1

intense and more important one, of how to increase the value of the library as a means of education. That the library is or should be one of the most vital of educational factors, you of all people need not be told, for it is you who have made it such. You agree with Draper that "The state which can put a mark upon its map wherever there is a town or village library, and find its map well covered, will take care of itself." With MacCunn do you also agree that "Many an end really within the individual's reach is never grasped simply because it is concealed by the screen of ignorance; and many a man in later years can, with bitter, unavailing regret, see clearly how his whole career might have been different if only this end or that had been brought within his ken by the written or the spoken word."

2

The school and the library are parts of one and the same great organic institution. Whether housed in the school building or in a separate structure on the campus, or in a public building, managed by a special board and financed by the municipality, the library is part and parcel of the educational scheme. The books of the library are as much a part of the school machinery as are the various pieces of apparatus in the physical laboratory, the biological specimens, the collections used in the study of mineralogy, or the tools and materials in the craft shop or the school kitchen. To think of the library as apart from education and as simply a desirable aid to the school, is to place it in the amusement column. Of course we must have a care for relative values and your speaker fully realizes the legitimate place the library plays as a means of entertainment and recreation." "After the church and the school, the free public library is the most effective influence for good in America," said Theodore Roosevelt. This is stating in another form that the church, the school and the library are three of the elements, without which any educational organization is less than perfect.

Your speaker had occasion to say recently that with building and equipment and playground and library facilities and all that goes to constitute the material and physical side of a modern school, the plant would

1 American Education, p. 46.

2 The Making of Character, p. 193.

prove inadequate to meet the demands imposed, unless the teacher of purpose and of power was the guiding genius of the whole. Personality in the teacher counts for more than all else on the success side of the balance sheet. So is it with your librarian. Before building or equipment or books, the librarian stands supreme. The librarian is the center of the system and all else depends upon her.

The first element necessary in making more efficient the library you represent is a more efficient you. For what constitutes a library? A beautiful building constructed by private funds or public bond issue and raised amid charming surroundings of lawn and lake and grove? Furniture and equipment of the most modern type? A large collection of books? Too often this is indeed the library. It is a show place. It constitutes Exhibit A" when visitors are taken proudly about town on a tour of inspection. But what of the librarian? Do her townspeople, her friends and associates, realize the part she is daily called upon to play in shaping the ideas and ideals of the community? A man or woman of personality, of tact, and one trained in library lore and possessing a knowledge of books, of teaching, and particularly of individuals such will be the librarian in fact. And a humble structure housing a handful of well-selected volumes may be the library of real educational value in any community.

By all means have the beautiful building where possible. But ambition to possess "the best library building in the state", to be able to furnish on the initial request, the novel fresh from the press; or to show in the annual report an unparalleled percentage of increase in stock - these are not necessarily commendable ambitions either on the part of librarian or board. The vital questions are: Has the individual been reading, what does he read, and how? Is taste developing? Is there an increased demand for the best in history and biography and science and poetry and travel and art? Are books read, or do patrons go through the library as the average tourist visits an art gallery or Europe?"

sees

How often has there come home to me the distinction as between a real library,

and a collection of books, when in one or another city throughout the country I have been shown the library—a beautiful, cold, unsympathetic monument in stone and steel, its exterior without a blemish, its rooms palatial, its shelves spotless, and ninety per cent of the books light fiction, novels of the passing moment, originally printed serially in the magazines. Or interest has been centered upon volumes of such specialized character that the dust of months is upon them or the leaves uncut. Fiction in this instance is fact. Here the main business of the librarian is indeed to be up to date with the latest fiction, and to see that the building is kept immaculate and the rooms absolutely quiet. Seeing this I have said: "What a waste of the people's money!"

All

Other kinds of libraries there are and other types of librarians. This brings me to the second point in the discussion. librarians must be teachers in spirit and temperament, and all teachers must understand how to work with books. Some one has truly said in speaking of the untrained that "you should not put drugs of which you know nothing into a body of which you know less." The individual who understands books slightly and boys and girls not at all can not be expected to make either a good librarian or an excellent teacher. It is then not only necessary to train librarians for their profession, but all normal and training schools must offer courses of instruction in the use of the library to prospective teachers.

The replies to a recent inquiry as to library instruction in normal schools show that of thirty-two schools replying (and representing eighteen different states), twenty schools offer instruction in the use of the library. Four schools offer no instruction whatever; one replies "yes and no"; in one school occasional instruction is given; in one instruction is incidental; in two there is individual instruction, and in three courses are in contemplation. The number of lessons per year range from one, two or four in several schools to sixty in one school. Between these limits one school offers ten to eighteen lessons, three give eighteen to twenty, one school thirty. In only twelve schools is the work obligatory and in all but three of these

the instruction is given by the librarian. Where library work is optional, either the librarian or a faculty member gives the instruction.'

While extremely suggestive as indicating the trend of affairs, it is quite evident that as yet few school boards, superintendents, principals, teachers or librarians have seriously considered the necessity of preparing all our teachers in the elements of library work. Such work in normal schools and education departments in colleges must be obligatory, for regardless of grade or type of school, and in whatever subject, the teacher must handle books. And no student should graduate from such a school until he or she is proficient in the elements of library administration. This knowledge is of greater importance than much else the student is required to know. If programs are now overfull, room must be made through the process of elimination; for library work is not a subject as in mathematics or Latin. "It is a method of work." Without it no work can be effective.

One has but to study conditions as they exist, whether in the public or the school library, to note that adults, not to speak of boys and girls, are practically at sea when making investigations. In a general way the location of certain books may be known. How to find books on a particular subject new to one; how to locate material bearing upon the text in use; how to find parallel studies, or substitutes, provided the required book be missing; how to separate the wheat from the chaff, and gather up the main points in a discussion; how to study to the best advantage in fact how to use the library: on these matters the average boy or girl, man or woman is comparatively ignorant. Many well-meaning students spend more time in groping through the library in a fruitless search than they give to reading, and many a one remains away from the library altogether when now and again he finds a few moments for study, knowing that only a prolonged period will reveal the desired material.

And with the book in hand how few know how to use it. Surely you have all had occasion to wish that the school taught pupils in the art of study. I sat recently in the library of a great university observing a number of

the make-up of most of them the art of concentration seemed entirely lacking. Pages were turned listlessly. Notes were made, passages were read and reread, positions were shifted. Only for the briefest periods were minds centered upon the subject in hand. Five minutes of concentrated, consecutive, understanding study will bring better results than will prolonged reaches of time given under such conditions. And these college people, well meaning and ordinarily bright and intelligent, are typical of those found the country over. Conditions with high school and grade pupils are even worse. Not interested, you say. They simply do not know how to use books. Is it then the duty of the teacher and the librarian to first instruct readers in this art, or is the time to be given to the mechanics of school keeping and to library routine? Welcome the time when with Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge Soul forward, headlong, into a book profound,

Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth

'Tis then we get the right good from a book."

Every well-regulated school of several teachers should have a carefully selected list of books and a librarian to preside over them. This librarian should be a member of the faculty. Every public librarian should possess the instincts of the true teacher. Much of the pupil's time during the first days of school (and here I speak particularly of the last two years of the elementary and the secondary school period) should be spent in the library, or in the recitation room with portions of the library brought to him. Where the school is without a librarian, the public library should furnish a demonstrator. And in any event, all pupils should report to the public library for instruction. They should be taught in groups. The first lesson should acquaint the students in a general way with their library home. They should know each member of the library staff, should visit every room and be told something of the units composing the entire plant. They should know how a book is ordered, how shipped, what happens when it reaches

1 Aurora Leigh.

the receiving room, how it is classified, cataloged and shelved. In the beginning, specific books need not be mentioned, but those covering the general subjects in which the particular class is most interested may be located. Subjects overlap and a given book may touch upon a variety of subjects while another may deal distinctly with a narrow phase of a given subject. This the pupils should understand, and thus they may more readily appreciate the basis of classification of books. The main features of the use of the card catalog may be illustrated, together with the value of the subject, author and title index and how to use the cross references. All of this, in simplified fashion, can be given to a class in one or two lessons. And together with the instruction on the use of the library there can be given, here and there, hints on authorship, the value of good books, methods of opening and handling new volumes, the place of good literature and of books as friends. All this will stimulate the class to a better care of books and an increased desire to begin a collection that shall develop into a library.

As opportunity offers, specific details should be presented. Many high school pupils and most children believe their textbooks contain practically all the information available on a given topic. Indeed, you librarians have still a task in convincing many otherwise excellent teachers that they need go outside the prescribed textbook for teaching material. When failing to find a particular reference the boy or girl does not know how to locate other references just as good perhaps; may not even know there are other references in existence. Or, having a subject to investigate, the student may have forgotten the name of the author cited to him. He may know the author and can not recall the subject or the title. A few minutes spent with a class, working on a typical case, will result in the saving of hours to each pupil during the year. Nothing will tend to draw young people to the library for serious work as will a knowledge on their part of how to use the tools.

BOOK READERS IN PROCESS

The recent agitation for an increase of postage on periodicals has called attention

anew to the amazing rise of periodical publications and their truly prodigious multiplication in this country in the last quarter century, a phenomenon which invites attempt at explanation and, after that, query as to whether the movement be inherently one for good or bad.

The reasons for it are not far to seek. First, of course, comes the low postal rate which periodicals were early granted, at first, if not now, as a subsidy, and against which books could not compete in carriage. Second, and an even greater factor, has been the growth of advertising, which has shifted the burden of cost from reader to advertiser, and again rendered it impossible for books to compete with the magazines on anything like equal terms of bulk and price. Third has been the change in the temper of the reading public, the spirit of the age. This change has itself been due to several factors -the advent of an immense immigration unused to sustained reading, the growth of an equally great rural reading class, an increasing distrust of the newspapers, too often nowadays the organs" of certain men or certain interests, and a dangerous popular impatience with the deliberate solidity and tempered balance of the typical book publication.

It is difficult to foresee the ultimate effect of the magazine flood on the American reading public. That it contributes to the superficiality of which we are as a nation only too often accused is likely; but that it sharpens our national alertness of thought and action seems no less true. Magazines are cheap - that is their distinguishing mark yet in scores of cases they maintain a standard which many a book publisher would do well to envy and emulate. When they are reprehensible it is almost never from actual viciousness, but because they offer merely harmless and worthless trash, "entertainment" for a people that is entertainment mad.

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"America, and specially young America," said the Springfield Republican recently, "is threatened with a surfeit of entertainment. Never was clever entertainment of a mediocre sort so lavished upon a population ill-trained for self-defense by discipline, ideals and habits of intellectual effort. Even imperial Rome could not offer its 'circenses' every day, and when the amphitheatre was

closed the capital must have been a dull place, with no cinematographic shows, no new Everybody's, no colored comic supplements, no vaudeville with new stunts."

The danger is that periodical reading, artificially stimulated by an extremely low postage rate and advertising subsidies, may swamp real intellectual activity. It has been repeatedly said of late years that we are taking our thinking, ready made for us, in periodical doses. The scholarly but authoritative book is too often denominated "dry," and the superficial but sparkling magazine summary relied on in its place. We are becoming prone to half-baked generalizations on insufficient premises. Public interest in contemporary events was never more instant and acute; sustained thought in the individual, carefully balanced, documented and coherent ratiocination, never more rare.

Yet the undeniable fact that, notwithstanding the immense spread of periodical literature, more books are being bought and read than ever before points the optimistic view that may be taken of the situation. If it is true, as has been stated, that the reading public of Mr Hearst's newspapers undergoes a complete change on an average of every seven years, it is probably no less true that at each ascending stage of literary development there is a similar progression of clientele.

It is one of the splendid things about the reading habit that it tends more and more to refine the reading taste. The trivial fiction that was eagerly devoured five years ago seem's trivial today; the liking for absurd sentimentalism and sensational exaggeration has unconsciously been transformed into regard for something a step or two higher, cleaner, saner.

So the Hearst habitué, recruited from the ranks of those who have never read at all, gradually outgrows his first literary mentor. From cheap newspaper to better newspaper, from paper to magazine, and from magazine to book is the easy and natural advance. Thousands of readers all over the United States are making that advance every day of the year.

In the end nothing will satisfy any earnest reader save the printed book-to read and to possess it. We of the book-trade should therefore be grateful to the periodical press, good, bad and indifferent, which, however