more exactly,
librarians educate the community? What is a librarian? Is he a
member of the community? One hopes so. Is he a leader? One
hopes for that, too. But the thing that needs to be thought about
for a moment is whether or not his position as the head of an
institution is enough to make him a leader.

One of the most interesting lessons to be learned from studying
the professional training of various kinds of institutional workers
who deal with the public is that each tends to think of his own
institution as central with the others grouped in satellite positions
around it. I have for some time been teaching in a seminar in which
are gathered social workers, teachers, missionaries, secretaries in
YMCA's and YWCA's, ministers, school administrators, and li-
brarians. They all have a common interest in adult education. And
it frequently happens in this group that we can let them discover
that each one has been quite unconsciously or perhaps quite art-
fully thinking of his own work as the starting point for any good
that can be done to the public. We have long arguments in some
sessions of that class as to who should take the initiative in directing
the reading of an individual or a family. It is a shock to the librarian
to discover that a social worker may consider that she has a prior
right to start a person on a course of intellectual improvement. And
the teacher sits by in amazement that either of the others would
dare to assume such a responsibility when obviously the teacher is
equipped for it.

Educating the Community

It may be quite proper for each to think of his own institution
as central. That may be necessary for healthy professional zeaL But
if we find that everyone thinks of his own institution as central we
are not getting very far toward deciding just what being the head
of a public library does to determine the position of a person in
his community. It is very likely that the training and temperament
of a librarian will give him a natural, not an institutional, leader-
ship in certain aspects of his community's cultural life. At least one
might think so, and I hasten to say that in my own experience,
looking at the situation from the outside, it has often been so. But
I do not believe that the librarian as such can assume that people
will give him leadership in educating the community unless he
proves his personal fitness for it. In very small communities the
librarian is likely to be overshadowed in leading community pro-
grams for cultural betterment by the school superintendent. In very
large communities he is likely to be not well enough known unless
he has striking personal qualities and is eternally busy in civic
affairs. The chances then of being at the head or being the insti-
gator of any community program of cultural importance are very
largely determined by the kind of person he happens to be. He has
one great advantage over a social worker, a religious worker or a
teacher. Even if someone else plans the campaign and acts as gen-
eral in practical decisions, the librarian is necessarily head of the
"service of supply." He cannot very well be left out of any plan
for community education and no plan is likely to be a success
unless it has his intelligent and hearty cooperation.

The librarian, moreover, can be expected eventually to approach
this problem with his own professional preoccupations and with
the use of his own techniques. We have long been waiting for
librarians to begin to think about adult education as professionals
rather than as amateurs. By this I mean that we have been waiting
for them to begin to think through their own special technical
problems, such as book selection, or cataloging, in such a way as
to make those techniques significant for adult education instead

The Library of Tomorrow

of giving to the adult education movement only their general
counsel and their sympathetic support. If one accepts, as I do, the
concept of the librarian as primarily an adult educator, and the con-
cept of adult education as primarily an individual's search after
the satisf actions of his own soul, most of what librarians and librar-
ies can do will always be the building up of those possibilities
that put persons in reach of books. Adult education has many
phases and certainly many of them must always be carried on by
groups. But if the ultimate aim of group work is communion with
thoughts and experiences greater than our own, few of us can find
those in great measure except by reading. We refresh ourselves from
study by conversation and discussion but we fortify ourselves for
further discussion by reading.

Perhaps the most important thing for us to say about the librarian
as the educator of the community is the most obvious. He must
serve the whole community with books. Some librarians do not.
They accept the principle but do not practice it; that is, they serve
the people who come to the library but do not exert much effort
for those who are somehow out of the sphere of its influence. The
movement toward branch libraries, giving the books to the people,
is recognition, of course, that this attitude is to be given up. Some-
times when I look at the vast piles of stone that are called public
libraries beautiful marble cemeteries I pray for a charge of dyna-
mite that would blow them in a great scatteration over the whole
community. So many of the books would do more good where they
happened to fall than they do now, gathering dust on the shelves.
In sober truth, scattering books everywhere, in the most unlikely
places, so that men cannot fail to see them and may be tempted to
pick them up would not result eventually in smaller and less im-
posing central libraries; it would result in greater ones.

The main job of educating a community is to enlarge the freedom
of men and women by letting them know how many things there
are in the world that are worth learning and enjoying. For this
purpose a library is merely an instrument in the hands of the librar-

Educating the Community

ian. It is the librarian who educates the community because it is
the librarian who so manages the supply o books that greater and
greater numbers of the people know what the books are and find
out what they can do. There are other tasks for other workers but
none is more important than this.

159

The Library s Part
in Developing the Citizen

BY R. RUSSELL MUNN

To OBTAIN the kind of citizens who will solve the many problems
of our new civilization, it is essential that we redirect our philosophy
of civic education. When the Daughters of the American Revolu-
tion state in a broadside: **. . no country, perhaps, is so prosperous
as ours and any individual has an opportunity to aspire to the high-
est position of honor under this government while a citizen. Our
prosperity is undoubtedly due to this incentive for all men have an
equal chance," they are expressing the philosophy of the nineteenth
century. As a creed for American citizenship it is no longer effec-
tive. Indeed it is dangerous and to insist upon it would invite the
second revolution, which this group so heartily fears. The new in-
dustrial age has made individuals into integral parts of one -large
composite system and it is as such that we must think of them as
citizens. The old laissez faire claim that enlightened self -interest,
if left alone, will work out for the benefit of all, is no longer
valid, if it ever was.

When the house of cards collapsed in 1929 the most important
casualty was the rugged individualist. It is highly significant that
a concept which for centuries has been so respectable should have
so suddenly and completely lost caste. The passing of this part o

160

Developing the Citizen

it, however, does not necessarily mean the total eclipse of the old
American dream. There are still resources enough left to make this
a "land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for
every man" 1 if we can only change our system from a competitive
one which, albeit expensive, was effective in the building period, to
one of cooperation for the common good. Maury Maverick, a
congressman who, until recently, has had the uncommon ability of
getting himself elected on the basis of his service to his country
rather than to special interests, puts it this way :

"Cooperative endeavor is forced upon us. Only by such endeavor
can we have the things which we severally lack. For certainly all
this talk about how a man should have self-reliance and initiative
and be a good American like our sturdy forefathers, when a man
has to grow corn on a pavement, is sheer cruelty. . , . The whole
pioneer philosophy has changed from the idea of individual isola-
tion to cooperative endeavor with proximity of individuals. Only
in this way can individuality be saved." 2

We can hardly forget, at this time, the world situation. At this
moment we are passing through the most critical period in the
history of Western civilization. Intelligent people of all nations are
looking to America to preserve the idea of democracy for future
generations. According to Thomas Mann, the United States is "the
lone bulwark against the destruction of liberty and freedom . . .
and must put its social influence to work . . . before it is too late.'* 3
We must show, by peaceful precept this time, rather than by resort
to arms, that our country, at least, is safe for democracy. To be safe
this democracy must rest on the intelligence and cooperative spirit
of its individual citizens.

There are grounds for hope, partly owing to the success of the
new conception of education. Informality is its keynote and the

*J. T. Adams, Epic of America (new ed.; Boston: Little, 1933), p.4iy.

*A Maverick, American (N.Y.: Covici, Friede, 01937), p-39-40.

8 "The price of citizenship," National Municipal Revtetv t XXVlI (March, I938),p.i27.

The Library of Tomorrow

development of the right kind of individuality is its aim. Instead
of inculcation, the "stamping in" of facts and habits by lectures and
drills, new curricula call for activities which develop the spirit of
curiosity, activities which encourage the individual to find out for
himself, and prepare himself for life as a member of a group and
not merely as a single atom competing with 100,000,000 others. In
this new scheme the library's stock is advancing rapidly. As sources
of information, the textbook and the teacher's head are being sup-
planted to an appreciable extent by the library. This has an impor-
tant bearing on civic education.

The constant worry of the good teacher of social science is the
essential conservatism of the administrative authority. Attempts to
describe social concepts which did not happen to be approved by
the Constitutional Convention have cost many a good teacher in
this country his job. The good school library can bring great relief
in this respect. The teacher can avoid the usually false charge of
radical indoctrination by simply bringing such matters up for con-
sideration and referring the students to the different points of view
as contained in the library. Instead of a slave driver the good teacher
then becomes a guide or a referee.

But if a large part of this burden is to be shifted to the school
librarian, the question is : Can she take it? Is she going to meet the
responsibility? And will she be successful in avoiding the on-
slaughts of the watchdogs of the public mind? Meeting the respon-
sibility involves the elementary principle of adequately covering all
sides of controversial issues. This, to me, means far more than the
inclusion of the odd pamphlet by Norman Thomas or Harry
Laidler, although that would be more than some will admit today.
It means that the whole leftward side should be well covered. There
can be little worry about the middle and the right being repre-
sented if the library subscribes to the normal number of newspapers
and periodicals and makes the usual selection of books. Adequate
representation of the leftward point of view is the direct respon-
sibility of the library and, whether or not we agree with the ideas

Developing the Citizen

expressed, we must defend to the death our right to include them
in our collections. If we can take our stand here firmly and im-
mediately we shall have done much to prevent many keen and
advanced teachers from either quitting the profession or degener-
ating into disillusioned drones.

What has been said of school libraries goes for public libraries
as well. In the case of colleges and universities, 1 am assuming, with
some mental reservations, that the above advice is superfluous. But
the public libraries face a real problem, particularly concerning
young adults. These young people come swarming in, in such
numbers that some of the forward-looking libraries, like New
Rochelle, are setting up separate departments to meet their needs.
We have been grossly underestimating the importance of this
group. A recent survey 4 of the New York Public Library's Circula-
tion Department reveals the fact that 75 per cent of the adult
registrants are between the ages of 15 and 30. If this is typical of
other cities it is an astonishing discovery with important implica-
tions for librarians. The problem which concerns us here is that
many of these youngsters, having recently graduated from or dis-
continued school and having come into contact with the world of
affairs, are anxious to learn some of the economic and political facts
of life. Are we going to continue giving them little else besides the
old escape literature, the White shadows in the South Seas, the
Flying carpets and the Lowell Thomases ? Of course these are neces-
sary and so are the books on flying and radio and other physical
sciences. But what about the social sciences? These young men and
women are at an age when permanent attitudes are being formed.
Gilbert's famous ditty about boys and girls being either little liber-
als or little conservatives from birth is amusing satire but factually
quite untrue. Most of our opinions and attitudes are formed before
we are thirty. It is extremely important, then, if we wish to develop
a liberal and progressive electorate for the next generation, that we
let them see the grave shortcomings of the world in which they

4 W. C. Haygood, Who uses the public library? (Chicago: U. of Chicago Pr. [1938]).

163

The Library of Tomorrow

must make their living. For the older adults, who, because of bitter
personal experience or through genuine sympathy for their fellow
citizens, are anxious to make this a better world for us all, let us
have adequate material in which they can discover the rotten spots
in our body politic and in our economic system. And let us help
them obtain the books and pamphlets which will give them a pic-
ture of something closer to the heart's desire toward which they all
may strive.

It is quite impossible to tell how much actual voluntary censor-
ship is practiced by public libraries. There is a litde study 5 on the
circulation of proletarian novels in 30 representative American li-
braries which might give some hint concerning library holdings of
one type of "questionable" material. A common tendency among
librarians is to consider the whole of their fiction circulation as a
recreational function, overlooking the immense educational value
of many of our modern novels. Experiments with radio and films
have proved that the best way to teach a lesson or to demonstrate
a point is to dramatize it. It is absorbed much more easily and the
impression left on the mind is clearer and more lasting. The pur-
poseful novel, which does just this, is gaining rapidly as an educa-
tional medium. This applies to the so-called proletarian group and
no one who follows current critical opinion or who professes an
appreciation for powerful writing can afford to neglect this impor-
tant new body of American writers. One of them, Steinbeck, has
recently "arrived" as a best seller. Yet what does Mr. Bowman's sur-
vey tell of the library holdings of the proletarian novel? Of the 10
titles chosen for the survey, only i of the 30 libraries (Detroit) has as
many as 8. Two had none at all and the average holding for each
library was 3.4 titles. Writers like Halper, Steinbeck, Lumpkin and
Mrs. Dargan do not deserve such treatment and, since their literary
value can hardly be questioned, the charge of voluntary censorship
is justified.

6 John S. Bowman, An analysis of public library borrowing of proletarian novels
(unpub. doct, dissertation. Perm. State College. 1939).

164

Developing the Citizen

There are those who argue that, since the dally press and current
popular periodicals present so consistently the reactionary side of
public affairs, the public library has an obligation, for the sake
of truth, to emphasize and promote reading of the radical point of
view. Our traditional impartiality would hardly allow a strong
stand in this direction. On the other hand, we cannot profess to be
impartial unless we honestly attempt to stock the literature of the
left (pamphlets, books and periodicals) in quantities that are ade-
quate for the present and potential demand.

What should be our attitude toward the present labor struggle
going on in this country? Questions of the rights and obligations
of citizenship are of paramount importance here. Labor, and this
term applies now to a large body of school teachers, will continue
to fight for its standard of living in periods of rising prices and to
maintain its gains when depressions set in. The new movement
towards vertical organization, involving as it does the masses of
unskilled laborers, is faced squarely with the vital task of educa-
tion. In an article entitled "Discipline and education found unions'
great need," the Christian Science Monitor quotes one CIO official
as saying, "Organization is one thing, unionization another. It takes
experience, maybe years, to become a capable trade unionist*'; and
an AF of L leader is reported to have stated, "I used to think organ-
ization was everything. Now I have changed. I see that education
is more important." What organization is in a better position to
help them than the public library? Through our facilities they can
compile information valuable in negotiations, they can find out the
mistakes of some previous labor movements and why others suc-
ceeded; they can discover how they might improve their purchasing
power through consumer cooperatives; they can learn methods of
political procedure whereby their aims may be achieved by demo-
cratic means. And if we are sympathetic and show our willingness
to aid them in these proper endeavors we shall have made powerful
friends who will help us in our time of need . . . which is most

F.W. Carr, in Christian Science Monitor, August 5, 1937.

The Library of Tomorrow

of the time. Again we owe it to our democratic tradition to do all
in our power to inject reason and knowledge into this vital struggle
to the end that industrial peace and economic justice will result.

There is one other thing which is essential to the library's part in
developing citizens. We must reach the people. We have heard a
great deal about the 45,000,000 without library service. There are
as many more in this country who do not use what they have,
largely because our library facilities are inadequate or inappropriate.

For the cities a good central collection is not enough. We must
decentralize to a far greater extent than we have done so far. John
Chancellor, in his study of the TVA libraries, 7 suggests that, just
as special libraries have developed techniques to furnish nuggets of
information to large organizations or groups, so do the require-
ments of informal popular adult education call for special tech-
niques and special collections. He regards the TVA community
libraries as demonstrations of this important need. By setting up
shop in the community centers, next door to the post office and
across from the grocery store, they come in close contact with every-
one in the neighborhood. By concentrating on informality in archi-
tecture, procedures, and in their whole general tone (by permitting
smoking, for example,) they appeal to the most timid of potential
readers. Their books are fresh and attractive both in appearance
and content. These libraries are small enough to avoid confusing
beginners yet they are so organized that they can deliver the goods
to more experienced readers through interlibrary loan arrange-
ments. To carry out this principle in a large city system would mean
smaller and more numerous branches than is common today, and
more inviting ones. It would mean considerably more duplication
of the so-called "readable books/ 5 and a great deal more weeding
out of the titles which have ceased to be attractive. These branches
must be staffed adequately to avoid the hurry and impersonality
which readers find so annoying in our libraries today. Might I
suggest that these informal reading rooms should be as ubiquitous
7 Tfic library in theTVA adult education program (Chicago: A.L.A., 1937), p.43, f.

166

Developing the Citizen

as chain stores? The time is not far distant when every school will
contain an adult branch library. Surely, as long as we are con-
servative in our demands our appropriations will continue to be
conservative.

The mention of chain stores suggests the question of the rental
libraries. In planning to attract more nonreaders we are confronted
with that constantly debated point in the philosophy of librarian-
ship, to what extent should we cater to popular demand? In an
article describing the enormous increase in the number of rental
libraries, one proprietor is quoted as follows: "The time is coming
when the public libraries may be used almost entirely for reference
with rental libraries providing the current books for readers." 8 A
most interesting comment from the outside! There can be little
doubt that the current decline in public library circulation is partly
due to the expansion of the rental library. And their present stock
in trade is by no means confined to the "hammock romance." They
are rapidly entering the field of the best fiction and current non-
fiction, competing with the public library on its own ground. Per-
haps the above prophecy will come to pass and before long informal
adult education through reading will retail at 3 cents a day. Per-
haps, on the other hand, the printed page will be crowded out of
the field altogether by further development in modern means of
communication. This trend is voiced by Gilbert Seldes as follows :

"Between the radio giving him the news and the moving picture
condensing and dramatizing novels, the necessity for reading stead-
ily diminishes. When they coalesce in television and make the aver-
age man a spectator of world events wherever they occur, and at
the same time afford him an entertainment with such luxury as
ancient despots could hardly imagine, the private art of reading
may disappear before the new universal art." 9

As adult education agencies, these competitors for the leisure time

^Christian Science Monitor, Weekly Magazine Section, July 28, 1937.
*The movies come from America (N.Y.: Scribncr, 1937), p.i5.

167

The Library of Tomorrow

of our citizens have, at the present time, a major drawback. They
are conducted by private people or organizations for the purpose of
private gain. The public library, on the other hand, is an institu-
tion staffed by trained people who have, or should have, as their
major objective the creation of an intelligent and informed elec-
torate which is indispensable to a successful democracy. While
books continue to be important in education, we are obligated to
extend and guide their use as much as possible.

Concerning suburban development, there are points in the Re-
settlement Administration's 10 "greenbelt town" idea which are full
of significance for libraries. R.A.'s contention is that, as a building
boom must come in the next few years if we are to raise or even
maintain our present living standards, it is the part of wisdom to
do a little advance thinking about it in order to avoid some of the
ghastly mistakes of the past. Their experimental towns near Wash-
ington, D. C., Cincinnati and Milwaukee are demonstrating many
advantages inherent in building planned satellite towns as single
units under a single ownership with the stress laid on community
living. In each demonstration the blueprints include a combination
school and community building which is planned to serve the
children in the daytime and the adults at night. In the preliminary
surveys conducted in each of the above localities, in which thou-
sands of individuals were questioned, it was found that, among all
the community facilities asked for, a library was most in demand.
It received even more votes than did the swimming pool. A library
in such a building, which is a school, lecture hall, avocational and
recreational center, cannot fail to be effective if it is well staffed and
adequately stocked. That the community center scheme will work
is proved by the successful English experiments of many years
standing at Watling Estate, near London, and Perry Common,
Birmingham, to mention but two. And there are the TVA towns
of Norris and Pickwick Landing to prove it in this country. There
are vast differences between this kind of library service and the

10 Now Farm Security Administration.

168

Developing the Citizen

deadly little affairs (Open every Thursday, 2 to 4 P.M.) which are
dignified by the name of library in so many small towns.

What has been said o these suburban satellite towns applies,
with some variations, to rural extension branches. The county and
regional library patterns are pretty well set; what is needed here is
more of them and better support. In this connection, while librar-
ians as a group were arguing over whether or not we should ask for
federal aid, the school people were not so backward and already
they have submitted to the President their plan for equalizing
educational opportunity throughout the country with federal aid.
Thanks to their broad view, libraries were included, willy-nilly.
School libraries constitute an important part of their recommenda-
tions. So will the combination type which I have just mentioned. It
is extremely important that librarians cooperate with the educators
as they are now doing in this long forward step.

There is no field of educational endeavor today that requires
more hard thinking and courageous convictions than that of edu-
cation for citizenship. That these implications are recognized by
some schoolmen is indicated by the following quotation from a
recent Yearbook^ of the National Education Association's depart-
ment of superintendence :

"Educators will probably face a desperate struggle if they run
counter to the prejudices and interests of big business and finance.
But if education is unwilling to assert a dignified independence of
vested economic interests, it might as well surrender without a
struggle." 11

Librarians are, or should be, faced with the same problem. They
must support the advance of the liberal wing of educators in their
effort to modernize school curricula to cope with the myriad un-
solved puzzles of twentieth century society. In adult education the
need is as pressing as it is in the schools. Our objective is to serve

^The improvement of education. I5th Yearbook (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of
Superintendence, National Education Association, 1937), p. 117.

169

The Library of Tomorrow

all the people well. At present the library borrowers constitute a
very small minority of the total population. No wonder our ex-
istence is frequently overlooked by sociologists and educators. The
library has an important role but we have been cautiously pecking
at a problem whose solution is vital to the development of the
citizens who must build the new kind of democracy required by
the new age.

I/O

The Special Library Looks Forward

BY RUTH SAVORD

WE HAVE had libraries as long as the world has had a way of express-
ing itself by means of symbols put together so as to convey thought.
From ancient days when books were chained and most libraries
were housed in monasteries, down to the present-day era of vast
marble halls, the word "library" has all too often produced a men-
tal picture of a somewhat mausoleum-like structure containing
large collections of books, often dusty, musty and of varying ages.

Nineteenth century America, which gave us the beginnings of
free public library service, did much to lighten this picture. The
development of children's rooms, story hours, traveling, school,
prison, and county libraries, together with the great promotion of
adult education through the library, served to make the movement
more significant and more useful to the public.

But the very aim of this movement, designed as it was for all the
people, made it impossible for it to meet the demands of the in-
dividual patron whose need was not for sources from which he
might extract facts but for the facts themselves a class of patron
which became increasingly numerous. The turn of the century saw
these demands met by the assembly of collections of specialized
information a new kind of library. To the administrators of these
collections came an opportunity for pioneering such as had not

The Library of Tomorrow

existed since the days of Browne, Cutter and Dewey. They had to
adapt old library methods, evolve new techniques for the care and
use of the mass of print which, even then, was pouring from our
printing presses, and prove themselves research workers in fact,
as well as in name. In so doing, they opened up a whole new front
which has been a continuing challenge to the profession special
librarianship.

'In contrast to the traditional college or public library, these "spe-
cial libraries" deal primarily with the present and the future (con-
sequently, the material of most vital importance is not in books,
often not even in print) ; they are confined to some special interest
or to the literature of one business or of one subject; they serve a
specific organization with a limited clientele; they reach out for
information, classify it in such a way as to make it available quickly,
check it, see that it is pertinent, authoritative and up to date and
bring it to the attention of the right man at the right time; they
are clearing houses of live ideas and live problems which are pe-
culiar to the organization which they serve; they are administered
by a trained staff with a clear knowledge of the activities, present
and future, of the group they serve.

The first adaptation of this idea was in legislative reference work,
where, on the basis of information collected, aid was given in the
preparation of bills, in digests of legislation, in analysis of argu-
ments, etc. Having proved its value in the state, the next step was
to apply it to cities hence the formation of municipal reference
bureaus. A logical development spread the good work to public
administrative offices and federal departments, with a few en-
lightened business and commercial organizations adapting it to
their needs. So the situation stood in 1914 at the outbreak of the
World War.

During and after that economic upheaval, statesmen and busi-
ness men alike were facing a new era; the United States changed
almost overnight from a debtor to a creditor nation, bringing en-
tirely new problems to our bankers and financiers; the scientific,

J/2

The Special Library

academic and industrial workers were all asking, "What of to-
morrow?"; new enterprises were being contemplated and old ones
revolutionized; new markets had to be obtained and old ones re-
tained; the whole life o the country which had been on a wartime
basis had to be readjusted to peacetime conditions. All o this called
for recourse to facts such detailed facts that the public library,
with its more general inquiries, was not able to meet the demand.
The facts were procurable but buried in the mass. The special
library came to reclaim information from printed sources and make
it available.

In the last twenty years the idea has spread to banks and invest-
ment houses; to chambers of commerce, trade, professional, civic,
religious, and labor associations; to boards of education; to insur-
ance, public utility, manufacturing, engineering and advertising
firms; to museums, foundations, publishing houses and newspa-
pers in brief, into every field of human activity. In addition, many
large public libraries organized special divisions which are decen-
tralized and which provide the essential functions of a special
library. This sort of special division really constitutes another type
of special library. Some departmental libraries in the larger univer-
sities, serving the faculty and students of a special school, and
similarly organized, may also be considered as special libraries.

With the coming to the fore of younger men, many of whom
were graduates of our university schools of business administration,
and of others who had learned in universities and technical schools
the worth of good library service, the value of information per se
came to be recognized. Analysis of the 1935 directory of special
libraries showed that, of about 2,000 well-established special libra-
ries then being maintained, roughly one fourth were in the fields
of business and economics; one third scientific and technical; one
fifth sociological, and the rest in fine arts and miscellaneous fields.
When we consider that there are in this country approximately
16,000 banks, 4,400 insurance companies, 2,200 daily newspapers,
and 2,400 major trade and professional associations, and that in these

The Library of Tomorrow

four fields only 500 well-organized special libraries exist., it is evi-
dent that the possibilities for future development are very great.

But, in order to make these potential libraries actualities, the
ranks of well-trained special librarians will be greatly increased by
close cooperation of the two professional organizations the Amer-
ican Library Association and the Special Libraries Association--
looking toward a better selection of new recruits in the profession.
Such a cooperative program will take the form of presenting to
college students in their freshman year, before they have decided
on their majors, the vocational possibilities of the whole library
profession, setting forth its various phases public, college, school,
county, special certainly a wide enough scope for all tastes. Along
with this presentation will go suggestions for preprofessional
courses similar to our premedical programs. With proper promo-
tion and cooperation between colleges and the library profession,
students so inclined will decide early in their college careers to
enter the library field and will plan accordingly. When students
realize that it does not necessarily mean divorce from their chosen
subject fields, but an opportunity to cultivate them in a less formal
educational agency than the school or college, more of die type
needed will be attracted to librarianship as a profession.

Having sown the seed of specialization in this fertile ground, our
library schools will, at the same time, begin the adaptation of their
traditional training courses so that, on graduation from college,
these students will find proper courses in special library methods
which will send them out prepared to organize and administer
libraries in their chosen fields. Supply always follows demand and
our library schools will meet the demand, once it is created. In the
meantime, the Special Libraries Association "of tomorrow" will
have worked out and put into practice an extensive internship plan
in all of its chapters so that recruits may have an opportunity to
acquire practical experience.

While this force of trained personnel is being built up, our public
libraries in large communities of diversified industries will have

1/4

The Special Library

been encouraging the organization and growth o special libraries
to strengthen their own resources, for no public library, with its
limited public funds, can ever hope to compete against the special
library when well-developed and backed by the resources of a
private organization. With cooperation between all libraries, we
will eventually find each large urban region serving as a single
research unit in which the local public library system will be sur-
rounded by a group of financial, commercial, industrial, medical,
technical and other special libraries all giving better service with
help from each other. There may be one public library system in
each community but there will be as many special libraries as there
are separate important enterprises able to support them.

With intelligent librarians in charge of these libraries, the whole
library movement will be furthered. The users and supporters of
special libraries are professional and business men who mold pub-
lic opinion and foster public undertakings. If these men are satisfied
with the service that they receive from the libraries which they
support personally, they will be willing and anxious to further the
interests of the public library system in their own communities.

During the last twenty years, the situation in special libraries has
paralleled rather closely the conditions that existed in the early
days of the public library movement in this country. Then, there
were no trained librarians and hence our pioneers in the move-
ment with no techniques developed, no codes by which to be
guided, with classification schemes in the making, subject heading
lists unrecorded had to struggle, confer, progress by trial and
error, step by step, sometimes failing but more often succeeding.
It was a long, hard road that has led to the present position of the
library movement in the United States. So, in the special library
field, the conditions that had to be met, the psychology of the
clientele that had to be studied, the demands for speed of service,
were all new problems which required an unusual gift for adap-
tation. Like the public library pioneers, these newly appointed
administrators of special libraries had to struggle, discuss, confer,

The Library of Tomorrow

experiment, make mistakes, fail, and succeed. The present depres-
sion gave the clearest indication of how well they have succeeded
in at least one phase of the special library movement the business
and commercial library. It is a well-known fact that the American
business man does not maintain for long any department which
does not pay. And yet, in the years following 1929, few such libra-
ries were disbanded while some new ones were organized. Is this
not proof that these librarians met the challenge of modern business
and proved that library practices and techniques can be success-
fully adapted to the needs of business research? Is it not also proof
that our schools of library service should provide the means of
preparation for work in this field among others, so that the achieve-
ments of the pioneers may be consolidated?

I venture to prophesy that, through the coordinated efforts of
these pioneers, the new recruit will find standards of practice
evolved and recorded for the various types of special library,
whether sponsored by a corporation, an association, a government
bureau, a hospital, a museum, a special department of public or
university library, or by a special research institute. For each of
these types of library devoted to a specific subject there will be
annotated lists of basic materials and guides to sources of informa-
tion with evaluations of each; lists of approved -subject headings
will be available for every kind of special library and for every
special subject; original classification schemes, as well as expan-
sions and adaptations of standard schemes, will be at the disposal of
the special librarian of the future; clipping and information files
will be in even more universal use, their problems solved and
methods standardized.

With such tools at hand, routine work will be reduced to a
minimum and the librarian will be able to take her rightful place
in the research program of her organization. Library reports will
be accepted as implicitly as the findings of laboratories in other
words the librarian will have become and be recognized as a re-
search expert rather than a mere technician. While this is true in

The Special Library

some cases even today, all too many o our workers are content
with mere technical perfection and are entangled in the coils of
red tape and routine.

With the whole trend of national thought turning to planning,
the special library profession will be in step with the times. There
will be a cooperative purchase plan, whereby duplication of ex-
pensive books, services, and magazines will be avoided entirely or,
at least, greatly reduced; cataloging, appraising and reviewing of
books, and many other library functions will be carried forward
on a cooperative basis; in the larger cities, the Special Libraries
Association will maintain reservoirs of seldom-used but important
special library material long sets of periodicals, almanacs, trade
directories, statistical handbooks, and the like.

I venture to say that it will not be many years before the prac-
tical, dollar-and-cents value of special library service will have been
so well demonstrated that every organization will have its informa-
tion service as automatically as it now has light, heat and elevator
service; that every big office building housing doctors will have its
medical library for the use of tenants; those housing lawyers, a
legal library; those housing engineers, a technical library, and so
on through all the professions; that research libraries will be sup-
ported cooperatively by organizations with like .interests so that
each may have access to adequate facilities at minimum cost.

Twenty years ago, John A. Lapp, one of the pioneers of the
special library movement, set forth the place of the special library
in the library profession in these words :

"It may be said in general that wherever there is a problem of
government, of business, of finance, of manufacturing, of com-
merce, there the idea of knowing all there is to know about the
problem must certainly prevail in the hands of men who think and
who act upon information rather than upon the rule of thumb.
The extension of this idea (by means of the special library) means
that the great storehouses of knowledge which have been created

The Library of Tomorrow

throughout the ages and which are being added to daily by re-
search and investigation shall find a means of making the knowl-
edge which they possess articulate in every-day affairs. Instead
of being hidden in the recesses of the general library, or instead of
being scattered and uncollected, it will be focused upon the jobs
which men perform and will help in the solution of problems which
come. . . . Enough knowledge is stored up to solve a great many
of the problems of the day if channels were open between the
storehouses of information, the executives who control policies and
the men who carry them out." 1

Special libraries have opened these channels and will continue to
broaden them by carrying out their slogan, "putting knowledge
to work." Librarianship has been defined as the art of directing the
great sources of power in boo\s. Special librarianship might well be
defined as the art of directing and releasing the great sources of
power in factual information of any kind whatsoever.

Can anyone doubt that the trend of the future is toward more
and more special libraries when he visualizes the extent of the
movement in every field, ranging from the large library with many
thousands of books and a staff of seventy-five to administer it to
the small one-man library which may consist of a few books, a few
file cases, a telephone, and a resourceful librarian? The same ideal
permeates the two extremes and all between, an ideal of service, of
putting knowledge to work, of providing facts where and when
they are needed, of knowing sources of information, of being ready
to meet the demand before it is made, of watching for trends that
forecast future needs and interests of the clientele served, by special-
ists who are incidentally librarians or by librarians who are inci-
dentally specialists. I think I shall be unchallenged in saying that
probably most important of the special library's equipment is hu-
man brains and human resourcefulness now and in the future-

1 P. F. Foster, "Information service for the community motion picture bureau,**
Special Libraries, IX (September-October, 1918), p.158-59.

The Future
of the Library of Congress

BY HERBERT PUTNAM

IN THE case of an institution the future of main concern is as to
function: how far and in what directions this is likely to be en-
larged, diversified or perhaps curtailed. But speculation as to func-
tions is futile without consideration of the resources necessary to
their exercise. In a library these include the plant, the collections
and the means of developing them, the accommodation for read-
ers, the bibliographical apparatus, the personnel and the means of
maintaining and further developing it; and any provision for
service relations of an extrinsic sort.

With the Annex, to be available shortly, the plant of the Library
of Congress will have a capacity double that of any other existing
library. 1 The bookstacks alone will accommodate 15,000,000 vol-
umes, and there will be, in addition, reasonable opportunity for the
housing of special collections. While no one of its reading rooms will
accommodate more than 250 readers, there will be in the two build-
ings adequate seating for a thousand, and so disposed as to bring
groups of readers within easy reach of the material with which they
are severally concerned. The concern of the Library being the re-
search investigator, rather than the ordinary student or the general

^Except perhaps the new library at Moscow which expects a capacity equal to ours.

179

The Library of Tomorrow

reader, such as overflow the municipal library of a metropolis,
provision for a thousand users at a time is likely to suffice indefi-
nitely. With the present collections of printed books and pam-
phletsat about 5,600,000 volumes, and an annual increase of about
200,000, the shelving for material of this class should suffice for
perhaps 40 years. The accommodation that may fall short will be
for the group collections manuscripts, maps, music, and prints-
for which the recent construction provides no corresponding addi-
tion, except through the release to their benefit of certain spaces
in the main building, and their participation in the advantage of
other spaces released to the personnel engaged in the treatment
of material before it reaches the reader.

For the further development of the collections, there may still be
reckoned the increment from copyright deposits, from official ex-
changes (documentary), from institutional exchanges, including
the Smithsonian, and from other government establishments by
transfer. The uncertain increments will be (a) those from govern-
ment appropriation and (b) those from gift or bequest. The gov-
ernment appropriation is notfixed,but depends upon the disposition
of Congress at each particular session. For general increase it has
been as high as $130,000 per annum; but it was reduced to $100,000
although there has been an increase from $50,000 to $70,000 in the
appropriation for law, and from $175,000 to $275,000 in the grant
for books in Braille and "talking books," as to which, however, the
Library of Congress is merely a contracting and disbursing agent.

Further appropriations for special purchases such as that of
$1,500,000 for the acquisition of the Vollbehr Collection of In-
cunabula are not to be counted on. And while the present normal
grant suffices reasonably for ordinary material, including repro-
ductions, any further additions of material of distinction must
depend upon gift or bequest. Precedent for them is already ample;
but continuance of them can be expected only as, and if, the public
continues to regard the Library as its national library, respects its
aims as truly cultural and its service as truly scientific, is impressed

180

Ftiture of the Library of Congress

by liberal support of It from the federal treasury, and has faith in
its administration as completely free from "politics."

The collection that 40 years ago was moved from the Capitol to
the new library building, though containing much material of his-
torical and even bibliographic interest, was, from a "collector's"
standpoint, commonplace. The collection today would add distinc-
tion to any group associated with it. The varied service of the
Library assures utility. The recent additions to the building in-
cluding the Rare Book Room provide both the security and the
refinements which the connoisseur demands for the sensitive ma-
terial that he values. With all these attractions, a collector could
scarcely find a superior depositary for his treasures, should he decide
to dedicate them to a public service, and have no commitments
either to a local institution or to the university which was his alma
mater. Thus far the universities have been most successful in secur-
ing his interest. But I am inclined to think that even allegiance to
them will not prevail as against the wider benefit and greater dis-
tinction which may be secured by a gift of the collection to the
national library, where it will be operated in a national service.
There is, therefore, prospect that, thus enriched, the collections of
the Library of Congress will, even in bibliographic distinction,
surpass those in any other American library, with the exception of
the fortunate four privately endowed: the John Carter Brown, the
Pierpont Morgan, the Henry E. Huntington, and the Folger.

International comparisons must, however, recognize that, as to
the entire body of literary records prior to the invention of print-
ing, the Library of Congress must bow to the great collections of
Europe and the British Isles. Practically all such (manuscript) rec-
ords in the original are permanently anchored, beyond its reach.
But, accepting this, there is a partial remedy offered by the modern
processes of facsimile, which, though they leave to its possessor the
distinction of the original, may secure a reproduction serviceable to
the student and even satisfying to the paleographer. This remedy
the Library has for years been applying; and the policy pursued will

The Library of Tomorrow

result in an accumulation at Washington of facsimiles of manu-
scripts and of bibliographic rarities which will fairly exempt die
American scholar from the necessity of a trip abroad.

The Bibliographic Apparatus. In type, this seems accepted as ap-
propriate, the practice of the Library in cataloging conforming to
the accepted standard, and its main catalog being in the "dictionary"
form (author, tide and subject) affected by most American librar-
ies. There is, however, apprehension that in this form, with the
tendency to multiply entries including analytical and cross ref-
erencesit may break under its own weight and volume. This may
conceivably lead to some limitation or modification.

The cards which compose this catalog are prepared by a staff of
experts and are subscribed for by 6,000 regular purchasers, nearly
all of them libraries. The fulness and scholarly accuracy of the en-
tries on these cards require so much labor that the output cannot
begin to keep pace with incoming material Ideally, this service
should constitute a central cataloging bureau for the entire country
but, actually, it falls far short of doing so. To achieve this ideal a
larger stall of catalogers is needed, as well as a larger appropriation
for printing and distribution of the cards and for the acquisition
of books. All this points to the desirability of a higher charge for
the cards. Subscribers would still save large sums as compared with
the cost of individual cataloging and the Library of Congress would
be more nearly reimbursed for the cost of maintaining the service.

Recent subsidized experiments in cooperative cataloging contain
great promise and should be continued on a permanent basis. They
have achieved the cataloging of numerous sets which the Library
of Congress alone could not deal with expeditiously, and the re-
sulting entries, printed by the Library, have amplified its salable
stock in particulars extremely important to libraries with scholarly
collections.

I should anticipate on the part of the American Library Associa-
tion an increasing sense of responsibility toward all these biblio-
graphic undertakings, and even an aggressive effort to make clear

182

Future of the Library of Congress

to Congress the general benefits which they promote and so secure
the additional resources necessary to their efficiency.

Publications. Apart from the cards (a major publishing enter-
prise) the publications of the Library have been numerous. It does
not venture or even think warranted the expense of comprehen-
sive bibliographies, but it has issued numerous "Lists of selected
titles," occasionally still issues them, and at least manifolds in some
form many such lists useful for reference on the initial approach
to a subject.

The publication by the Library of texts in extenso, even if in its
collections, seems to me questionable. In the case of the Van Buren
autobiography the expense was inconsiderable; in that of the Jour-
nals of the Continental Congress and of the Records of the Virginia
Company, though very great, it seemed warranted as saving wear
and tear upon the originals, and extending the service of the docu-
ments to scholars and students at a distance, to whom as tools they
are indispensable. But as a rule the outlay would be more appro-
priately applied to the production and diffusion of catalogs which
will announce the possession of a text, or calendars which will guide
to its use.

Publication under its auspices of texts, catalogs, calendars or
guides, where the expense is borne by some outside contribution,
rests upon a different basis. I should expect more examples of it as
the realization grows of the Library's unique facilities, including
especially the expert advice and direction freely afforded by the
specialists within its staff.

Special Projects. It is not merely in bibliographic undertakings
that the resources of the Library have been thus utilized. Congress
itself has during the past ten years committed to it the execution
of several projects outside of its normal functions, yet not within
the scope of any other federal agency. They may, as in the case
of the Index to state legislation, recognize its possession of die
material necessary and the apparatus; or, as in the case of the books
in Braille and the talking books, the familiarity of its staff with a

The Library of Tomorrow

certain need and with the technique necessary to meet it. They
assume the general competence of the Library in administrative
matters, its sense of responsibility, and its accountability to the
General Accounting Office for the disbursement of every fund
committed to it, from whatever source derived.

Similar considerations have operated to commit to it projects
subsidized by individuals or foundations. It cannot of course ac-
cept them unless they bear some relation, if not to its functions as
a Library, at least to its larger motives in the advancement of
learning and the diffusion of culture. The Library is a convenient
agency. Its plant, equipment and organization supply without
effort resources which obviate a drain upon the contributed fund
for administrative expenses. Experts upon its staff may, without
charge, supply tested counsel. Its numerous official and institutional
relations give authority to its representations and influence to any
appeal that it may make for cooperation. And it has prestige as
the one agency of the Federal government concerned, not merely
with knowledge, but with culture. A practical economy is in its
franking privilege.

One may therefore foresee a steadily increasing number and
variety of projects committed to it or at least centering at it: projects
of a bibliographic nature, of course, but also projects of historical or
scientific research, and enterprises in music and the fine arts, of
which the past 10 years have furnished examples.

Their probable nature may be suggested by the variety of those
already under way: e.g. the systematic reproduction, in photostat
and film, of source material for American history located in foreign
institutions or archive offices, the administration and circulation of
the rotographs of literary texts secured by the Modern Language
Association, the Census of mediaeval manuscripts in American col-
lections, and the "Guides" (to law and to diplomatic history) ; the
productive studies in the history and culture of China and Japan
under the conduct of its Oriental Division; the development, in
the Division of Fine Arts, of the general Index to portraits, of the

184

Future of the Library of Congress

Archive of American architecture, of the Cabinet of American
illustrators; and the provision, under the will of Joseph Pennell,
for the maintenance here of a Bureau of Chalcography similar in
purpose to those at Paris, Rome and Madrid a bureau that will
issue popular editions, at nominal cost, of masterly prints of which
the plates are in its possession.

In connection with the Music Division, the special projects have
included the development (largely through work in the field) of
the Archive of American folJ^ song and the numerous actual per-
formances of miscellaneous musical programs of high distinction:
programs given not merely at Washington but in many other cities,
and also, through broadcasts, reaching out to the entire country,
and beyond its borders.

To the many such enterprises whose aim is to advance exact
knowledge there are thus already added many whose purpose is
to promote an understanding and appreciation of the purely cul-
tural arts. It is difficult to predict a limit to them, should the interest
continue in thus utilizing the Library as the effective medium and
agency.

The Library of Congress Trust Fund Board. Endowments for
such purposes have been attracted and facilitated by the creation
14 years ago of the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board, which
can accept and administer any fund committed to it the income of
which is to be applied "For the benefit of the Library, its collec-
tions, or its service." The funds already in its custody, or supplying
income, total nearly $2,000,000; and the disposition to add to them is
likely to increase when the public realizes that the Board may treat
any such fund as a permanent loan to the federal treasury, upon
which interest will be paid perpetually at the rate of 4 per cent per
annum even though the Government is habitually borrowing at
a much lower rate. An equivalent income from ordinary investment
can no longer be counted upon by trustees of such funds.

Interlibrary Loan and Information Service. As regards these the
future need only amplify practices already established and the gen-

The Library of Tomorrow

eral understanding of them. For years, the Library has indicated
its willingness to lend, within certain limitations, the chief of which
are (i) that the book requested is one that at the moment can be
spared from reference use, and the privileged demands at Wash-
ington, (2) that it is not a book within the ordinary duty of a local
library to supply, (3) that it is sought in the interest of serious
research, by a person likely to render the use of it productive, and
(4) that it is capable of transportation and exterior use without
peril to its own existence or integrity.

This latter consideration is not, however, applied to bar the loan
of a book merely because it is costly, rare, or difficult to replace.
Such features may cause hesitation, but they are not accepted as
conclusive. The merit of the request may override them, on the
principle that, if the Library refuses to lend a rare book, a costly
book, or an unwieldly book, it may be withholding from an im-
portant service perhaps the most important in its career many a
volume which would thus remain static on its shelves while the
opportunity beckoned for a dynamic service abroad. The number
of loans is not yet impressive, but it already includes South America,
Europe, and the Far East.

In its informational service, not involving the loan of the mate-
rial itself, the Library extends the benefit, not merely of its collec-
tions, its bibliographic apparatus, and the skill of its technical staff,
but also the knowledge and experience of the specialists on its
"Faculty" and of those other specialists at Washington upon whom
it freely draws. As a Bureau of Information it has therefore a con-
siderable range, efficiency and authority. And it is responsive, as
no other agency of the government is certain to be. An inquirer
may count upon its disposition as he has learned to count upon
the disposition of his local public library. The result has already
been to direct to It a volume and variety of inquiries which taxes
the physical abilities of its staff. No limit to them can be predicted.
For a large group of them its Union Catalog, including already
over 10,000,000 entries, supplies a unique resource, indefinite in, its

186

Future of the Library of Congress

possibilities. And the Union Catalog is but one unit of many cal-
culated to offset its lack of particular material for research by
identifying the actual location of it elsewhere. A rapidly increasing
use of the film will both amplify its own apparatus and serve to
duplicate sections of this for the benefit of other libraries. The
Annex is to contain accommodation for a competent filming, as
well as photostat, plant. A television service is not improbable.

Some Constitutional Considerations. The Library of Congress, as
constituted under the Appropriation Act of 1897-98, is a sort of
hybrid. It remained a part of the legislative establishment; the
librarian was not to be under the control of any department head,
and his reports were to be made, not even to the President, but
direct to Congress. Yet the functions assigned him were distinctly
executive, for he was empowered to select and appoint his staff,
"considering only fitness," and to "make rules and regulations" for
the government of the institution.

These provisions and relations still subsist and, anomalous as
they seem, entail certain advantages which during the past forty
years have proved very convenient. One is that the Library estimates
cannot be revised by the Budget Bureau; another is that they come
before a subcommittee of Congress in an appropriation bill which
is concentrated upon only a few items. The needs of the Library
are therefore not submerged in any huge measures making provi-
sion for the executive departments. There is also the supposition,
warranted by experience, that so long as the Library remains the
Library of Congress, Congress will take a special pride in it, and
feel a special responsibility for it, that would fail if it were detached.

While this sense of proprietorship demands from the Library
special consideration for the needs of Congress and its members,
Congress has never grudged the services that the Library renders
to other institutions and to the public at large. The one major peril
is that, the other personnel employed by Congress being subjects
of patronage, there may develop a disposition to reduce to the same
category the personnel of the Library, whose selection, appoint-

The Library of Tomorrow

meat, promotion, or dismissal have for the past 40 years been
within the exclusive authority of the Librarian. Such a disposition
might not take the form of a specific proposal, but, vaguely in-
fluencing individual members, may cause demands embarrassing
to the administration. That such demands can be withstood is
proved by the efficiency of the organization that has been developed
during the past period from a staff of 130 to one of nearly 1,000
with a professional repute everywhere unsurpassed. If, however, in
the future the pressure should become excessive, the Librarian may
require outside support in resisting it. This support should come
particularly from the American Library Association, which must
recognize that the efficiency of the national library affects the wel-
fare of the entire community of American libraries, as well as the
entire community of American scholars.

It is conceivable that at some future time it may seem wise to
substitute for the Library's present constitution an organic act,
more definite and more comprehensive, which will recognize the
institution as a distinct governmental unit, completely executive.
A less radical step would be a designation by law, as "The National
Library." That designation alone, without specific detachment,
would relieve the Library of such inconvenience as resides in the
implication of the present title.

I have heretofore deprecated any such movement; but there are
conceivable conditions under which I might favor it.

The Users. Apart from the obvious constituency resident at Wash-
ington, and including the scientific bureaus of the government, that
which in its future development seems most significant consists of
two groups: (i) the mature investigators occupied with research
"calculated to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge" and (2) the
student pursuing studies for an advanced degree.

The first of these is represented by visiting investigators who
come to it as individuals, the second may in the future include
groups organized under some program adopted by the universities.
It may not always involve a program of observation and study

188

Future of the Library of Congress

conducted by accompanying instructors though that phase Is al-
ready in evidence but it will imply some systematic plan for
directing the graduate student to Washington, equipping him for
his sojourn there, and assuring him the most effective use of the
facilities. Incidentally, it may include some more definite assurance
to his alma mater that he has employed his time effectively.

A University Center. In 1916 a conference of university teachers
in history, political science and economics was held to consider
what might be done to further and make more effective recourse
to Washington of students in those subjects. There resulted a pro-
posal for the creation of "A University Center for Higher Studies
in Washington," with particulars that included supervision under
a resident director, a permanent secretariat, courses by visiting pro-
fessors, conferences participated in by officials of the government;
and a community life, to be fostered by the construction of dormi-
tories, refectories, rooms for social intercourse all to be located
within easy reach of the Library of Congress, which would con-
stitute the common laboratory.

A Vision. The project remains only on paper. But it may con-
ceivably interest some philanthropist in the investment necessary
for the construction of the plant and for a suitable endowment.
The belief that it will do so caused the Secretary of the Council of
Learned Societies, Dr. Waldo G. Leland, some 10 years ago to
indulge in a vision (which he confided to me) of the Capitol Hill
of the future. Dr. Leland's visions are not those of a mere visionary.
His nature precludes mere speculation, as does his responsibility as
the guiding influence within the Council in the shaping of pro-
grams severely practical. Yet in 1927 he declared to me that he
foresaw, on Capitol Hill, an establishment in the nature of a medie-
val university, with the Library of Congress as its magnetic and
inspiring center.

Should that dream come to pass, the inspiration will consist, not
in the books of their own motion, nor in the apparatus; but in a
personnel which will vivify the collections, interpret them, by its

18$

, The Library of Tomorrow

own example notably expound them; a personnel that will create
an atmosphere grateful to the visitor of experience and likely to
impress itself for a lifetime upon the impressionable student; an
atmosphere of sure but tolerant learning, of genial cultivation, of
unaffected good breeding friendly, hospitable, sympathetic, com-
municativecompounded of scholarship, of altruism, and those
qualities which Lowell imputes to the true gentleman-~"that good
taste which is the conscience of the mind, as conscience is the good
taste of the soul."

Is it fantastic to provide the opportunity for such a contact in a
public institution, accessible, without formality, not merely to the
"elect," but to the underprivileged citizen quite inexperienced in
the approaches to culture? How otherwise can our national library
realize the conception of it which Truslow Adams and others have
found warranted of the most democratic of our institutions? In
what superior way can the lesson and the emotion represented by
this huge accumulation of literature be made an effective influence
in the ideals and conduct of that large section of our population
which lacks a stimulating environment, and cannot even afford
the benefits of a college career?

We take concern for their cultural needs by assuring beauty and
power in our monuments, public buildings, and art galleries, whose
appeal is direct. In the case of a library we can meet them only
through the mediation of a competent personnel which in liaison
with the collections will serve to interpret them.

A Partial Realization. The creation of such a personnel in the
nation's library is my dream, not opposed to Dr. Leland's, but an
obvious complement to his. Its partial incorporation is in fact here,
in the "Faculty" already gathered under experimental gifts and
grants : that group within its staff which includes the incumbents
of its "Chairs," 2 who have administrative duties but are also spe-
cialists in fields of subject matter, with a knowledge and experience

2 The existing "Chairs" with permanent endowments are o American history*
geography, fine arts, music, and aeronautics.

igo

Future of the Library of Congress

equivalent to those of a university professor; and the holders of
its "Consultantships," 3 who serve merely as advisers (to the Library
and the public), but bring to that service a similar equipment.
Further "Chairs" will certainly be established; and the perpetua-
tion, on an adequate scale, of the corps of consultants requires only
a further general grant of $1,000,000 even less which will pro-
vide the permanent endowment necessary.

A national university has for years been a desire of certain edu-
cators. In the lack of it, the title is occasionally bestowed upon us.
We do not crave it, must indeed challenge it, as ignoring the func-
tions of a university and implying responsibilities which a library
can never exercise. We readily admit, however, that there are func-
tions and qualities of the Library of Congress, which, if given
resource for future development, will cause it to be regarded as
much more than a mere library, and in its potencies not inferior to
the typical university* But the title "library" has also a certain
nobility; and our sufficient ambition should be to ennoble it still
further.

The Consultants, from time to time provided for by grants, have been in the fields
of European history, church history, political science, physical science, economics,
sociology, philosophy, classical literature, Hispanic literature and English poetry.
But except in two cases the existing provision for them is merely temporary.

COLOPHON

This volume designed by Harold English,
has been composed in Linotype Granjon, a
recutting of one of the types of Claude
Garamond, named in honor of Robert
Granjon, a tvell-J(nou>n printer and type-
cutter of the sixteenth century. Typography
by Norman W. Forgue. Printed by Louis
Graf on a wove paper specially made by
the Worthy Paper Company. Bound in Ban-
croft linen by the John F. Cuneo Company