Chapter XII: Part 12

This question comes up especially in connection with certain adjuncts to a music collection--pianola rolls and phonograph records. These are both of great aid in assisting the public to understand the language of music, which they must do before they learn to read it. They may be profitably used, of course in connection with reading, and yet the pleasure of following a piano player or a phonograph with the printed score seems to be known to few. Every library must judge for itself whether it can afford to put money into these adjuncts but in most cases it is unnecessary to do so, it being easy to get the rolls and records by donation. In doing this at my own library I have been struck with the trivial or so-called “popular” character of most of the rolls received. I am told, also that those who borrow them (and they have gone out “like hot cakes”) are largely persons who have not visited the library before. I believe that this sort of music is popular not because it is trivial or “trashy”, but because it is easy to understand. There is some music that is both good and easy--easy to understand and easy to read. Schumann’s Album for the young will occur to anyone. The compositions of Ludwig Schytte are modern examples. But the general impression that good music is difficult both to read and appreciate--is “high-brow”, in fact; and that easy music is always trivial and poor, is a deduction, I am afraid from experience. It is certainly not in the nature of things. However, so long as we want easy music, both to hear and to read, and a good deal of it is trashy, I can see nothing to do but to use the trashy music. With the music rolls triviality is all we have to object to--the ceaseless repetition of the same phrases and harmonies. We must remember, however, that these are not boresome to the beginner. It takes a good deal of repetition to make one tired of a musical phrase. And there is absolutely no question of active badness here--only of worthlessness.

When we come to phonograph records, however, we encounter something different. So far as these are purely musical, what has been said of the music rolls applies to them also, but many of them are vocal, and the words are often far below library standard. When a record is rejected for its words, the music, of course, must go with it, although as music it may be quite unexceptionable.

The location of the music collection is affected by the purpose for which it is maintained. A collection for scholars alone should certainly be in a separate room, with an expert custodian. But when we regard the collection as a means of popularizing music and of improving popular musical taste, the matter takes on another aspect. A person who comes to the library for the purpose of visiting the music room will find it, no matter where it may be, but the reader who needs to have his attention called to it or in whose case it must compete for use with other books, will never do so. Going back to our analogy with general literature we may note that when a librarian wishes to promote the circulation of some special class of literature or call attention to some particular book or books, the last thing he would think of doing would be to set them apart in a special room. What he does do is to place them conspicuously in the most frequented spot in his library.

This is, of course, only one side of the question. No one can browse in a collection of books unless he knows how to read; and so long as music readers can not read “to themselves”, the reading of instrumental pieces can not be done without the aid of the actual instrument. Even when one can read music to himself well enough to pick out what he wants it may aid him to be able to perform the piece on the instrument for which it was written. Now the most frequented spot in the library, where I recommend that the music collection shall be displayed, is not the place for a piano or for its use. This must necessarily be in a separate room.

These are not, however, absolutely irreconcilable requirements. It is not necessary that the music and the instrument should be in the same room. A sound-proof or a distantly-located room, for the instruments, may be used by those who wish to perform pieces before selecting them, even if no music at all is shelved in the room. This room should preferably be as near as possible to the music shelves, and if it is it must of course be sound proof.

Going back again for a moment to our analogy, the provision of a sound proof music room corresponds to the creation of a similar room for the ordinary reader, where he may take his books and read them aloud to see how they sound. The mere statement shows us how far behind our ability to read language is our ability to read music.

When I first began to present these ideas, which seemed to me to be absurdly self-evident, it was gradually borne in upon me that most people considered them new and strange, both those who agreed with me and those who disagreed. But without going into the question of what music can and can not convey to the human mind, it seems clear to me that both music and language succeed in conveying _something_ to the human organism, and do it principally by sound-waves. In the case of both, there is a way of writing down what is to be conveyed, so that the record may be used by another person who wishes to convey it by sound, or so that a person, sufficiently skilled, may convey it to himself, without making an audible sound. These facts seem to me to establish so complete an analogy that we may treat music in a library precisely as we treat ordinary books, both in selection, distribution and use. If to complete the analogy we must insist on certain changes in the attitude toward music of both educators and readers, this kind of missionary work is after all no more and no other than that which the modern librarian, especially in America, is often called upon to do.

I am a believer in the mission of music. The public library can do no more helpful thing to our modern life than to assist the public to understand and love it. The fact that it is not a representative art makes it all the more valuable as a means of detaching the mind from the things of this earth and transporting it to a separate world. A beautiful picture or statue or poem is anchored to the ground by the necessary associations of its subject matter. Music has no such anchor. It is free to soar, and soar it does, bearing with it the listening soul into regions that have no relations with the things of every day life. It may rest or it may stimulate; it may gladden or depress; but it does so by means of its own, not by reminding us of the stimulating or depressing things of our own past experience.

In the multifarious mission of the Public Library, as we Americans see it, surely the popularization of good music is to assume no unimportant place.

TWO CARDINAL SINS

The sins of which I purpose to speak are Duplication and Omission. They are peculiar to no one class of persons, to no one business, profession or institution. They are ubiquitous and omnipresent. Those who use the Book of Common Prayer acknowledge them when they confess that they have done those things that they ought not to have done and have left undone those things that they ought to have done. This statement covers other sins, both of commission and omission, than those that I have specified above, but it includes both of them. The peculiarity of Duplication and Omission is that they are complementary so far as the labor and expense involved in them is concerned. Their existence is like that of a surplus and a debt in the same purse. To bewail them is like complaining because you have a thousand dollars that you know not how to invest and at the same time because you owe a thousand that you can not pay. The whole world is out of joint because it is doing twice things that need to be done only once, and at the same time is not doing at all things that ought to be done. The man with the thousand-dollar surplus and the debt of the same amount may obtain quick relief by paying his indebtedness with his balance. The world will be relieved when it takes the energy and the money now expended in wasteful duplication and puts it into the doing of those things that are now left undone because the energy and money necessary to do them are expended wastefully. It is very easy, is it not? As easy as adding plus 10 to minus 10 and getting zero. The surplus and the debt, the duplications and the omissions, extinguish each other and neither of them bothers us any more. Unfortunately there are practical obstacles that do not present themselves in the case of the algebraic sum. These difficulties might occur in the case of the man with the surplus who owed money, if he could be supposed ignorant both of his balance and of his debt, while suffering the inconveniences due to both. This ignorance is the rule, rather than the exception, in the case of ordinary duplications and omissions. Either the duplication is not noticed, because at first sight it does not appear to be a duplication, or when recognized as such, its existence does not seem to be of any consequence. Besides this, both duplications and omissions seem to some to be part of the natural order of things ordained for us and not to be disturbed by the hand of impiety.

One hardly knows when to begin with illustrations where there is such a wealth of material, whether we seek it in civics, or history, or science, or business or in domestic economy. As you have doubtless surmised I intend to take the Public Library as my chief field of research, but I must maintain or at least justify my thesis of universality by a preliminary trip through a much broader field.

First let us take the age-old universal grievance, the unequal distribution of wealth, which from our present standpoint we may simplify by saying that one man has two dollars where he needs only one and another has no dollars at all--omission in his case where there is duplication in the other. I know there are some people who fail to see two sins in these simple and well-known facts, but most of us nowadays are recognizing that it is at least an unsatisfactory state of affairs. Where we disagree is that some feel that however unsatisfactory it may be there is nothing to be done about it; that others who agree that it is unsatisfactory are unable to agree on what they would consider satisfactory; and that even those who think they know this are unable to get together on a method of attaining what they desire. These various kinds and degrees of disagreement constitute the reason why these two particular sins of duplication and omission continue to be committed.

Now let us take a very big jump, from the general theory of socialism down to the golf-clubs of Middlefield, Mass.--a real place, though I have taken the liberty to change its name. With a population of about a thousand, this model village supported until recently two of these institutions for no other reason than the general tendency to wasteful duplication, already noted. The links on the West Side and those on the East Side had both their ardent partisans. Each club considered the existence of the other a shame and an outrage and each was only too willing to abolish duplication by consolidation, always provided its own particular links should be the ones to survive.

For years this small place supported these two clubs, each with its club-house, grounds, dues and assessments. Those who were not partisans had to belong to both, to keep the peace. Meanwhile, the town greatly needed a small social club where the retired city merchants, professional men and artists who largely made up its population could assemble occasionally, have a game of pool or bridge and drink a cup of tea. But their incomes were not large and they had to keep up those two golf clubs. The situation is so typical that I am enlarging on it a little. I wish that the outcome were typical too. That outcome was that after years of discussion the clubs were merged, one of the links was discontinued, and the village now enjoys the little social club that it needed. An omission has been filled by doing away with a duplication.

The church history of many a small place is very much to the point. We see three or four denominational bodies struggling with small congregations, inadequate buildings and general poverty when by uniting they might fill all these lacks simply by saving what they are now spending on duplication. Doctrinal differences are said to keep them apart; but to the non-theological mind these differences are not greater than these that must always exist between thoughtful men in the same religious body. It is pleasant to see an occasional lapse into sanity, shown by the union of such churches and the consequent strengthening and growth of a town’s religious life. Probably it is not too much to say that the whole problem of Christian Unity is but a phase of this general question of duplication and omission.

In the business world our two sins flourish like green bay trees. Small villages have two groceries and no hardware store; large cities may be overrun with one trade while there is lack of another. These things ought to adjust themselves, but they do not. One can pick out duplication and omission in the stock of a single institution. On asking for something at a department store recently I was met with the remark, “Isn’t that funny? You are the fifteenth person who has asked for that in the last three days!” The fact was noted as merely curious and interesting and there was apparently no intention of remedying the omission, even by cutting out some of the superfluous styles of neckties.

The most flagrant example I know of duplication in the business and industrial world is the duplicate telephone company. A telephone company is a good example of a mutual enterprise; its value to any subscriber depends on the existence of all the other subscribers. If a man could afford to buy up the company and discontinue all the telephones but his own, the value would disappear. Two companies are simply a nuisance, involving duplication of plant with no resulting convenience. The same is not true of gas or water companies, because here one user does not depend on the others. You would get just as good service if the electric company concluded to serve you, and you alone. There is, to be sure, wasteful duplication in these cases also, but in the instance of the telephone it is accompanied with necessary deterioration of service.

I suppose I need say little about the existence of our two sins in the household. We are honeycombed with them from the rural dinner table where there are no soup and three kinds of pie, to the housewife who yields to the temptation to buy another evening dress and “can not afford” an outing costume. What we need everywhere is some kind of a Board of Equalization, with autocratic powers, that will rigourously suppress all our duplication and with the money saved supply our omissions for us.

We may learn something from the efforts that have recently been made to minimize these two sins in charitable work and social service. Every city contains numerous charitable bodies, all trying to relieve want and alleviate suffering. They are frequently the prey of unscrupulous persons who manage to get their wants alleviated by three or four societies at once--by each, of course, without the knowledge of the others. The result is that there are no funds to relieve many worthy persons who accordingly suffer. The two sins in this case are being avoided by the simple establishment of a card-index at a central point. When an application is made for relief the index-office is informed by telephone, the index is consulted, and if it is found that the applicant is already receiving aid from some other source his request is politely but firmly refused.

The present production of books gives us an instructive example of the existence of duplications and omissions on a large scale; and the elucidation of these will bring us a little nearer to the application of our principles to the library, toward which we are tending. I know not which is the more striking fact in connection with the publishing business--the continual issue of useless books--fiction and non-fiction, or the non-existence of works on vital subjects regarding which we need information. Of course this is due partly to the fact that the men who know things are also the men who do things. They are too busy to write them down. It is also due to the abnormal appetites of the semi-educated, which create a demand for the trivial and fatuous. The semi-educated person is intellectually young; he has the peculiarities of the child. Foremost among these is the love of repetition. The little one would rather hear his favorite fairy tale for the hundredth time than risk an adventure into stranger fields of narrative. There is something admirable about this when it leads to the adult’s love of re-reading great literature. But in the semi-educated it appears as an unlimited capacity for assimilating unreal fiction with the same plots, the same characters, the same adventures and the same emotions, depicted time after time with slight changes in names and attendant circumstances.

An African explorer told me recently that the events attending the southward progress of the French through the Sahara and down into Central Africa were the most thrilling and the most important, from the standpoint of world history, among those of recent times. The story of them remains unwritten, except for a few episodes in French that have not been thought worthy of translation into other tongues. Yet in this period how much trivial incident, how much banal reminiscence, has been thought worthy of enshrinement in bulky octavos, selling at four dollars each! The money spent in putting forth the same idle stuff that has oppressed the world for centuries would have supplied great gaps in our catalogues of history, travel and science and have given us vital literature that we may now have lost forever.

In fiction, the sin of repetition is largely due to the substitution of imagination for observation. No two actual things are alike and no two events happen in the same way. Observation and accurate description will never result in duplication. But the semi-educated imagination sees always the same things and sees them in the same way; and its use in the writing of fiction results as we have seen.

Would that we had, to-day and here, realism like that of Turgenief in his “Memoirs of a Sportsman”--the detailed account of every-day happenings; the hardest thing in the world to write interestingly. When we try it, which we seldom do, we seem to revert at once to the dreary side of life, which doubtless exists but surely not to the exclusion of other things. Turgenief’s book helped toward the emancipation of the serfs. I will not dwell on that, for Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin--a very different sort of book, performed a like office for us. I will rather insist that Turgenief wrote simple, vital descriptive literature; something that you will look far to find in our modern fiction.

Our books of reference are full of duplications and omissions. Search the commoner dictionaries and cyclopedias on the library shelves and you will find countless instances of items of information given twice or thrice and others left out altogether--of words entered under more than one form and completely defined under each, while cross-references lead the seeker to nothing at all. After working a good many years on books of this kind I am convinced that the art of making a perfect dictionary or cyclopedia is the art of avoiding duplication and omission. This can not be done until publishers are willing to allow sufficient time to elaborate a plan before beginning work on one of these books. This, so far, has never been done, and the two sins continue to be committed, here as elsewhere.

It is doubtless time for our application of these principles to the library. We have not to look far to begin.

Take any city of average size and inquire how many libraries it supports. Is there any necessity in a town for more than one library? I am open to conviction, but I doubt. There are excellent reasons for the duplication in each case, I know, just as there were for the two golf clubs in our little town. The duplication in buildings, staff and books is very costly, and the service, no matter how good it may be, is not bettered by this duplication. The trouble may be minimized by co-operation, but it still exists. Take, if you please, the one item of book-purchase. I shall not speak here of private owners, though they must bear their share of blame and of punishment for our two sins; but add together the book funds of the two or three large libraries--public or subscription--and of the dozen small ones--special, denominational, associational--in a community, and see to what a considerable sum it amounts. If it could be administered and expended as a unit, is there any one who will maintain that the precise books would be bought that actually are bought? We find all these libraries buying copies of the same book when one copy is all that the community needs, each ignoring the others and each lamenting the insufficiency of its funds. I have not forgotten such conspicuous instances of co-operation in book-purchase as that of the three large libraries in Chicago, but I also do not forget that it is rare, and that even in Chicago it has been found difficult to carry it out in the perfection in which it is to be found on paper. If we add private purchasers to the libraries I have little hesitation in saying that the money spent on books in any community is quite enough to buy all that the community needs. The lacks are due to the fact that the sum needed to supply them is spent on useless duplicates.

I am not proposing plans, here or elsewhere, to perform the addition of plus and minus quantities that is so easy in pure algebra; I am merely pointing out their existence. From my point of view the ideal situation in a community is the administration by a single body of all its library activities, even private owners co-operating to a certain extent. Let us refresh our memories with a bit of library history. There are at present a great many separate libraries in greater New York. That is, from my point of view, a bad thing. But there were once a great many more. New York and Brooklyn were full of small circulating libraries--denominational, charitable and associational; and many of them had succeeded in obtaining small subsidies from the city. The sum of these was considerable--or would have been considerable had it been administered as a sum, instead of in separate driblets. All the considerations noted above applied in this case, but the Board of Equalization for which we have been sighing actually existed here. It was the city government, which bestowed and controlled a large part of these institutional incomes. A city comptroller with a business-like mind saw all this and proceeded to act upon it. The small libraries became branches of the public libraries of New York and Brooklyn. The city subsidy, in a lump sum went to those institutions. If there is any one who now wishes to return to the old system of separate control and duplication of effort, I am unacquainted with him; notwithstanding the fact that I know many trustees of the consolidated institutions who were filled with rage at the summary action of the city. That action was in the nature of both a threat and a bribe--a threat to discontinue the appropriation of city funds for a library that should refuse to consolidate and a bribe in the shape of a hint of additional favors to come if it should not refuse. Mr. Andrew Carnegie’s offer to build branch libraries, coming at about this time, made it possible to reinforce this hint very effectively.

Our federal government is being held up as the model for a future world federation, and its successful operation confutes the fears of those who doubt the workability of any such plan. In like manner I beg to point to the library consolidations in New York and Brooklyn as an evidence that such removal of duplication elsewhere would enable us to supply omissions in library service. All we need is a motive--if not the threats and bribes that forced the New York consolidation, then something of equal effect. But as I have said I am not proposing plans.

The abolition of this kind of duplication requires pressure from an outside body or agreement among those concerned; no one of us, acting alone, can do away with it. But there are duplications and omissions in the work of every library that it is in the power of the librarian to remedy. Many of these are the result of growth. I know of no profession whose members are more continually and consistently looking for more work to do than that of librarianship. This quest is rarely carried on cooperatively in a library. The head of each department grasps every opportunity to enlarge her sphere of influence, with the result that her sphere first touches that of another department and then intersects it, so that they possess certain parts of the field of service in common. The departments concerned may not know of this duplication, or they may realize that it is going on and be unwilling to stop it for various reasons. Each department-head, like the golf-clubs mentioned above, may be willing to abolish duplication by driving her fellow-worker out of the field, but not otherwise; and her fear lest she herself may have to be the one to retire may induce her to keep silence. Sometimes the librarian himself, observing the interference, contents himself with seeing that individual items of service are not duplicated, leaving the two departments to do, in part, the same kind of work, though not in precisely the same items. This is but a partial atonement for our two sins. Although there is, perhaps, no longer actual duplication of work, there is duplication of administration, duplication of thought and planning. All this is waste of effort that should be devoted to doing some of the things that every library leaves undone. I have elsewhere treated of what I call “conflicts of jurisdiction” in libraries. This comes under the same head, though there may be no actual clash of authorities.

Sometimes we have cases resembling those of the applicants for charitable aid from various sources. Members of the public entitled to library service, the amount of which has been limited by the rules to ensure proper distribution and to prevent monopoly, manage to get two or three times as much as they should get, by applying to different departments, or to the same department under different names. There has been much removal of restrictions of late, in libraries, with the intent to give fuller and freer service to the public. There should be no restriction that interferes with such service. But many restrictions are intended merely to check those whose tendency is to hamper service; and removal of these will evidently injure the public, not benefit it. Traffic regulations are a great bother, but their removal would not be in the public interest. Neither would the removal of necessary regulation of library traffic--the free distribution of books through the appointed public agencies. I sympathize with our modern desire to let Mr. A have as many books as he wants and to keep them as long as he wants; but this sympathy changes to indignation when Mr. A proves to be a library hog, taking advantage of his privileges simply to keep away from Mr. B and Miss C the books that they want. Now and again we find a reader who understands increase of library privileges to mean taking a book away from someone else and giving it to _him_. There could be no more flagrant example of the double sin of duplication and omission--giving A more than he can use and thereby depriving B of what he needs.

The expenditure of time is a domain in which our two sins become especially noticeable. If one has plenty of money he may waste a good deal without serious effects; but waste of time is different. The total extent of time is doubtless infinite, but not its extent as available to the individual. He has only his three-score years and ten, and astronomical happenings have chopped this up for him into years, months, weeks and days, any one of which is largely a repetition of those that have gone before. So many of our duties, for instance, are daily that the average man has only a few hours out of the twenty-four to deal with emergency work, “hurry calls” and all sorts of exceptional demands on his time. If he gives ten minutes to something that requires but five, he must often neglect a duty, and this constitutes duplication and omission of time, to be remedied by taking the unnecessary five minutes from one task and bestowing it on another. Here again, however, our algebraic addition is simple only on paper. We are hindered not only by our own propensity to waste time but by those whose own is of no value and who therefore insist on wasting ours for us.

This is a subject on which most executive officers can speak feelingly. Such officers are troubled with two kinds of lieutenants--those who keep them in ignorance of what is going on and those who insist on putting them in continual possession of trivial details--more omission and duplication, you see. One special kind of time-waster is the assistant who comes to her chief with a request. Foreseeing refusal she has primed herself with all sorts of arguments and is ready to smash all opposition in a logical presentation of the subject calculated to occupy thirty minutes or so. But the request, as stated, appeals to her chief as reasonable, and he grants it at once without hearing the argument. Do you think the petitioner is going to waste all that valuable logic? Not she! She stands her ground and pours it all out, the whole half hour of it; and when the victim has granted a second time what he had already granted without argument, she retires flushed with triumph at her success. And while this duplicator was duplicating, the other sinner, the “omittor”, was performing some innocent and valuable administrative act without her chief’s knowledge, causing him to give wrong information to a caller and convict himself of ignorance of what is going on in his own institution.

Time-wasting, of course, is by no means confined to the library staff. Much of every one’s time, in a library, is consumed in fruitless conversations with the public--the answering of trivial questions, the search for data that can do no one any good, efforts to appease the wrath of someone who ought never to have been angry at all, attempts to explain things verbally when adequate explanations in print are at hand. All these things consume valuable time and thereby force the omission of public services that would otherwise be performed. Some of them are unavoidable. We must always change up a little time to the account of courtesy, the avoidance of brusqueness, the maintenance in the community of that tradition of library helpfulness that is perhaps the library’s chief asset. This we can not afford to lose. But without sacrificing it, can we not eliminate some of the bores, cut down our useless services for the sake of performing a few more useful ones, and increase the amount of library energy usefully employed without enlarging the total sum expended? This is one of our most vital problems, did we but realize it.

We have gone far enough, perhaps, to realize that our two sins are indeed cardinal and fundamental. The authors of the Prayer Book were right. We have done those things that we ought not to have done and we have left undone those things that we ought to have done; and we are all miserable sinners.

If I had nerve enough to add a new society to the thousand and one that carry on their multifarious activities about us, I should found a League to Suppress Duplications and Supply Omissions.

A MESSAGE TO BEGINNERS

History may be described as an account of the conflict between the tendency of things to move and efforts to fasten them down so that they will keep still. Where they have been moving in the wrong direction these efforts have been praiseworthy; but in too many instances motion has been resisted simply because it _is_ motion, quiescence being looked upon as the supreme good. In his interesting “History of Fiji”, Dr. Alfred Goldsborough Mayer notes that the difference between the savage and the civilized man is not one of content of knowledge, for the savage often knows far more than we do, but is due to the fact that the savage is bound hand and foot by tradition--he is a slave to his imagination, and to that of his forefathers. The conflict in his case has ended definitely with the triumph of the fastening down process. There is no more motion. He can not fall back, but neither can he move forward. He is locked in one position--that of the particular generation, five, fifty or five hundred years ago, when his fight for progress was lost.

With the civilized man the fight still goes on. It is not yet won nor lost and the story of it, as I have said, is history. Read it in this light and it will assume for you new significance. Wars, revolutions, changes of dynasty, racial migrations, linguistic changes, the achievements of art, the triumphs of science, the evolution of social systems, the development of justice, the rise of literature and the drama--everything that marks the story of what has been going on in the world--is but a phase of this age-long struggle between forces and obstacles of whose origins, at bottom, we know little. So far as the obstacles have won, there are still savage elements lurking in us; so far as we have thrust them aside, we are advancing further toward civilization. The one title that we have to call ourselves civilized is the fact that no set of traditions or customs--no institution--has yet become crystallized into the fixity that obtains with the savage races;--not the Church, not government, not science, nor art nor literature. All these are changing, despite efforts to pin them down. Our language, our social customs are altering; our fashions of dress change from year to year. Our old people, for a man often reverts to savagery in his old age, pass away with words of regret on their lips for the good old days of their youth, when things were different. A savage has never to do this, for the days of his youth and his age are precisely the same--custom, speech, habit, observance, tradition, all are locked up into fixity.

The education of the savage is directed toward perpetuating this fixity; that of the civilized man should be a force in the opposite direction. Recognizing that change is the life-blood of civilization, it should be devoted to controlling and directing that change, leading the mind of the pupil to anticipating and welcoming it and bracing that mind against all feeling of shock due to the mere starting of the machinery of progress. I say this is what education should be. I believe that it is tending in this way. But a large part of it is still savage--an effort to keep our customs, thoughts and actions to standards set up by our ancestors.

The Public Library, we are fond of saying, is an educational institution; which kind of education shall it dispense? Shall it be a motor or a brake? Shall it look back into the past or forward into the future?

To many persons, the idea of a forward-looking library seems absurd. It is essentially a repository of records, and records are of the past. You will find somewhere, unless oblivion has overtaken it, an address by your lecturer on “The Public Library as a Conservative Force”. Such it doubtless is and such it should be--but its conservatism is that of control, not of stagnation. It is the skilled driver who keeps the car in the road--not the ignoramus who stalls it in the ditch. Records are assuredly of the past; but the past and its records may be looked upon in either of two ways--as standards for all time, or as foundations on which to build for the future. The civilized man rejoices in foundations--he builds them deep and strong, and erects upon them some noble superstructure. The savage puts up his great stone circle, mighty and wonderful perhaps, but complete in itself and of no manner of use.

So I ask you, what is our collection of records to be--a stone circle or a foundation?

Now the records themselves--the books--can never determine this any more than the great monolith can determine whether it is going into a Stonehenge or into the foundation of a Parthenon. It is what we do to the books--to and with them--that matters.

The world would never move on without records of the progress that had already been made. Just as surely, it would never move on by reliance on those records alone. What we have accomplished brings us merely to a mile stone in the path of progress. To reach a given point, one must pass the mile stones on the way; but they must be passed and left behind. We shall never get anywhere merely by sitting down upon any of them. To make a personal application to yourselves, you will never make good librarians unless you master what good librarians before you have learned and taught. But just as certainly, you will never be good librarians if you regard this as a definite stopping point. The trouble with most of our education is that it is static and not dynamic; it looks backward, not forward; it teaches what has already been accomplished and fails to equip the student for devising and accomplishing something further, on his own account.

I am warning you in the midst of a course intended to fit you for librarianship that the course alone will not so fit you. But it will start you--and a start in the right direction is of great value--nay, it is indispensable. When the fielder throws the ball directly into the baseman’s hands there is a preliminary motion of his arm. At the end of that motion the ball begins its flight; its start has enabled it to go straight. Your library course will be the throw that enables you to go straight to the mark, but you must not forget that the whole flight remains to be made. My metaphor is a bad one. The ball has no power to adjust or alter its course. You have that power; you can better a good start, or you can nullify it. You may even hit the mark after you have been started in the wrong direction; but to say this is by no means to recommend a wrong start.

All this is a series of platitudes; but to insist on the obvious is often useful. There are so many obvious things that we are apt to neglect some of the most necessary, just as we may fail to see a sign on a building because it is all plastered with signs. Nothing is more common than to assume that a period of formal education, general or special, makes its subject “fit”, either for life or for a vocation. Some never get over this idea and fail in consequence; some discover their mistake and blame their training because it does not do what it can not do and was not intended to do. Formal training trains one to start; it makes one fit to run the race. The race is not won when the training has ended; it has not even begun. The man with a B.A. degree is not ready to tackle the problems of life and vanquish them. The graduate in law or medicine is not a trained lawyer or physician, and when you have completed your library course you will not be trained librarians. You will have been started right, the rest of your training will depend on your reaction to the forces, the stimuli, that surround you on all sides.

What the executive officer is looking for all over the world is initiative, guided by common sense; but it is rare. Possibly our education fails to develop it; possibly no system of education could develop it. But it exists; and we are all happy when we find it. Throwing out of consideration the really lazy, ignorant or incompetent assistant, competent subordinates may be of three kinds--first, he who has been trained to do certain things in certain ways and continues to do only those things in only those ways, not realizing the possibility of change or improvement; secondly, he who does realize this possibility but has been taught, or at any rate believes, that it is not his place, but only his superior’s, to take active steps toward something more or better; and thirdly he who both realizes and acts, who does what he can to see that such steps as he can properly take to improve matters are taken and that such as he can not take of his own accord are suggested, in a proper manner, to his superior. If I were asked to sum up, in a few words, the things that differentiate a well run from a poorly run institution I should say, first, the existence of a staff composed of persons of this third variety, and secondly a chief executive who appreciates and uses them. A progressive executive with a staff of assistants who faithfully obey orders and do nothing more will not go far. His institution may make no mistakes; it may run like a machine, but it will have the faults of a machine--its product will be machine made. With a live staff and a poor executive there will be a maximum of mistakes, absurd and ill-judged plans--a failure to co-ordinate effort in different lines. With plenty of initiative in the staff, and with an executive to select, restrain, encourage and control, we have an approach to the work of a single living organism, the most perfect tool of evolution.

While this means the encouragement of suggestion it also means rejection and selection. It means that while the staff will have to bear disappointment with good nature and without diminution of initiative, the executive, on his part, must realize that a hundred impractical suggestions do not disprove the possibility, or even the probability, that the assistant who makes them may ultimately offer some plan, method, or device of great value. Some of the greatest improvements in library service are due to persons with an imagination and an initiative especially prone to run wild in impractical suggestions.

I realize that I may be regarded as tossing a firebrand among you when I tell you to develop your initiative. An unwise or uncontrolled initiative may do harm, but I fervently believe that greater harm is done every day by the lack of all initiative. Better than any stagnant pool is a running stream, though it break bounds and waste itself in foam and spray. There may be those who will say: Let the student first learn to obey without question; when he has done this it will be time to talk to him about initiative. Alas! that will also be the time when he has lost the chance to develop it intelligently. No, the accepted standards and the ways of progress must be assimilated at one time. Rather than unquestioning obedience to an order, a rule or a formula, let us have appreciation of the reason for it and disobedience whenever a breaking of the letter may keep us more closely to the spirit.

I can assure you that you will make better assistants if this is your temperament, that librarians are looking earnestly for more of this kind, rejoicing when they see the spark of life among the dead wheels and cogs of the library machinery, determined to give any one who shows it an opportunity to show more of it, by promoting him to a place of greater effort and of higher responsibility and service. When such a promotion comes, perhaps over the heads of others with better training and longer experience, there is often wonder and a disposition to explain it all by “favoritism”. And viewed from the proper angle, this is correct; every chief librarian has his favorites; they are those on whom he has learned that he can depend, not only for solid and accurate knowledge of facts and methods but also for quick and ready response to the slightest change of conditions--for appreciation of what is needed in a given set of unusual circumstances and resourcefulness in devising new methods or modifying old ones to meet the emergency--what I have already summed up in the one word initiative.

Every teacher, and every student knows that a good arithmetician may fail utterly when he comes to state and solve problems in algebra. His success has been due to the memorizing of rules and their application. When he is confronted with the necessity of putting into mathematical symbols the fact that A, B and C can do a piece of work in 3, 4 and 5 days, respectively, he is stumped because an entirely different sort of demand is made on his intelligence. And when his teacher explains how the statement may be made, although he has learned how to state that particular class of problems, he is just as much at sea when he is confronted with the question of how soon after 12 o’clock the hands of a watch will again be together on the dial.

In other words, he has left the land of rules and entered the region of common sense. If he is bright, he very soon realizes that all mathematics is common sense; that rules are very useful indeed, but only as short cuts to mechanical processes.

So, at least so I trust, all the methods and tools of library work are based on common sense--catalogues and charging systems and classifications are very useful indeed, but only as short cuts to certain results that would otherwise not be achieved or would be arrived at too late or too confusedly. We must learn all about these, but the time will come when we shall leave the library school and enter the library. Here no sort of rule, formula, method or process will suffice for us, essential though they all are; if we are to make good we must add common sense, adaptability, resourcefulness, initiative.

Possibly you think that I have been applying the principle of conflict between progression and stagnation somewhat carelessly--now to your own training as librarians and again to the service rendered by the library itself. In truth these are intimately connected. Progressive assistants make a progressive library. A staff that does its work mechanically will operate a library without initiative. If your habit of mind has grown to be a habit of regarding all the technical detail of library work as part of nature’s law, you will be shocked at a suggestion that the library of which you are a part should undertake some public service that a library never undertook before.

You may know already--you certainly will know soon--that this question of the extension or limitation of library service is still a burning one in many minds. Libraries to-day are doing a thousand things that no one of them would have thought of doing fifty years ago. That some of these things are foolish or ill advised I have no doubt. We now occasionally hear it said that there should be some authoritative statement or agreement on what public libraries, at any rate, ought to do and what they ought not to do. But we Americans do not take kindly to limitations of this sort, although they are familiar in countries where service of all kinds is more standardized. We read in a recent magazine article of the trials of Mrs. James Russell Lowell with English servants, when her husband was American minister in London. Wishing to have a loose corner of carpet nailed down, she called on one after another of her domestic staff, only to be told that the clearly-defined duties of each did not admit of that particular item of service. She finally lined them up on one side of the room, tacked down the carpet herself and then discharged every one of them. This sort of thing does not seem to Americans like efficiency. If some needed bit of service in an American town remains undone, and church and school and library all look the other way because it does not fall within a carefully-limited sphere of duty which each has assigned to itself, we shall count them all blameworthy, especially if it shall appear that one of them is equipped to perform that particular service easily, cheaply and well. The church and the school have both taken this view, and the modern extension of the library’s functions shows that it has been doing likewise. It has gone further than either of the others, probably, because it finds itself in many ways better equipped for the doing of civic odd jobs. It is related of a railway manager that an employee whose work was over once asked him for a free ticket home. The manager refused, saying: “If you had been working for a farmer you would hardly expect him to hitch up and drive you home, would you?” “No”, said the man, “but if he had a rig already hitched up and ready to start, and he was going my way, I should call him darned mean if he didn’t take me along.”

In many cases the library has been hitched up and standing at the door when the necessity has arisen, and it has been “going the same way”--in other words, the need of the community is nearly related to the work that the community’s support has already enabled it to do. Under these circumstances it is in the position of Coleridge’s Wedding Guest--it “can not chuse but hear”.