Papers and proceedings of the thirty-fifth general meeting of the American Library Association, 1913

It is now twenty-eight years since some one first recognized the fact that children needed to have special libraries or special collections of books in libraries, and thereupon opened a children's reading room in New York City.

Some of the conditions affecting child life today existed then, but we know more about them now than we did then. We have many specialists in sociological fields who are making investigations, compiling statistics, drawing conclusions, and telling other people how to make the world a better place. Our rapid industrial development is producing many problems concerning child welfare, some of which are of vital interest to us as library workers; others we may well leave to playground associations, juvenile courts, health bureaus, social settlements, child labor committees, schools and churches. It is not ours to change housing conditions or to do away with child labor, but it is ours to meet these conditions, to be god-parents to those whose natural parents are not inclined or not able to guide their reading, to present to the children's minds other worlds than the tenement or street, and to give to children worn with daily labor such books as will be within their grasp, and will help them to permanent happiness.

In 1885 when a children's library was opened by Miss Hanaway in New York City, there were fewer means of recreation than there are now. There were no motion-picture shows, no children's theaters, no municipal recreation parks with free gymnasiums, swimming pools and baths. Child labor had only begun to be exploited by large manufacturing establishments (1879). Then there were more homes, permanent abiding places, where there was room for children both to work and to play. There was more family life, where father and mother and children gathered about the evening lamp, and father read aloud while mother sewed and the children listened, or where each member of the family had his own book in which to lose himself. There were daily duties for each of the children, the performance of which gave them training in habits of responsibility.

Today such conditions may be found only rarely, except in small cities and villages.

Congestion in large cities has led even well-to-do families to live in apartment houses. In Chicago this sort of life began only thirty-four years ago, and today one-third of all that city live in residences having six families per main entrance. (Chicago City Club-Housing exhibit.) This tendency to apartment life means the loss of the joy of ownership, the feeling of not-at-homeness and consequent restlessness, due to frequent change of environment.

Book agents say that they cannot sell books to families in apartment houses, because they have no room for books. Scott Nearing in his "Woman and social progress" regrets "the woeful lack of provision for the needs of the child in the construction of the modern city home. Huge real estate signs advertise the bathroom, bedrooms, the dining room and kitchen, the library, and reception hall. But where is the children's room? Owners do not care to rent houses to people having children. Many of the apartment houses exclude children as they exclude dogs or other objectionable animals." Yet we say, and rightly, that this is the century of the child.

The complexity of modern life, the tendency to materialism, the multiplicity of interests, have deterred many parents from being actively concerned in the growth of the minds and the souls of their children. This part of their development is being left to teachers, church workers, leaders of boys' and girls' clubs, etc. There is not time for reading aloud to children at home, and little concern is manifested by many intelligent parents, regarding their children's choice of books. The "poor, neglected children of the rich" are not allowed to use the public library books, because there may be germs hidden among the leaves. They may have their own books, but they are denied the joy of reading a book that some other boy or girl has read and pronounced "swell".

Because of this lack of concern on the part of parents in children's reading, are we not justified in our hitherto condemned paternalism?

Home life among the very poor in the congested districts of our large cities is often such as is not worth the name. The practice of taking lodgers which prevails among some foreign elements of the population, means the undermining of family life, and often the breaking down of domestic standards. (Veiler, "Housing reform," p. 33.) "Thousands of children in Chicago alone are being exposed to the demoralizing influences of overcrowded rooms, of inadequate sanitary provisions, and of unavoidable contact with immoral persons."

"Bad housing is associated with the worst conditions in politics, poverty, population density, tuberculosis, and retardation in the schools. It is directly related to many cases of delinquency of boys and girls, who have been brought before the juvenile court." (Breckenridge and Abbott, "The delinquent child and the home.")

Furthermore wrong home conditions result in driving children to the street. The child who finds no room at home to do the things that he wishes to do, not even room to study his school lessons, is inevitably forced into the street, "not only in the day time, but as common observation shows, until late at night, not only in good weather but in foul." Here he grows up, and is educated "with fatal precision." The saloon and its victims, the hoboes and their stories, criminals dodging the police, lurid signboards, a world of money-getting, all become only too familiar to him. Sin loses its sinfulness, and gains in interest and excitement.

Are we placing our attractive children's rooms, clean and orderly, adorned with flowers and fine pictures, where they may be readily seen from the street, where picture books placed in the windows may vie in alluring powers with the nickel-novel window displays?

The boy of the street may be a member of a boys' gang, and if so, this becomes one of the great influences acting upon his life, either for good or for ill. Mr. Puffer makes the statement that three-fourths of all boys are members of gangs. (Puffer, "The boy and his gang," p. 9.)

Those boys are fortunate whose gang is an organized body efficiently directed, such as the Boys' Scout Patrol. This, Mr. Puffer says, "is simply a boys' gang, systematized, overseen, affiliated with other like bodies, made efficient and interesting, as boys alone could never make it, and yet everywhere, from top to bottom a gang." Here lies an opportunity for co-operation on the part of the library, and many are the interests awakened by the Boy Scout movement which may be encouraged by the library.

Another influence constantly appealing to children of the street as well as to others, is the glaring advertisement of the moving-picture show. Moving pictures are now the most important form of cheap amusement in this country; they reach the young, immigrants, family groups, the formative and impressionable section of our cities, as no other form of amusement, and can not but be vital influences for good or ill. In 1910 it was estimated that more than half a million children attended motion pictures daily. (Juvenile Protective Assn. of Chicago, "Five and ten-cent theaters"-pamphlet.)

Is it not possible for the library to make permanent whatever good, though fleeting, impression may be made by educational pictures or pictures from great books, by co-operating with the picture shows, and being ready to supply to the children copies of the stories, nature books, or histories to which the children may have been attracted by the motion pictures?

During the meetings this week our interest in the adult immigrants and their relation to the library has been aroused and augmented, and it has been proven conclusively that the solution of the immigrant problem must of necessity rest with the children. The change in the type of immigration in recent years from a large percentage of English-speaking and Scandinavian races having a low percentage of illiteracy, to a leadership among races of eastern and southern Europe, with a very high percentage of illiteracy, has had a decided influence on standards of living.

These people of other lands do not adapt themselves to American ways as readily as their children. Many do not know the English language, they do not stir far from home or from work, and have few new experiences. "Many things which are familiar to the child in the facts of daily intercourse, in the street or in the school, remain unintelligible to the father and mother. It has become a commonplace that this cheap wisdom on the part of the boy or girl leads to a reversal of the relationship between parent and child. The child who knows English is the interpreter who makes the necessary explanations for the mother to the landlord, the grocer, the sanitary inspector, the charity visitor, and the teacher or truant officer. It is the child again who often interviews the boss, finds the father a job, and sees him through the onerous task of 'joining the union.' The father and mother grow accustomed to trusting to the child's version of what 'they all do in America,' and gradually find themselves at a disadvantage in trying to maintain parental control. The child develops a sense of superiority towards the parent and a resulting disregard of those parental warnings which, although they are not based on American experience, rest on common notions of right and wrong, and would, if heeded, guard the child." (Breckenridge and Abbott, "The delinquent child and the home.")

Can books not teach children to honor their father and mother, and "that the head and the hoof of the Law, and the haunch and the hump is obey"?

We are told that one of the causes of crime among the children of foreigners is transmitted ambition. "The father left the homeland because he was not satisfied.... He worked hard and saved money, that the dream of better things might be realized.... The son manifests this innate tendency by a desire to excel, by the longings to rise and be masterful, the ambition to beat the other fellow-these are the motives which impel him to an intensive life that carries him to excess and transgression." (Roberts, "The new immigration," p. 325.)

It is for us to interest this ambition and turn it into right channels. We may also discover what special interests are uppermost in the minds of those of different nationalities, things they wish their children to love, traditions they have cherished, and which we may help the children to cherish.

Driven by necessity or by the spirit of the age, the immigrant quickly develops a strong ambition for acquiring money, supposing that he landed on our shores without that impelling force. One of the consequences is that he withdraws his children from school as soon as they are old enough to secure their working papers. "To the Italian peasant, who, as a gloriously street laborer begins to cherish a vision of prosperity, it matters little whether his girls go to school or not. It is, on the contrary, of great importance that a proper dower be accumulated to get them good husbands; and to take them from school to put them to work is, therefore, only an attempt to help them accomplish this desirable end." (Breckenridge and Abbott.)

In 1911 the National Child Labor Committee conducted an investigation of tenement house work in New York City. Among 163 families visited having 213 children, 196 children ranging in ages from 3? to 14 years were working on nuts, brushes, dolls' clothes, or flowers. These are truly not the good old-fashioned domestic industries in which children received a good part of their education. Those working in factories and tenement sweat shops, where labor is specialized and subdivided into innumerable operations, do not get the variety of employment that cultivates resourcefulness, alertness, endurance and skill. (Child labor bulletin, Nov., 1912.)

We cannot expect these children, with bodies retarded in development by overwork, and without proper nourishment, to be able to take the same mental food that is pleasing to other children of the same age, who have had all necessary physical care.

The hours when working children, those engaged in gainful occupations, and those who are helping in the homes, are free for recreation, are in the evening and on Sunday. Are we placing our most skilled workers on duty at these times, and are we opening our story hours and reading clubs on Sunday afternoons, when the minds of these children are most receptive of good things, when the children are dressed in their good clothes, their self-respect is high, and they are free from responsibility?

It is a well-known fact that the need of money is not the only cause of the exodus from school that occurs in the grades. An investigation made by the Commissioner of Labor in 1910 (Condition of woman and child wage-earners in the U. S., vol. 7), examining the conditions of white children under 16, in five representative cities, showed that of those children interviewed, 169 left school because earnings were necessary, and 165 because dissatisfied with school. The Chicago Tribune (Nov. 11, 1912) stated that in 1912 there were in Chicago over 23,000 children between 14 and 16 years of age, who were not in school. Over half of these were unemployed, and the remainder had employment half the time at ill-paid jobs, teaching little and leading nowhere. In 1912 there were 34,000 children of Philadelphia not in school, and only 13,000 were employed. (Philadelphia City Club Bulletin, Dec. 27, 1912.)

The curriculum of our public schools is in a transitional stage. The complaint of parents who take their children from school before they have completed the high school course, is that it does not teach them to earn a living. The desire of commercial men is to have such courses introduced as will lessen the need of apprentice training in their establishments. These changes may help boys and girls to earn a living, but those courses which teach them how to live may be sacrificed. Man does not live by bread alone. Mrs. Ella Flagg Young says, "The training must also implant in the mind a desire to become something-I mean by that an ideal.... It must make the boys and girls able to know that they have possibilities of greater development along many lines." This sort of training is within the sphere of the library as well as within that of the schools.

The children in the rural districts (which the 1910 census interprets as meaning people of towns of less than 2,500 inhabitants, and people of the country) are the library's great opportunity. In these districts may be found the old-fashioned home life, where parents are glad to be aided in the direction of their children's reading. There are fewer distractions in the way of amusements. Books are not seen by the thousands, until they have become so confusing that one knows not what to read or where to begin. Homes are owned, instead of rented, and a library worker is not liable to lose her group of children each first of May.

The pleasures of city life have been made easily accessible to children and grown people by means of trolley lines, good roads, telephones, etc., and the music of grand opera has been carried to the country homes by means of talking machines. Still the distractions of modern life have not absorbed a large part of the everyday life of the children, so that their minds may be appealed to along the line of their natural interests. As Miss Stearns told us yesterday, there is less of drudgery in farm life today than there was thirty years ago, and children have more time for study and reading; but they need direction and assistance.

The consensus of opinion among writers on rural sociology is that the great need of the people of the country is more education; education that will make farming more scientific and efficient, and less fatiguing, education that will help boys and girls to find amusement in the life about them; education that will guide that passion for nature which every normal child possesses.

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Because children today have many more opportunities for recreation than they had thirty years ago; because many leave school long before they have acquired the education that will teach them how to live, as well as how to earn a living; because in many homes mothers and fathers cannot train their children in American ideals of citizenship, which they themselves do not understand; because in other homes the physical needs of children are held to be of most importance, while mental and moral needs are left to the care of teachers and social workers, the time seems ripe for the library to place emphasis upon the educational side of its work, rather than upon the recreative. Let the recreative be truly recreative, giving relaxation, new visions, higher standards of living, and increased belief in one's self, but let the educational work meet the children's needs, increase their efficiency, teach them how to live, and to be of service in the world's work.

Mr. Bostwick, in the Children's section, mentioned three eras in library work with children; first, the era of children's books in libraries; second, era of children's room; third, era of children's department. These concerned books and organization, the machinery of getting the books to the children. We think we have learned something about children's books, and we know approved methods of administration. Possibly we are now on the verge of the fourth era, when we shall know children. Not the child with a capital C, a laboratory specimen, but living children, with hearts and souls. Do we know the conditions under which the children of our own neighborhood live? Do we understand their interests, and are we sanely sympathetic?

The PRESIDENT: We are glad to get Chapter Two: How the Library is Meeting these Conditions, by Miss GERTRUDE E. ANDRUS, of the Seattle public library.

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Every month, if the mails are regular, we receive assurance that the public library is an integral part of public education, and the complacence with which we accept this assurance gives ample opportunity to our critics for those slings and arrows with which they are so ready. Ideas and ideals of education are rapidly changing and it behooves the librarian, and more particularly the children's librarian, to see that she keeps pace with the forward movement and that the ridicule of her censors is really undeserved.

The old idea of education was to abolish illiteracy, "to develop the ability, improve the habits, form the character of the individual, so that he might prosper in his life's activities and conform to certain social standards of conduct."

The new idea of education is that of social service, to train children to be not mere recipients, but distributors, not merely to increase their ability to care for themselves, but also their ability to care for others and for the state.

This perhaps sounds a note of the millennium, but we have been told to hitch our wagon to a star and although the star proves a restive steed and often lands us in the ditch, we travel further while the connection holds than we should in a long, continuous journey harnessed to a dependable but slow-going snail.

It may seem a far cry from these comments on education to the topic of my paper: How the library meets the changing conditions of child-life, but in reality it is only a step, for just as in philanthropy the emphasis is placed more and more upon prevention rather than remedy, so in education the task is coming to be the training of the good citizen rather than the correction of the bad citizen. And if the library is, as we are anxious to claim, an integral part of public education, it must have a share, however small, in the preventive policy of modern educators, which will in time effect a change in present social evils. Unless the library, as it meets these constantly changing conditions, can do something to improve them and to make the improvement stable, it has small claim to be included in the educational scheme of things.

In the conditions of child life which Miss Smith has outlined, the breaking up of the home is the most serious handicap which the children have to face. It is on this account that all social agencies working with children endeavor, so far as each is able, to supply an "illusory home" and to give, each in its own capacity, the training in various lines which ought in a normal home to come under the direction of the mother and father.

There is a spreading belief in the value of reading but there is a woeful lack of knowledge as to what should be read, and the children's library therefore fills a double r?le; it provides books which it would be impossible for many of the children to get otherwise, and it selects these books with thoughtful care of the special place each one has to fill, so that it becomes a counselor, not only to the children but to those parents who are anxious to assume their just responsibility in the guidance of their children's reading, and yet feel their inability to breast unaided the yearly torrent of children's books. The stimulation of this feeling of responsibility on the part of parents is one of the most effective means at the library's disposal of striking a blow at the root of the whole matter, for it is on the indifference of the parents that the blame for many juvenile transgressions should rest, which is now piled high upon the shoulders of the children.

In this connection mention should be made of the home library, the most social of all the library's activities. This small case of books, located in a home in the poorer quarters of a city and placed in charge of a paid or volunteer library assistant has been proved to be a potent force in the life of the neighborhood, for the "friendly visitor," if she be of the proper stuff, is not merely a circulator of books, she is an all-round good neighbor to whom come both children and mothers for help in their big and little problems, so that the results have proved to be "better family standards, greater individual intelligence, and more satisfactory neighborhood conditions."

But even granting that the mothers and fathers show a deep concern in what their children read, the connection between books and children is often left of necessity to the children's librarian who is selected with special reference to her adaptability to this particular kind of work. Now, no matter how strong a personality this young woman may possess, no matter how high her literary standards, nor how far-reaching her moral influence, it is obviously impossible for her to come in contact with more than a few of the children in her community. And in order to provide that intimacy with books from which we wish no child to be debarred, she must depend not alone upon her children's room, beautiful and homelike though that may be, but she must place her resources at the disposal of other educational agencies, all of which are working toward a common end. Of these the most powerful is the school, and through the lessons in the use of the public library, through the collections of books placed in the schoolrooms, and most of all through the influence of the teacher, the public library will touch the lives of thousands of children who might otherwise be in ignorance of its resources, and who through this contact will receive a vivid impression of their share as citizens in a great public institution. In this correlation of school and library care must be taken to place an equal emphasis upon the library as a place for recreation as well as a place for study.

Contrary to the teachings of our Puritan forefathers, we are growing more keenly alive to the imperative need of healthful recreation as a means of combating existing social conditions, and our great cities and our little villages are gradually making provision for the gratification of the desire of the people to play. Nowhere does the library find an alliance more satisfactory than with these play-centers, for it is in the union of the physical and mental development that education comes to its fullest fruition and the striving to instill "imagination in recreation" can find no better field than in these places where not only muscles but minds may be exercised.

These are the well-worn channels through which the children's library pours its stream of books into a thirsty land, channels into which run the tributary streams of deposit stations, churches, settlements, telegraph offices, newsboys' homes, and all the rest which it would only weary you to repeat.

We are constantly engaged in deepening and broadening these channels because we believe in the power of books to develop character and to broaden the vision of that "inward eye which is the bliss of solitude." Now the book that does this most effectively is the book behind which lies some personality. We all know the popularity of "the book Teacher says is good." But the problem of the children's librarian is not limited as is the teacher's to two or three dozen children. She must lay her plans to reach hundreds of children and she can do this only by dealing with the children in groups: in other words, in clubs, reading circles, and story-tellings.

The natural group of child life is the boys' gang or the girls' clique which offer unlimited opportunities for good or ill. The tendency of a neglected group is to develop strongly a regard for the interests of the individual group and make it antagonistic, if not actually dangerous, to the larger group of society.

The possibility of touching children's interests, enlarging their horizon, and influencing their ideals through these groups has been utilized in the club work of many libraries. Although all library clubs lead eventually to books, the way may be a circuitous one and baseball, basketry, and dramatics may be met on the way. But aside from the book interest, without which no library club can be considered legitimate, there is the opportunity of guiding the activities of the group by means of debate work or similar interests so that their attention may be directed outside of their immediate environment and made to include the greater possibilities of the larger social group.

Very often in girls' clubs the charitable impulse is strong and may be so led as to instill a very thoughtful sympathy for others.

It is for the things we know best that we have the most sympathy and the truest devotion, and we may expect real patriotism and an active civic conscience only when we have taught the children to know thoroughly their country and the city in which they live. This is some of the most valuable work that is being done by libraries, and it may be well passed on, as has been done in Newark, to become a part of the school curriculum. Indifference to the fatherland is not the best foundation on which to build the superstructure of American patriotism, and the confused and homesick foreigner welcomes with gratitude the books in his own tongue provided by the library, the opportunity to use the library's auditorium for the meetings of his clubs with unpronounceable names, the respect with which his especial predilections and prejudices are considered by the library in his immediate neighborhood, the display of his national flag and the special stories told the children on the fete day of his country. A people without traditions is not a people, and if we expect these strangers to respect our institutions, we must show them an equal courtesy.

This regard shown by the library and other institutions for the national characteristics of the parents reacts upon the children and they grow to understand that though their elders may have been outstripped in the effort to become Americanized they have behind them an historical background which is respected by the very Americans whose customs the children ape so carefully.

The reading circle and the story hour are similar in their purpose for they are both intended to call the attention of the children to special books and to open up the delights of a new world to imaginations often starved in squalor and poverty. Both the reading aloud and the storytelling have their rightful place in the home and are merely grafted on the library in its attempt to supply its share of the "illusory home" for which we are striving.

If the Sunday story-tellings and clubs meet the neighborhood needs more efficiently as Miss Smith has suggested, the library schedule should be so arranged as to accommodate them.

The time of childhood is a time of unbounded curiosities. Everything is new and wonderful and open to investigation, and that library may count itself blessed of the gods which can command the co-operation of a good museum. Given an exhibit case containing a few interesting specimens, a placard bearing a brief description of the specimens, and the titles of a few books on the subject obtainable at the library, and we can all of us picture a rosy dream of budding scientists, nature-lovers, and historians.

This child-like interest is the secret of the popularity of the moving-picture show. Here we see unfolded the processes of nature, the opening of a flower, the life of a bee, we ride in a runaway train and in an aeroplane, and we see enacted the daily human drama of love and hate. Here is an opportunity which many libraries have grasped, and slides are furnished the picture theaters announcing the location of the library and bearing some such legend as this: "Your Free Public Library has arranged with this management to select interesting books and magazine articles upon the historical, literary, and industrial subjects treated in these pictures. It is a bright idea to see something good and then learn more about it." Mr. Percy Mackaye in his recent book on the Civic Theater, comments on this as follows: "A brighter idea-may we not add?-if the founders of the library had recognized the dynamic appeal of a moving-picture house, and endowed it to the higher uses of civic art! Truly, a spectacle, humorous but pathetic: Philanthropy in raiment of marble, humbly beseeching patronage from the tattered Muse of the people!"

So far as the writer knows, but one library has as yet made moving pictures a permanent addition to its activities, although a small town in Washington State has intimated that it would do so, provided the Carnegie Trust Fund would give it money. It is a sign of the times, and one of which note must be taken, for it gives the library a chance to deepen the benefit of such good pictures as there are and to raise the standard of the others.

Unfortunately the interest of many boys and girls is forced prematurely to the subject of how they may aid in the family support. They leave school untrained and unfitted for the life they have to live, and go into shops, factories, department stores, and other service. Whether they leave because of economic pressure or because of a lack of interest in their school work the fact remains that 32 per cent of the children entering school drop out before they reach the sixth grade, and only 8 per cent finish the fourth year of high school. Manual training and vocational guidance are taking a hand in the matter and the part of the library is evident, not only in its supply of books on these topics but in the personal interest of the library assistants and in their suggestions and advice to the young folks who are struggling to find themselves. This is of course but a drop in the bucket but it is an effort in the right direction.

So many of these young people leaving school prematurely are shut up at the crucial age of adolescence in huge factories and stores, creeping home at night too tired to move unnecessarily, or letting the individuality which has been so sternly repressed all day burst forth in excesses and indiscretions. Only a few will come to the library, so to make sure the library must go to them.

One of the most notable examples of this kind of work is in the main plant of Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Chicago. The company furnishes room, heat, light, and librarian's salary and the public library provides the books. This type of library may combine the intimate personal relationships of the small branch, the club, the story hour, and the vocational bureau. It may, as the Sears, Roebuck library has done, publish lists of books covering certain grades of a school course in grammar, rhetoric, history of literature, and study of the classics, and through the personal influence of the librarian it may make these courses really used, for always in work of this kind it is the personal equation that counts.

Some commercial houses have independent libraries of their own, sometimes in connection with their service department, as does the Joseph & Feiss Co. of Cleveland, in which case the direction of the library comes under the charge of a person whose duty it is to use every means to deepen, strengthen, and broaden the capacity of every employe so that he may remain an individual and not become a machine. This is an age of industrialism which has early placed upon the boys and girls the responsibilities of life, and the love of books is one of the most important of the influences which will keep the pendulum from swinging too far upon the side of materialism and purely commercial ambition.

These are some of the ways in which the library is trying to meet the changing conditions of child life in the city through the children's rooms, the homes, the schools, the playgrounds, the factories, and other institutions which have to do with the employment, amusement, or education of children.

From many of these problems the life of the country child is mercifully free, but in place of them there is the isolation of farm life and the idleness on the part of the children so often found in country villages. As more than half of our population is in the country, it is but logical that libraries should long ago have made some attempt to reach a class of readers who, as Mr. Dewey says, "have a larger margin of leisure, fewer distractions, and fewer opportunities to get the best reading. They read more slowly and carefully and get more good from books than their high-pressure city cousins whose crowded lives leave little time for intellectual digestion."

Long before the formation of the Country Life Commission, librarians were sending traveling libraries to farm-houses and rural communities, and library commissions are now scattering broadcast the opportunities for reading which will do so much to "effectualize rural society." When we think of books and the country, we think also of Hagerstown and the book wagon, an institution which in its influence on country life may well be added to the famous trilogy of "rural free delivery, rural telephones, and Butterick patterns." Greater attention is being paid in these days to conditions of country life, both on farms and in villages, and the work of the country librarian is as broad and as interesting as that of her city co-worker.

But whether the work is done in the city or the country, in a crowded tenement district or on a thousand-acre ranch, it has as its foundation the same underlying principle: that of co-operation with all other available agencies to the end that the boys and girls may have a fuller opportunity to become good citizens. We cannot be progressive if we are not plastic, and in the adaptation of our work to the changing conditions of child life lies the secret of the value of the children's library.

The PRESIDENT: We give a sigh of satisfaction and one of regret: satisfaction over the pleasure we have had in listening to these fine, moving chapters; regret that they have been so brief. We are reconciled only by the fact that there are two fine companion volumes still to come. Mr. WILLIS H. KERR, of the Kansas State Normal School, will give us the first one, the subject being:

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NORMAL SCHOOLS AND THEIR RELATION TO LIBRARIANSHIP

That there is a close relation between librarianship and the forces of education is implied both in the special topic of this paper and in the general theme of the morning: "Children and young people; their conditions at home, in the school, and in the library." Indeed librarian and teacher have more in common than we yet think. For real library work is teaching, and real teaching is guidance in living, and to live well for thy neighbor and thyself is-real library work.

The burden of this discussion will be, not whether the library is an integral part of education, but rather what modern education, as an art, science, and practice, has to say about the attitude and method and practice of library work. With open mind and modest, may we attempt a statement of "library pedagogy" to parallel current educational practice? How may we librarians knit our work more effectively into the educational fabric? How best correlate people and books?

If such a statement of library pedagogy is possible, even though tentative, it is worth our while. From college days there rings in my ears the topic of an address by Dr. Samuel B. McCormick, now President of the University of Pittsburgh: "We can achieve that which we can intelligently conceive and adequately express." We must see our whole job through and through if we are to cope with our friends who do not yet see what we are at. The good brother, a Ph. D. of one of our best universities, a successful city school superintendent, now a fellow professor, who said, "I can see how instruction of our normal school students in library methods will help them in their work here, but how will it help them as teachers? Anyone can find a book in a school library." The superintendent who complained that all his pupils got at the public library was sore eyes and ruined minds from reading trashy fiction; the library trustee who likened library work and salary to dry-goods counter service and wage; the typewriter salesman who objected to open shelves and book wagons and story hours, because they cost-I won't say how much he said; what infinite patience, what skillful teaching power must we librarians have, to turn this tide and use it?

Lest we paint the picture too darkly, let it be said with all thankfulness and cheer that multitudes of teachers, superintendents, boys, girls, men and women, do understand. There is Superintendent Condon, formerly of Providence, now of Cincinnati, of whom Mr. Foster says in the last (1912) Providence report: "Mr. Condon's co-operation with the library was constant, intelligent, and effective." There is Mary Antin and her brothers and sisters, Americans all, to whom one of the richest gifts of the "Promised Land" is the public library. There is State Superintendent Alderman, of Oregon, and Mrs. Alderman. There is the United States Commissioner of Education, Mr. Claxton, and Mrs. Claxton. In every state are men like a western Kansas superintendent (way out next to Colorado, on the prairies), who found his community destitute of books; even school books and tablets had to be ordered by the drug store from a distant city; no community interest, no debating societies, no class plays, no school athletic teams. He made school vital to the boys and girls. Then because to his thinking education does not end with school days, and because he had the library vision, before he was there a year he passed the subscription paper, organized the library association, got the books and magazines, and opened the public library. He gave that town something to live for. And every state has librarians like the little Kansas lady in a country community who does reference work and draws patrons from sixteen surrounding school districts by the use of the rural telephone.

What have the normal schools to do with all this? Before answering this question, it may be well to note that the term "normal school" has not always the same significance. In the United States there are 194 public normal schools. Scholastic standards are of three general types: First, the old-time normal school, whose graduates have little more than completed a high school course including some required pedagogy. Second, the largest division, the two-year normal school, which requires two years of college cultural and professional work, high school graduation being required for entrance. Third, the normal college or state teachers' college, which grants the bachelor's degree for the completion of four years of college cultural and professional work. As a rule the graduates of the high school normal course go into the rural or the small-town schools; the graduates of the two-year college course, into elementary schools and special subjects; and the graduates of the four-year college course, into high school subjects, principalships, and superintendencies. The four-year state teachers' colleges of the United States can be counted on the ten fingers, and their ultimate sphere of influence is being debated. It would seem, however, that the adequate teacher-training institution must be as broad in its facilities and standards as are the conditions of modern life with which teachers must cope.

In the normal schools of these three types, student attendance varies from 100 to nearly 3,000, the average being about 600. Faculties vary from 8 or 10 members to 125. Equipment varies correspondingly, the better schools having very complete facilities. For example, the Eastern Illinois State Normal School, at Charleston, which is said to have a faculty ranking in scholarship with the universities, has 1,200 students, 31 members of faculty, offers two college years of teacher-training, has three buildings, a library of 16,000 volumes, and like many other normal schools of its type has an assured future and a fine field of influence. You will pardon another example, I hope, cited because I can be still more definite in describing it: The Kansas State Normal School, at Emporia, is a type of the four-year normal college. It was established in 1865. Last year it had 2,750 students, 350 in the training school (comprising kindergarten and grades one to eight), 1,100 in the normal high school, and 1,300 in the college. It had a faculty of 100, nearly half of these being men, many of the best universities being represented. It has 11 buildings, including an enormous gymnasium, a library, a hospital, a training school, science building, etc. It has a department of library science, in charge of a professor giving full time to that department, and on the same plane as other departments of instruction. Of this same general type, in equipment, numbers, and standards, are the schools at Ypsilanti, Michigan; Cedar Falls, Iowa; Kirksville, Missouri; Greeley, Colorado; Terre Haute, Indiana;-I do not mean to slight other worthy examples.

Aside from these three types of public normal schools, another important type of teacher-training organization is the department of education and psychology in our best colleges and universities, exemplified notably by the School of Education of the University of Chicago, and Teachers' College of Columbia University, the last-named being perhaps the most efficient teachers' college in the world. I hasten to add mention of the conspicuously helpful work in educational psychology, pure and applied, which is being done at Clark University, Massachusetts, under the inspiring leadership of Dr. G. Stanley Hall.

Now, using the term "normal schools" to include all of these types of institutions and as representing their practices and ideals, may we ask the question we left a moment ago, "What have the normal schools to do with librarianship?" This: The normal schools have now consciously taken up the task of preparing teachers who understand the life that now is and can teach boys and girls to live that life and to be useful members of society here and hereafter. These organized institutions of teacher-training take themselves seriously, they accept the responsibility of their task, and they are measurably succeeding; despite the declarations of popular magazines and investigating committees that our schools are a colossal failure. Which they are not, for didn't they train Mary Antin, and Miss Stearns, and you and me? If librarianship is educational work, and it is, the normal schools may therefore have some suggestion of educational practice worthy the consideration of librarians.

What is the educational world thinking and doing? Examine the program of the National Education Association, to meet week after next at Salt Lake City. I group some of the topics from the general sessions: First, What is education?; Education for freedom; The personal element in our educational problems; Teaching, and testing the teaching of essentials; Measuring results. Second, What shall we do with the single-room school?; The rural school; Fundamental reorganizations demanded by the rural life problem; Rural betterments; The schoolhouse evening center. Third, moral values in pupil self-government, The high school period as a testing time, Public schools and public health.

Relate these groups of topics with this definition of education from the late Andrew S. Draper, of honored memory:

"Education that has life and enters into life; education that makes a living and makes life worth living; education that can use English to express itself; education that does not assume that a doctor must be an educated man and that a mechanic or a farmer cannot be; education that appeals to the masses, that makes better citizens and a greater state; education that supports the imperial position of the State and inspires education in all of the States-that is the education that concerns New York."

Mingle with educational men and women, search the educational periodicals and programs, scan the educational books, visit the normal colleges; and I think you will discover that something like this is happening in the educational world: The content of education is being adapted to meet the needs of all the classes and the masses. The method of education is being adapted to the individual. The result is that education is being universalized, socialized, democratized.

In this adaptation of educational material and method, all eyes are upon the individual child. We are studying this child, working for him. We are playing for the batter, tackling the man with the ball. We believe it is more important to develop the undiscovered resource than to run all boys and all girls through the same hopper. A phrase used in the School Arts Magazine for May, 1913, in describing a notable Boston exhibit of art illustration, breathes this spirit: "Instruction in illustration, should be creative and individual from the outset. Models are posed to help in expressing more truthfully the conception of the illustrator rather than as a discipline in abstract drawing."

The true teacher never gives up a boy or a girl. But mind you, we are saving the individual, making a man out of him, not that he may be a self-centered unsocial phenomenon, but that he may be a fellow among men, a useful social unit. We want strong individuality willing and able to live in society.

Perhaps the biggest word in current education is motivation. That word motivation covers a multitude of sins and a multitude of virtues. Motivation does not mean coddling. It does not mean allowing the child to do as he pleases. On the other hand, motivation does not mean forcing an unnatural process or situation upon a helpless child or a helpless public. It does not mean that we are to give something to the child. Motivation is not didactic in attitude.

The spring of action in all of us is impulse. There is no time here to go into the psychology of instinct, impulse, emotion, motive, action, and all that. Suffice it for example that through the play instinct and impulse the wise teacher leads the child to a respect for fair-play, order, law, justice. The child never knows where he got it, but he has what he needed, and he has it indelibly. This process assumes a God-given wisdom on the part of the teacher: to know how that little mind is working, what it needs, how it may be brought to feel the need, and then to lead, draw out, educate that mind-O, miracle of miracles!

A step further in the consideration of the educational process: Perhaps there have been committed more atrocities, more crimes in the name of education, in the high school than in any other period of school life. More fairly stated, the crimes have been in the upper six years of the usual twelve,-in that period which is called adolescence. Why do so many boys and girls drop out of the upper grades? Why do so many youths never complete high school? The vocational training people have one answer, and it consists in letting the boy work at something of which he feels the need. They motivate his work. The boy from the farm can't read Tennyson's "Princess;" set him at the Breeder's Gazette or the testing of seed-corn; you can teach him English as readily through one task as the other. Only that boy never would learn English from "The Princess,"-and I love Tennyson.

As an example of skillful motivation in teaching may I describe a case which is also an object-lesson to librarians in correlating people and books? It is a third-year high school class in argumentation. After some preliminary study, one day the teacher remarks rather inconsequentially, "Do you know I believe the 'Boston tea party' was an unjustifiable destruction of property, and that unprejudiced historians now admit it?" Now that won't "go" in Kansas any easier than it will in Massachusetts. Teacher is immediately challenged, and she replies, "Well, I'll debate it with you; and I'll be fair and square with you and tell you of some material on your side. But there is one man whose authority I would not want to dispute; you'll surely treat me fairly, won't you?" A young lady member of the class at once puts a motion to the class that it will not be considered fair to use the writings of Edmund Burke against teacher. Does that class depend upon bluffing its way through that debate with teacher? No, it keeps us busy at the library to get material out fast enough, even though we had been previously informed by the teacher that the material would be wanted. Even Dr. Johnson's "Taxation no tyranny" is read with eagerness. Teacher finally agrees to debate even against Burke. Is Burke a bore to that class? Why, the library has to buy additional copies. Of course, the end desired by the teacher all the time was Burke.

More and more, in the instruction of adolescent and adult, the teacher's effort is being directed toward arousing a problem to be solved. Whether by a class lecture, by a class discussion, or by a personal conference, the pupil is brought to feel that it is important for him to find the answer. Is it not important, then, for the librarian to be skilled in drawing out a statement of the problem, or, changing the figure, to recognize accurately the symptoms and to prescribe unerringly? I think librarians having to do with high school and college students should rather frequently visit classes and attend lectures. If this were done, the pupil would less often be ground between upper and nether millstone, and the millstones would think more of each other.

Thus far, educational ideals and practices. Now will they help us any in attempting to formulate a library pedagogy? I believe they will. I believe that the teaching attitude, the study of the individual, the putting of the individual's needs far and away before the observance of inflexible rule and practice, and the determination to correlate people and books and life to the very ends of the earth,-these four stones at least will be in the foundation of library pedagogy.

I am not sure that all educational people will agree entirely with the foregoing statement of educational principles and methods. I am quite sure that I may as well gracefully hand my head now to some of you because of the following library corollaries of the preceding educational doctrines. Some of these are my own beliefs, some are beliefs of educational men regarding libraries:

In the training of librarians, would it be more in accord with modern pedagogy to have less lecturing, less practice work done in the this-is-the-only-way-to-do-it attitude, and to have more of the come-on-and-let's-find-out, the learn-by-doing laboratory spirit?

Educational administration is being remodeled, centralized. If library work is to be more and more educational, school men have said to me, why not make the public library an integral part of the city school system, and the state library and state library commission an arm of the state department of education? It is a terrible thought, but it will not drown by denying it.

When library work becomes educational through and through, and all library assistants are experts in psychology and human nature, the fines system will be a thing of the past.

Conservation of the individual means that it is better to have a book in use than to have it lying peacefully on the shelf entirely surrounded by unbroken rules.

Conservation of society means that it is better to have the library open on holidays and Sundays, when the working man isn't "dead tired," than to report an increased circulation of fiction.

The PRESIDENT: For an object lesson as to the strenuous life we go to Oyster Bay. For library buildings we go to East Ninety-first street, New York, or when he is in Europe we go to Skibo Castle. For information as to the latest inventions we go to the laboratory of Mr. Edison. For full information as to the best in high school work we go to the Girls' High School in Brooklyn. Miss MARY E. HALL.

Miss Hall spoke extemporaneously upon the enlarging scope of library work in high schools. Some of the points discussed were treated by her in a paper before the section on Library Work with Children at the Ottawa conference, 1912. See Ottawa Proceedings in Bulletin of the American Library Association, v. 6, p. 260-68.

The PRESIDENT: As my eye roves over this audience I see it is thickly sprinkled with punctuation marks. It has been suggested that some of our papers ought to be discussed from the floor. We shall be glad to hear from any librarians who are in this audience, either in the form of experiences or comment.

Mr. OLIN S. DAVIS: While I approve fully all that the last speaker has said, I feel very strongly that the college or high school library should not be too complete and that the student should be encouraged to use the public library. Work should be given to the students in high schools and girls' schools that would require their coming to the public library, because if the children in the grades and high schools do not learn to use the public library in those years they will not be apt to use the library in later years when they have left school.

Miss HALL: I would like to say that the first thing we do with pupils is to take a census of the entering class to find out how many do not have cards in the public library; interview them to see why they have not; even to write letters to the parents and urge them to allow their children to have cards; and to see before the end of the first term that every student in the entering class has a card in the public library, has a note of introduction from the school librarian to the branch librarian of the public library, and to see that the branch librarian of our big cities and the high school librarian work together four years with that student. We have the very closest co-operation.

Miss AHERN: Most of you reading library literature lately have seen considerable criticism of the fact that when students go out from college they do not know how to use the library. That is sometimes the student's fault, but most often it is the fault of the college curriculum. That is a topic we need not discuss here. But I believe librarians will do a great service to those who are going into college activities if they emphasize and elaborate that idea of putting into the requirements for college entrance, a knowledge of how to use library machinery.

There are a good many things that are necessary for students to know before they are able to take up the work in colleges, particularly in literature and language. I am not saying that these should be any less. But here is something that I wonder no one has ever thought of before. It means a good deal more to a student to know how to use the various reference books in the college library on, say, the works of John Milton, than to have read some of the things which are included in the entrance examination. I think the idea of requiring a knowledge of how to use the library for college entrance is the best thing I have heard at a library meeting for a long time, and I hope the librarians who are present will impress that idea on their superintendents of schools, on their high school principals, and on the college authorities, as far as they can. It is a good thing. If we should not get anything else out of this 1913 meeting but to impress on the school people that a knowledge of how to use the library is a necessary requirement for a college course, we shall have gained a great point.

Mr. RANCK: I should like to ask Miss Hall about her experience with reference to the use of the library on the teaching of English and literature in the high school.

Miss HALL: I have been very much interested in this. Our school has been so large it has been very difficult to do all we would like to do. We have not been able to do what has been done in the Detroit or Grand Rapids high school in the way of instruction. But I have been interested in seeing what it has done for the English and the history departments. In the first place, our teachers are coming with their classes for instruction and the teachers are learning a great many things which they are putting in practice. For the last year we have done more with the Reader's Guide in history than ever before. Teachers are assigned to help me in my work. After they heard the talk on the Reader's Guide they said, "We can do this: we will go through the Reader's Guide and we will bring out everything that is really interesting on the history of France, Germany, China, Russia and the Balkan War; we will look over those articles and make a card of the best things." They are using the Reader's Guide in English more than ever before; they are using reference books more. After the talk on the Statesmen's Yearbook and on the almanacs and some of the yearbooks, such as the New International Yearbook, they are using them almost as textbooks. The Statesmen's Yearbook is in use nearly all the time, as is the New International Yearbook, since that talk. They are using the Reader's Guide for new material-essays that they want on special subjects, and are using it for debate work, informal debates on all sorts of interesting current problems for English work, training the students to do oral debating without any notes, and talks on the topics of the day. They are using encyclopedias more wisely than they used to. Teachers used to send scholars to encyclopedias for everything. And when we talked about the real use of encyclopedias and bibliographies, how the encyclopedia simply gave you a certain amount of definite information and often led to more important things, they began using those bibliographies.

Miss HOBART: I do not know that any librarian has been trying to work out the problem which I have of reaching the public school pupils and teachers. Some of the best things that I have found in that way are these: I made myself familiar, as early in the term as possible, with the teachers and the conditions of their home life. I found that some had very poor places to room, as they are apt to have in small communities, and to those I offered the use of the library rooms for evening use and for time out of school when they wished to correct papers. Our library is warm and light in the winter and cool and light in the summer. And the teachers were extremely glad to have a place where they could come and be quiet and comfortable and do their own work. I think that last year the teachers in our small village practically lived in the library. Even those who had homes there used to make it their abiding place most of their waking hours. For the high school pupils, at the time of their graduating essays, we laid books aside in different places in the library. Many of those children had no proper places at home where they could write. They came to the library and did their work; almost all the work on their graduating essays was done evenings. For six weeks we gave the use of our catalog rooms to two girls who had their books sent there. There were several out-of-town children; to those we gave a room in the basement. They came from school as quickly as possible at noon, ate their luncheon in a very short time and spent the rest of the intermission in the library doing reference work. The expressions of appreciation we have received and the consciousness of the help given to those children in the use of the library has been a great source of satisfaction.

Adjourned.

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FIFTH GENERAL SESSION

(Friday morning, June 27, 1913.)

The PRESIDENT: We begin this morning the fifth session of this conference and the theme covering the papers is, "The library's service to business and legislation." Ten years ago it would not have occurred to anyone perhaps that it would be possible to have a series of papers upon this subject, and the surprising expansion of the service in these directions is evidenced by the fact that we have, in order at all to attempt to cover this subject adequately, a larger number of papers on this morning's program than we have on the program for any other of the subjects which have been scheduled. I will ask Mr. C. B. LESTER to start the program with his paper upon

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THE PRESENT STATUS OF LEGISLATIVE REFERENCE WORK

It is now more than twenty years since the need of specialization in the library's work on subjects of legislation was recognized in New York in the creation of a special staff for such work, and it is just about ten years since the successful combination in Wisconsin of such special reference work with the formulation of bills aroused most of the states to the possibilities of usefulness in this field. It would therefore seem worth while to examine the work so far done to discover if possible such principles and tendencies as may be subject to generalization.

It is at once obvious that any such generalization in a broad sense must be difficult, for this present year shows in legislation both east and west that we have not yet come to rest on such fundamental principles as to method even though there may be substantial unanimity as to policy. The new laws in Vermont (and I think in New Hampshire) in the east-in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the middle west-and in California on the Pacific coast show such differences that it is evident that local conditions must still be very largely controlling. And to go back a full year or more would bring to notice the new work organized in several states through university bureaus but without special legislation, and the proposals before the Congress.

Comparatively little examination shows that the conception of the work to be done differs widely. Mr. Kaiser of the University of Illinois, who is preparing a detailed study of the subject, writes me: "I find that in practically thirty-two states it is attempted in some form or other-the state library as a whole, a division of the state library created within the library, a division created by law, a separate bureau, library commission bureaus, state university bureaus, etc." Obviously this must include practically all states where the state library is other than a law library only or a historical collection only, and must credit with doing legislative reference work those states where general reference work is done on subjects of legislation. But there is a more exact use of the term which takes account of the fundamental principle well suggested in the statement of the Librarian of Congress in his communication to Congress in 1911. "A legislative reference bureau goes further [than the Division of Bibliography]. It undertakes not merely to classify and to catalog, but to draw off from a general collection the literature, that is the data, bearing upon a particular legislative project. It indexes, extracts, compiles." It breaks up existing forms in which information is contained and classifies the resulting parts, and often "adds to printed literature written memoranda as to facts and even opinions as to merit."

Such work as the legislative reference staff should be qualified to do is distinctly informational rather than educational in its reference to the patron. It does the work of research, of gathering, sorting and uniting the scattered fact material wanted and presents the results ready for use. And to be fully effective this work must in some way be co-ordinated with the formulation of legislation, so that the product offered by the legislator may be both firmly founded and properly constructed. This work is so evidently necessary that it will be done in an increasing number of states whether the state library or some other agency undertakes it and protects its efficiency by the impartial, non-political and permanent organization of it which can be there best provided.

Practically all legislation specifically providing for such work has been passed in the years beginning 1907 and it is significant that most of this emphasizes research and drafting. The laws specially providing for such work are as follows:

Alabama, 1907, no. 255.

California, 1913.

Illinois, 1913.

Indiana, 1913, ch. 255 (1907, ch. 147).

Michigan, 1907, ch. 306 (1913, ch. 144).

Missouri, Stat., 1909, Sec. 8177.

Montana, 1909, ch. 65.

Nebraska, 1911, ch. 72.

North Dakota, 1909, ch. 157 (1907, ch. 243).

Ohio, 1913 (1910, no. 384).

Pennsylvania, 1909, no. 143 (1913).

Rhode Island, 1907, ch. 1471.

South Dakota, 1907, ch. 185.

Texas, 1909, ch. 70.

Vermont, 1912, ch. 14 (1910, ch. 9).

Wisconsin, Stat. Sec. 373 f.

An analysis of the work done, whether provided for by legislation or by administrative practice, shows certain other facts. The number of the staff in any state is often variable, temporary or part time assistance is often used, and this is true where this work is not a part of the work of a state library or other wider organization. Furthermore, the cost in money is almost impossible to estimate accurately in many places, because of this co-operation with other work. In starting a new work this difficulty in answering the question of what it costs elsewhere must be faced. The best way to meet it seems to be to make the comparison on the basis of the work wanted, definitely planning what is to be done, and asking for a lump sum to cover its estimated cost.

The drafting proposition is a most important element. Some three or four states already have official bill-drafting agencies, other than legislative reference departments, and a number of others definitely depend upon the attorney-general's office for this work. In some states there is opposition to putting this in the hands of a non-legislative agency, and in others the libraries, while ready to handle a specialized reference work, are not ready to undertake drafting. Obviously this work requires highly specialized training, and equally, I believe, it will be agreed that this service should be rendered and that it must be in the closest co-operation with the reference work. There is no doubt in my own mind that the best condition is that of a single agency to perform this dual work, where the establishment of such is possible, and the usual organization seems to include both the expert draftsmen and the special clerical and stenographic assistance.

This service in the primary formulation of bills must inevitably lead to a similar assistance as bills progress toward final enactment. This care as to form through the processes of amendment and revision will ultimately be complete if the enacted statute law is what it should be "to stand the test."

This leads me to certain suggestions of other fields of service in the legislative process which should all tend to better the whole legislative product. Of course, in much of this service the emphasis is placed upon form and make-up of the final product, the discretion as to subject matter resting elsewhere, but that discretionary judgment is to be based upon the most complete information it is possible to furnish. Most of these services are now performed by the libraries or other non-legislative agencies in some states, but of course not all, or indeed many, in any one state. They include editing, foot-noting, side-noting, indexing of session laws, and the preparation of tables of amendments, repeals and similar matter; the proper filing and care of original bills, journals, committee records, and similar matter, after the work of the session is completed; the editing and indexing of the printed journal; editorial work of various forms upon the legislative documents. These are all services needed by our states, useful to the legislative bodies, and only properly handled through some permanent agency. Is the state library that agency? I leave the question for your consideration, and suggest that some uncertainty at present as to just what may be most desirable is evident particularly in the new legislation in Vermont, Ohio, Indiana and California. It has already been brought out in prepared paper and in discussion at this conference that the state library should not be a central public library in its content or its method. It is rather possible to express the field of its activities as that of a collection of special libraries. Into that field would come quite naturally the varied services to the legislative branch of the government which have been suggested. As already stated some of them are now supplied in some states. What we shall ultimately work toward in our states is a complete organization of these allied branches of work, all of which focus about the work of the legislature. Some of these services are at once recognized as within the field of the library-about others there is a decided difference of opinion. But they all have many common elements, many points of contact. They are most effectively to be handled as a group. The tendency will surely be toward a concentration rather than a scattering of these parts of one general work. Plans for such a concentration, adapted to a particular set of conditions, to be sure, have already been put into concrete bill form in New York and the bill was before the legislature this year. The question presents many new features, but is not something to be answered perhaps in the distant future; it is rather, I believe, worthy of a very real consideration in the present.

The PRESIDENT: The second paper this morning, which follows very logically after the one which we have just heard, will be by Mr. DEMARCHUS C. BROWN, state librarian of Indiana, on

* * *

STATE-WIDE INFLUENCE OF THE STATE LIBRARY

The writer of this paper would be more than Prot?an if he could say anything new on this topic. All our associations, at least the half dozen I belong to, meet so often that repetition is forced upon us. In the interim very few experiences or ideas worth recording come to us. Biennial or triennial sessions would lead to better results and save money.

The personality and attainments of the librarian (and his staff) are of prime importance in making the state library a dominating influence in the commonwealth. He is the man behind the gun. I put him first. From the negative side,-his position should not be subject to partisan or personal influence. That is a blight to start with and will ruin any institution. We are still afflicted with that curse in places, not only in the state libraries but in official positions generally.

Affirmatively, the head of the state library ought to be a person of scholarly acquirements or at least in deep and appreciative sympathy with scholarship and knowledge. If he is a scholar in a limited field he should be in accord with all who are trained in other departments. He should be able to represent the state in its educational and scientific undertakings, by papers and addresses, whenever called upon. It goes without saying that he should be a trained man in educational or library or literary work and of course an executive officer. His library is a laboratory of all for all in the state and he must be in touch with the work of that laboratory. His library is the distributer of blessings to a great commonwealth, and according to the motto of the "Library Company" of Philadelphia, that is divine (Communiter bona profundere deum est). I'll not quote the Latin-it would be classic, and to be classic is against the regulations of the Zeitgeist. I want him to be an inspirer for all to love art and poetry, and study and history and politics (real); and not merely skilled in the knowledge of card indexes and catalog rules. A certain famous general in the Confederate Army spent so much of his time on details of drill and quartermaster's regulations that he forgot how to fight his army.

I have put the librarian first in this broadening influence of the state library. All the volumes and equipment and staff will be comparatively a failure without this scholarly, well-trained, wide-awake executive officer.

As to the various ways in which the state library can extend its influence and make itself useful, permit me to suggest a few. This institution can well be the bibliographical center of the state. Every club, school, library, society, and all citizens can be made to know that here information can be obtained about books.

Our own demand is quite large and ought to be larger. There are libraries with meagre equipment, schools with none, people with none, colleges with little-all these may be taught to turn to the central institution for bibliographical information. I consider this a source of wide-spreading influence, valuable and helpful to the whole state. I have placed it second more because I deem it important, not because I think all of these points can be listed accurately as to their relative positions.

Our states heretofore have been very slow in preserving their history, both of the commonwealth and municipalities. This has led, perchance, to the unspeakable commercial county histories with their unspeakable portraits and unspeakable cost, which we are compelled to purchase in order to have something.

The state library's influence should extend over the entire state in an attempt to teach the preservation of history. The library is the natural place for the collection and organization of the history of the state. The archives may well be kept here for reference and use, though some states have a separate archives and history department.

I wish we knew how to preserve history. We don't keep or build memorials, we tear down and throw away. What we want is the new, the fresh, the raw. The old, the seasoned, the ripe, we think is effete (how we like that word in referring to the old advanced civilization of Europe). The state library has a great, unploughed field to cultivate. Personally, I find people ready to burn up newspapers or manuscripts, or sell volumes for junk rather than give them to an institution where they may be preserved. I am trying to teach them otherwise, but succeeding very slowly indeed. I trust some of you are doing better.

The women's clubs are a source of help in extending the influence of the library. They are asking for information of all kinds at all times. We laugh at them, I know. They have papers on Shakespeare, Goethe or Homer at one sitting and dispose of them all. But what shall we do? They are the conservers of culture and reading. Men don't want them, i. e. culture and reading. They are bourgeois, "practical," (à bas with that word and up with refinement and culture which is just as meaningful in books as in a field where we know culture is everything). I know many prosperous country towns without a men's reading organization or club in them, but many women's. If the state library in its state-wide influence, could convert men to reading, it would do a great work. Send your bulletin to the clubs, suggest topics for discussion, and thus distribute the leaven.

So much of our reading and study is done through periodicals of every description that it is made necessary for one central institution to be well supplied with these publications. The periodicals not taken in the average library, college or club, the foreign, like Revue de Deux Mondes, and Dublin Review, for example, and particularly the learned periodicals used only occasionally, should be found in the state library.

The state library can become a source of information, widespread over the state, by this process. Demands come sometimes from remote corners, from a teacher or some ambitious student, and he should never be neglected. This department, I fear, has been in a measure overlooked. We have about a hundred from foreign countries secured through exchange for the Indiana Academy of Science. They are not commonly called for but they form a tie between the library and the scientific men and students over the state.

By no means limit this list to scientific periodicals. Make the selection as broad as human interest, if funds and space permit.

It is commonplace to say that the state library is the document depository of the commonwealth. You know that now. Many people do not realize it, however. Every official publication of the state, counties and municipalities, if preserved here, will be a source for historical research in the future. Nothing of the kind should be thrown away. Many state libraries were founded with this particular purpose in view. The state library is the logical place for the preservation of all documents of the state. From it the municipal authorities, students of state history and political science, teachers, legislators and citizens gather the information needed on the documentary history of the state.

All the states have institutions of various kinds-colleges, hospitals for insane, the epileptic, the tubercular, reformatories, etc., etc. Why should the state library not at least supplement the small or large collections in these institutions? Their purpose is not to purchase books, though some are needed. The state library's influence and assistance should enter here, also. Much can be done to enlarge the views and inform the heads of these institutions and to make happy many of the inmates. No demand by a superintendent of a state institution for books to be purchased for and referred to by him would be overlooked in the Indiana state library. The institutions are scattered over the state and the library's influence would be spread in gathering material for the people connected with these institutions. The libraries of the state universities can be supplemented to great advantage, as has been done at least in our own state and in yours, I have no doubt.

The newspapers of the state are not kept with any regularity in the different localities. They are a valuable fund of information for the historian, who must sift rigidly of course. Our attempt is to preserve the papers from each county. We have many instances already of the value of our collection. We believe that a state-wide service is done in this way. I know the newspaper is not what we think it ought to be, but certain conditions of politics, business and social customs are pictures which will otherwise be lost. The librarian in the state library has imposed upon him here an important duty to the commonwealth, and the possibility of rendering great service.

The high schools are fond of debating. The boys are more easily aroused to reading by the discussion of a public or social problem. The local library is usually meagre. If the school principal is kept in close touch with the central library he will know where to send for material. A bulletin on "Debates" with bibliographical lists is of great service to the school men. The state library extends its work to educational centers by this method. The Indiana state library for several years has followed this system and as a result has almost been swamped with requests for debate material. As many as forty high schools in one week tried to overwhelm us, but our staff stood the test womanfully and won.

There are state-wide associations of all kinds in every state. Many of them publish reports or proceedings. The state librarian may well keep his institution in touch with all of these. The library may even be a member of some of them, especially educational, social, literary or artistic. The presence of a member of its staff at their meetings or correspondence may lead to the use of the library by these organizations in a way that will show that the library is the thing to be used-a tool for every man.

Common as it may be to say it, the assistance to the blind of the state by the central library must not be passed by. It is a great joy for any one to note the pleasure these unfortunate people obtain from the collections from which they draw daily. Very few, if any, are able to purchase their own books. The number assisted is small, but the benefit and happiness are great and lasting.

As the state library is the document and the political science center, it follows that legislative and official information are to be secured here. The officials and members of the Assembly ought to be made to know that the state library is, as it were, the fountain head from which to draw. If the library is worth anything or its head and staff worth anything, they should be consulted frequently by these persons in their work of lawmaking. The library has gathered and organized the material and by means of its use by the legislator, the library exerts a state-wide service.

It is the province of the traveling libraries department to lend collections of books to groups of citizens in localities apart from libraries. This does not hinder the state library from doing much for the farmer individually and in farmers' institutes. Addresses may be delivered, bibliographical lists on agricultural subjects sent and books loaned if the law permits it, and I think it should.

In our own library we have letters and requests from farmers; we preserve the records of their institutes and granges. One who had only half an hour a day to read asked for a volume of Jefferson, Shakespeare, or a good book on chiggers. If he could find out how to get rid of the chiggers, I would prefer that book to Jefferson, whose apotheosis is sadly overworked. That farmer's request was not so fascinating as that of a teacher who wanted a book on "the history of the human people." This is a sample of Indiana readers. Indiana, the home of authors! (I want to express my opinion in parenthesis here, that this Indiana literature talk is also sadly overworked.)

All this concerns special classes of people and books. But the general reader must be looked after. If democratization of books and reading is our keynote, and I think it is, then the citizen who wants to read on history, poetry, art, sociology, religion, must not be neglected. State-wide means much. It means an open mind for all the demos.

Our central library shall not be a trade shop, not for the bourgeoisie, but a mentor, a guide, a place of refinement and culture. Not for the practical man only-he usually does not know anything and does not want to; he has no breadth of view. Looking up a trade item or a report or some figures is good and useful; so is loving a poet because it is at the foundation of character and education.

We have recently been informed-no, we have been told-that to talk about reading, culture, the love of knowledge, is "flapdoodle." A citizen may be benefited by knowing how many miles of railroad are in his county, or what amount of money his city spends, but he will be just as much benefited by reading a lofty poem of André Chénier, Le Jeu de Paume for example, or a stanza of William Dwight Moody's, not that he will make money, but something far better.

What I want to say is that the state library shall extend the love of learning, of literature, or art and all their kin to the furthest boundaries of the state in order that all may know that here is a fountain whence all may receive instruction and refreshment. Why should the business man not read something besides the newspaper, the statements of which are denied the next day? Yet most men read nothing else. If his own town library is small let him call upon the state library and let the state library be ready to help. I believe that lending books must still be granted to the state library. We have calls from lovers of reading from every corner of Indiana, from men who love culture, knowledge and literature. These we propose to accommodate as long as the law permits. This observation is made because it has been said repeatedly that the state library shall deal in documents, reports and reference books.

We have many foreigners in Indiana. When these cannot secure what is wanted at their local library I want them to come to us, as recently happened when the Roumanians wanted the text of their native poets and something about their provincial capital Nagygebin.

I trust that we may all have one great library for reference with a minimum of popular fiction-a library that is a guide to scholarship and knowledge, a library where every man who loves to read may turn himself out to grass and browse, browse deeply. Herein will we have state-wide influence.

May I group these influences as a summary:-the personality, fitness and scholarship of the State Librarian; the bibliographical center may well be the state library; the legislative reference for the Assembly and officials; the gathering and preserving of the history and archives of the state along with the encouragement among the people to preserve local historical material; the collecting of newspapers representing the entire commonwealth; the creation of a periodical center in the state library; close connection with schools, colleges and all kinds of organizations, social, literary, commercial, etc.; assistance for all the state institutions, educational, charitable, and correctional; close relation with the women's clubs; assistance to the farmer and the foreigner in isolated localities; the center for general culture and love of knowledge where every citizen may continue to go to school.

The PRESIDENT: Mr. Lester in his paper referred to the bill-drafting department of a legislative reference bureau and Mr. Brown has just referred to the man behind the counter. We may perhaps feel that modern conditions require two men behind the counter in government: the one who prepares the ammunition and the one who fires it; and perhaps the more important is the one who prepares the ammunition; the one who draws up the law, leaving to the legislature the more perfunctory service of applying the match. Mr. MATTHEW S. DUDGEON has served in the capacity of director of the bill drafting department of the Wisconsin legislative bureau and I believe that since he has assumed the duties of the executive officer of the Wisconsin Library Commission he has continued to perform that service. We shall be glad to hear from him this morning as to

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THE LAW THAT STANDS THE TEST

In an address before the New York Bar Association the Honorable Joseph E. Choate says that we in America are suffering seriously from plethora of legislation. He suggests that this whole mass of legislation pabulum that is made up and offered to the people from year to year, ought to be more thoroughly 'Fletcherized,' more completely masticated, before it is poured into the body politic for digestion. "If that were done, I am sure," he says, "that we could get along with half the quantity and it would do us just as much good." The volume of legislation now being considered is, in fact, appalling. The legislature of one Eastern state had before it at its last biennial session four thousand and eighty-one distinct bills. A Western state this year has asked its legislature to consider three thousand, seven hundred and thirty-eight measures. A Southern state actually passed at its latest session one thousand, four hundred and sixty different enactments.

Unlike the hookworm, however, this disease is neither new nor newly discovered, nor is it like the chills and fever, indigenous to our newly settled American continent. Over three hundred years ago Montaigne discovered a superabundance of legislation in France. "We have more laws in France," he says, "than in all the rest of the world." And going back still further to the first century A. D. we find Tacitus complaining that there are too many laws in Rome. "So that as formerly we suffered from wickedness," he says in his Annals, "so now we suffer from too many laws."

We may safely conclude then that the enactment of many laws which are not so fully "Fletcherized" as they should be, is a complaint which long ago became chronic among bodies politic generally and that it is high time that some cure be found for the ailment. How can the quantity of laws be diminished and the quality improved? How can our legislative acts be masticated so that one-half as many may do us as much good?

The problem of thus improving legislation and producing "the law that stands the test" is indeed a most serious one.

Requirements. Let us suggest the proposition that a law that stands the test must first be one which violates no provision of the constitution; second, it must be founded upon a sound economic basis; third, it should be capable of efficient administration: that is, it should be a practical, workable, usable thing; fourth, it must fit into its surroundings both legal and social. It must, as Blackstone has suggested, fit the situation as a suit of clothes fits the man. Some laws which are perfectly sound in good old occidental England have been found to be entirely impossible in oriental India. A measure which suits the Anglo-Saxon Yankee in Connecticut may be entirely out of place among the mixed peoples of the Philippines.

The law that stands the test must have all these qualities and this is the law which all the American states are striving to produce. Such a law may, of course, possess these characteristics and yet not be in every sense satisfactory. It may not accomplish all that was hoped for it; it may contain errors; it may need amendments, and still it may be a law which, in a proper sense, stands the test. To give a method by which a law may be created which will stand the test will not therefore be to suggest that a method has been discovered which will produce perfect legislation.

Nature of subjects considered. It should be remembered also that the difficulties of legislation arise not only from the multitude of subjects presented, but because many of the subjects are in themselves most difficult of comprehension. The Right Honorable James Bryce has said that the task of legislation becomes more and more difficult and that many of the problems which legislators now face are too hard not only for the ordinary members but even for the abler members of legislative bodies because they cannot be understood and mastered without special knowledge.

To illustrate: The legislature of a middle western state has had before it at a single session laws upon the following subjects: A comprehensive code of court procedure, initiative and referendum, recall of all officers except judges, home rule in cities, excess, condemnation, woman's suffrage, workmen's compensation, regulation of industrial accidents by commission, income tax, state aid to public highways, conservation and control of water power, forest reserve, system of industrial education, system of state life insurance, the formation of farmers' co-operative associations, limitation of the hours of labor for women, child labor, public school buildings as civic centers, and teachers' pension.

There does not exist in any learned society nor in any university in the land a single man who can do more than converse intelligently upon all of these subjects; yet this state expected its absolutely untrained legislators to understand these matters thoroughly, to express a wise judgment upon them, and to record their judgment in such form as to force it upon an entire state.

Lack of training on the part of the legislators. Of the one hundred members of the lower house of the legislature which voted upon all these measures sixty-five had never had any previous legislative experience. Only thirty had had the advantage of any college education. While nineteen of the one hundred were lawyers, they were for the most part young, inexperienced men, whose contact with public questions had been limited. Thirty of the one hundred were farmers, thirty-one were in business, six were doctors or dentists, eight were mechanics, three were school teachers. Yet these men, without experience, or training, or special fitness were forced to vote upon all these difficult economic and industrial problems, and also upon about two thousand other more or less important measures.

Necessity for unbiased information. It is of course evident that what the legislator must have is a source from which he can obtain complete information upon all sides of a controverted question. A court which purports to administer justice after hearing the contention of only one party to a transaction would open itself to ridicule. Yet this is precisely the method pursued in legislation. The legislator begins without any independent knowledge of the subject. Such knowledge as he obtains is brought to him ordinarily by a lobbyist. He receives many private suggestions whose source he hardly knows. He attends a committee hearing on a bill seeking to increase the taxes levied upon railroad property, for example. Here the best data and legal arguments that money can buy is ably and forcibly presented by the railroad attorneys. They give figures to show that the railroads are already taxed more than other forms of property. They quote economists to the effect that the proposed taxation is unsound and unscientific. They cite court decisions demonstrating to a certainty that the proposed measure is unconstitutional. They argue, wheedle, misstate, and finally convince the legislator that the measure is absurd. No similarly exhaustive arguments in behalf of the bill can be presented, for no talent comparable to that of the railroad attorneys, and in fact no talent at all is retained by the people in behalf of public interests.

This is the legislative librarian's opportunity. As the Right Honorable James Bryce has said: "No country has ever been able to fill its legislatures with its wisest men; but every country may at least enable them to apply the best methods and provide them with the amplest material."

Legislation elsewhere. It is to be remarked that the legislative questions before all civilized communities are essentially similar. Everywhere are problems growing out of crime and pauperism; problems relating to hours of labor, child labor, and wages; employer's liability; compulsory insurance; workman's compensation; problems arising out of inheritance, income taxation, and the regulation of public service corporations. Nothing is so new, however, but that some other legislature has worked upon the problem or is working upon it. Take, for example, such a question as employer's liability or workman's compensation. Fifty legislative bodies are working upon or have worked upon this single question. In at least three foreign countries and in one American state it has been adequately solved. The other forty-six have failed in part or altogether, either because of uneconomic and unscientific approach or because of constitutional limitations. Formerly and up to within the last ten years no effort had been made to profit by the experience of these fifty other legislative bodies. The typical American way is to let the legislators stumble along, ignorant of the results of similar experimentations elsewhere, trying out expensive, independent experiments, which inevitably end in ineffectual enactments.

What the legislator most needs to know, then, is what efforts other communities are making to solve the problem before him and how they are succeeding, to the end that good measures which have succeeded elsewhere may be adopted and their failures not repeated. Where successful legislative work is done the first effort is always to get copies of every law on every subject which is likely to be legislated upon at the current session. All data bearing upon the success or failure of this legislation in other states and countries must be collected, digested, tabulated and placed in such form as to be readily available to the legislator. If a measure has failed or been repealed the reasons for the failure or repeal are sought. If it has been successful its provisions are carefully studied and analyzed with a view to adaptability to local needs. Experience shows that in some cases it is necessary to prepare a translation of good foreign legislation which has never before been translated into English.

But no law from another jurisdiction can be safely transplanted without careful consideration. The local constitution must be studied. In such a case as the workman's compensation act referred to, it was necessary for a commission to make a close, scientific study of the causes and character of the industrial accidents within the state, to investigate the rates of the casualty insurance companies in the different industries, to discover what co-operation for the prevention of accidents could be secured from employers and employees. Hearings were held at various industrial centers within and without the state; scores of witnesses were examined; manufacturers, labor unions, engineering experts and economists were called upon. In short, the problem was treated in a thoroughly scientific manner. Contrary to the usual practice, the case was prepared and presented to the legislature with the same thoroughness and care as is usual when an important case is prepared and presented to the court. As a result the law, although not perfect, stands the test.

Drafting. When the legislature has discovered what measures have proved successful elsewhere and what local conditions demand, it is still helpless because the members know nothing of legislative forms and cannot use with sufficient accuracy the language expressive of its conclusion. Assistance in bill drafting is necessary. Experience has shown that the man who does this must be either a trained lawyer who is also a practical political scientist or a practical political scientist who is something of a lawyer. It is often found too that in its original form a measure is unconstitutional and a lawyer's knowledge is necessary in order to devise some means of whipping the constitutional devil around the judicial stump. For example, the workman's compensation law of England, enacted too literally in its original form, is clearly unconstitutional in America and has been so declared by the courts of our state. In another state, however, the legislative lawyers who were engaged in drafting the bill, seeing clearly the judicial stump and the constitutional devil, by a simple but clever device passed what was in effect the English law, but in such form that when it came before the Supreme Court it was not only declared constitutional but was commended.

Fault not with legislators but with the system. If legislation be bad the fault is, then, not with the legislator. The average legislator is a keen, bright, honest man, who has been successful in at least a small way in his business or profession. He is ignorant of legislative subjects not because he is an ignorant man, but because his knowledge is of other things. The fault is not with him. It is inherent in our unscientific system of legislating.

We put a group of farmers, grocers, and mechanics at work upon some great sociological problem. They can have no adequate knowledge of the subject. We do not give them compensation enough to pay their living expenses while they work. We allot them only a few hours to consider a given question. We provide for them no information. We furnish them with no legal counsel. Assuming, however, as is often true, that these men are men of integrity and humanity and common sense and that their ideas are sound, they enact a good law that forbids, for example, the employment of children in hazardous and immoral surroundings. In this they have accomplished an important and intelligent constructive work.

Then we hire the best trained minds in the state and put them in our courts. We pay them higher salaries than any other public servants. We give them large libraries in which is found the accumulated legal lore of the past. We grant them, for the questions before them, all the time they can use,-weeks, months, often literally years. These talented, high-minded gentlemen, by dint of industrious delving and assisted by highly paid and highly trained attorneys, discover at last in the depths of their moth-eaten law books some mummified eighteenth century idea which has become petrified into a constitutional provision. They shake their heads and decide that the splendid, humane, up-to-date, common sense legislation is unconstitutional and void because of some minor constitutional objection. They cannot be, and should not be, criticised, for they are clearly performing a duty. Neither can these judges substitute anything in place of the law which they destroy, for the work for which we pay them so well in money and honor and position is only critical,-and their function is in this case destructive.

The law making function as important as the judicial. Now, creative work the world over has always been recognized as requiring greater intelligence, better training, keener initiative than the purely critical. Yet, in legal matters this principle has been entirely ignored. In every way we exalt the interpretive, critical, even destructive, judicial process. We neglect and belittle the constructive creative process of law making.

The conclusion of the whole matter is that the making of the law is in principle as important,-in fact, more important, than the interpretation of it.

The legislative function must be as carefully performed as is the judicial. Men should be prepared for law making as are men for the judicial bench. They must be men of the same calibre, of good ability, of high intelligence, of absolute integrity, of broad sympathies, and of big vision. Not until we have an agency of this type assisting in law making, not until the making of laws is recognized as a distinct and important governmental function, co-ordinate with, if not superior to the judicial function, not until each state has a bureau which will, as the Honorable James Bryce says, supply the legislators with the amplest material and enable them to apply the best methods, can we hope to have laws which in the highest sense "stand the test."

The PRESIDENT: We go now from the legislature to the business man, the man who makes the wheels turn around. Those of you who had the opportunity to hear the striking address, at a meeting of the Special Libraries Association the other day, from a business man of Boston need not be reminded of the tremendous possibilities that lie in this extension of the library service. Mr. S. H. RANCK, of the Grand Rapids public library, will discuss

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MAKING A LIBRARY USEFUL TO BUSINESS MEN

On first giving consideration to this paper I was inclined to believe that the story of the personal use of the library (the public library) by business men would be almost as brief as the traditional story of snakes in Ireland. Few librarians have the means of knowing how many business men use their institutions, but where statistics of registration indicate the occupation of card holders it would appear that the library gets almost as many bartenders as bankers.

To get some definite data on this subject I had the library records investigated of the 198 officers and committees of the Grand Rapids Association of Commerce, the leading business organization of our city, with a membership of 1,300. These 198 men (and a few women) represent our most active business concerns, as well as a few professions. Of this number only 53, or 27 per cent, have live library cards. In looking over the names I recognized 38 of those without cards as persons who either individually or through their employees in the interest of the house, have used the library more or less for reference purposes. There are of course others who use the library in this way without my knowledge.

These figures indicate that the library is serving directly only about 50 per cent of the livest business men of the town. The specific questions I propose to discuss are, Why do business men use the library relatively little? What can the library do to get business men to use it more?

Progressive business men use the library because they recognize the enormous value of new ideas and of new knowledge to their business, no matter where they get them. The trouble is that public libraries can't always furnish them the knowledge they need. And furthermore not all business men are progressive. There are standpatters in the business, as well as in the political world. However, there is no class of men who have a better idea of the potential power of print, rightly used, than the business men who advertise. Such men are always ready to meet the library more than half way.

In discussing this question I should have preferred to use the term "business men" in a liberal sense. We are all more or less "business" people at times, but for this occasion I am directed by our president to limit it to that one of its 24 different meanings which applies to employer rather than employee in "the occupations of conducting trade or monetary transactions" and in "employments requiring knowledge of accounts and financial methods."

Before proceeding further permit me to state my conviction that the greatest service the library is doing for business men is not to business men personally, but rather for them through their employees,-in supplying knowledge and in promoting the general intelligence and the social welfare of the community. These things are of the greatest importance to every employer, for they are the foundations on which all efficiency is built. The social welfare work of the Panama Canal, much of it the kind libraries are doing, is a conspicuous example of the immense financial value of such work.

The male portion of adult society we may roughly divide, so far as occupations are concerned, into manual workers (laborers and mechanics), professional men, business men, and drones (the idle class) who, like the lilies of the field, neither toil nor spin, but who frequently outshine Solomon in the gorgeousness and variety of their array. They live a parasitic life on the productive labor of their fellow men, giving no adequate return. In the administration of our public libraries most consideration has been given to the idle class and to the professional classes. Real service for the manual workers and business men has been largely neglected until within recent years.

There are several reasons for this neglect. Among these may be mentioned the following: Working men and business men are expressing themselves in deeds and in things rather than in words and books; and therefore until recently there has been relatively little worth-while material available for the libraries to put on their shelves for the men directly engaged in industrial or commercial pursuits. Furthermore there has been a long standing prejudice on the part of these men (those who are rule-of-thumb men) against the reliability and the utility of things in print for their everyday work. And in certain quarters this prejudice still exists to a very considerable extent. They are inclined to look upon the writers and users of books as theoretical and impractical.

A further handicap in the use of libraries by business men, is the fact that so few of us in library work know the contents of books and things in print that might be useful to them in their daily work; and oftener we know still less of the problems business men must deal with. Therefore we cannot relate the inside of books with their work.

Much of the work of the public library is a kind of salesmanship, even though there is no direct exchange of the coin of the country. Salesmanship in its best sense is service, and service is what a city is buying for all its people when it puts into its annual budget a more or less (usually less) adequate sum of money for its library. As things are today I fear that in too many cases the public instead of drawing a plum from the library pie is not infrequently handed a lemon.

Recently I had the pleasure of dining with the vice-president of a department store that employs over 2,500 people to sell nothing but clothes-wearing apparel. He told me that the great secret of the success of his institution, through whose doors there enter from 30,000 to 40,000 people every day (and remember that nearly all these people enter with the expectation of parting with some of their good money), is the fact that every employee has instilled into him or her the fact that the salesmanship that brings success is service and that it is founded on knowledge; for, said he, "No one can sell goods satisfactorily unless he knows all about them,"-where they are made, how they are made, what they are, their history, etc. And these things everyone in this store is systematically taught. Incidentally, I may add that this department store starts its people at a minimum wage higher than the minimum in many libraries, and the maximum for women in this store is double the maximum of the highest paid women in library work in this country. This store uses the public library of its city and has a library of its own whose librarian is at this convention at the expense of the store. When a department store finds such a policy a wise one the business men responsible for its management will be the first in the community to support a policy of library service based on knowledge. But business men must be shown that the library is delivering the goods.

The business man places his establishment so far as possible where it will best serve the purposes of his business, and he spends loads of good money in the first place, and annually in the form of taxation, to get his building at the right place. Besides getting his establishment at the right place he also spends more loads of good money to arrange it for the economic and expeditious handling of his affairs in it. So far as libraries relate to serving the business man, as well as nine-tenths of the other people in the community, I am convinced that 95 per cent of the library buildings of the country are badly located, and furthermore that the large proportion of these buildings are badly arranged for the work they have, or ought, to do.

The place to serve the people is where the people daily congregate and pass by in the largest numbers. This is never on a side street or in the "best" residence section of the city. Your average "best" citizen today gets more satisfaction out of his public library in showing his visitor from out of town the Greek temple set back in a beautiful grove or garden as he whirls by in his six cylinder, 60 horse-power, seven-passenger touring car than in using the books and periodicals inside. Such a building in such a setting has a value as a work of art, but not as a library for service. Incidentally, it is only fair to say that business men in most of our cities are largely responsible that we have library buildings for show rather than for use.

Every block that separates the library from the principal lines of the movement of the people, every foot that people must walk from the sidewalk to the entrance of the building and then to its books, every step that must be climbed above the level of the sidewalk to reach the first floor, are all so many hurdles, barriers, which the people are obliged to overcome before they can get to their own books, whether it be to use them for business or pleasure, for education or recreation. The bad location and arrangement of library buildings in the United States are keeping hundreds of thousands of potential users and supporters of libraries away from them and out of them every day of the year. And there is no class of persons in the community more affected by such things than business men, for they recognize (consciously or unconsciously) better than any other class the commercial value of time and convenience.

Let me put this a little more concretely. The library building in which I work is better located and arranged than the average library building of the country. And yet the total distance walked to and from the sidewalk by all those who enter that building daily is nearly 35 miles to the point where the library begins to serve them. Furthermore each one of the thousand and more persons who daily enter this building, in addition to the energy he uses in walking 180 feet to and from the sidewalk must lift his own weight and the weight of the books he carries seven feet above the level of the sidewalk. In other words the location and arrangement of this building with reference to the sidewalk requires the people who use it daily to take an extra walk of almost the distance from Baltimore to Washington and at the same time carry a weight equal to that of a ton of coal 350 feet to the top of a skyscraper and down again. And all this is in addition to the walk of 450 feet from the nearest car line, which few people use, 800 feet from the car lines which are generally used, and over 400 feet from the nearest thoroughfare. The library to be a friend to man, and to serve him, must "live in a house by the side of the road where the race of men go by."

The business man who studies usually buys his own printed matter that deals directly with his work, and in this respect he is usually far ahead of the library both in knowledge and in material at hand; and the bigger his business the more is this likely to be the case. The librarian will almost invariably find such a man a most helpful person in the selection of things to be purchased and in the relative value of both authors and books. It should be the business of every librarian to know intimately, as far as possible, all such men in the community.

Our public libraries must largely increase on their shelves the number of things in print that are of real service to the business man in his work. First of all we must know what these things are, and next we need to have the nerve to spend money for them much more freely than we have ever done before. This is expensive and most such expenditures will not show in the statistics of circulation. As an illustration of this let me refer again to the institution I have the honor to serve. For a number of years we have been spending $400 a year for books in only one line of business. Besides the books, we take some two dozen current periodicals on the same subject. All are used to a considerable extent and the use made of them by only a dozen men is of the greatest commercial and financial importance to our city. And yet so far as the figures of circulation are concerned the expenditure of $450 of our annual book fund for this one business is practically nothing.

We must get away from the idea of measuring the usefulness or the efficiency of the library by the number of books issued for home use. So long as this idea dominates our public library work we can never do our best for the community, and especially the business part of it.

We need of course many books for the business man in our circulating departments, but these by no means meet the need. Many of these books are out of date in a few years at the best. To keep up to date there is necessary a liberal purchase of yearbooks, transactions and publications of industrial, technical and commercial associations which bring down to date annually, and in convenient form, the latest knowledge in their respective fields. For progressive business men such works are vastly more important than encyclopedias, important as encyclopedias of all kinds are.

Then too we must pay greater respect to the material published in pamphlet form. On a multitude of subjects some of the latest and best things have appeared in this form. Most of us do not handle this material properly, if at all. In many libraries pamphlets are regarded and cared for with about the same degree of disrespect as were public documents in most libraries twenty years ago, and I regret to say, in many libraries today. And as for the public use made of pamphlets, it is practically nothing.

But more important for the wide-awake business man than books, documents and pamphlets, is a large collection of current periodicals relating to every kind of business activity in your city, with clipping files on many subjects, for it is only through these that it is possible to keep up with the latest information or for the library to supply the thing that is most needed at the minute. As an illustration of such use I recall several recent instances of business men getting up briefs in connection with the proposed Underwood tariff bill. The latest information, even when compiled sometimes by government authorities, was secured from technical or trade journals before it could be received from the Government Printing Office.

In short the best work the library can do for the business men personally is in the building itself, supplemented by extensive use of the telephone and the mails (reference or information work if you please), and not by issuing to them for home use books whose information at the best is rarely less than a year old, but in reality is more likely to be five, ten, or even twenty years old. The circulating book has a most important place and I would not for one moment take from it the importance that is its due. My plea is that we recognize more fully for our business man, and especially the so-called small business man-the man of small business, or the young man who hopes to establish a business of his own, the great importance of library assistants who know the contents and the relative value of books, pamphlets and periodicals, and who understand the art of library salesmanship whereby the business man gets the things he really needs.

And then when we have done all this-have librarians who know, and the things in print the business man needs, this one thing more we must do, we must let the business man know what we have for his particular problem and how we can serve him. The library must advertise the utility of ideas and of knowledge in the every day work of the world as well as advertise its resources and its service.

The best advertising is that which comes from a well served patron. But our libraries have thrown away one of the best means of publicity by locating their buildings where people must go out of their way to find them and by so arranging them that the passerby sees nothing but stone, brick and glass-things that suggest nothing of the joy and usefulness of books. Seeing great crowds enjoying and using books, as well as seeing attractive things in print through properly arranged show windows, would appeal to the average library user in a way that would simply compel his interest and attention in the things we have for him.

The architecture of the average library building suggests a tomb-a place for dead ones-rather than a place chock-full of the things that appeal with tremendous force to the soul that is alive with the throbbing impulses of this wonderful time in which we live.

Since our buildings deny us this great means of publicity which the show window enables every merchant to use to such great advantage, we must use as best we may such means as we find available. In a general way I may state my conviction that we should make a much larger use of the specific personal appeal as over against general publicity, though the latter is also necessary. When a man has a definite task assigned him put the resources and service of your library directly up to him for his particular problem, especially if the problem is one a little outside the circle of his regular business. It will come to him at the psychological moment and he is most likely to act on your suggestion; whereas had it come to him as a general statement before he was personally interested most likely it would have been promptly forgotten. As a part of our regular routine letters from the library go to all such persons, as we see their names in the newspapers, on programs, etc.

At the meeting of the Associated Advertising Clubs of America early this month in Baltimore I had the pleasure of "getting next" to some of the livest business men in the country. The thing that impressed me most was not the interesting exhibitions there shown or the various "stunts" that were pulled off, but the new note that some of the men were striking. It was this: "Business and business efficiency for service rather than for profit." This is a high ideal, worthy of any profession, and I venture the prediction that it will be men of this type who will more and more dominate the business world of the future. Such men will appreciate and support the public library more than business men have ever done before; but they will also require more. To get their support we as librarians must think less of measuring our efficiency in terms of circulation statistics, a kind of impersonal, bookkeeping standard, but more of measuring it in terms of human service-human service not only for the business man, but for every man, every woman and every child in all this vast continent of America.

The PRESIDENT: Great as is the opportunity of the public library to serve the business man, it can't do it all, for so highly specialized are some of the departments of interest of the various business houses that no public library without a treasury like that of our millionaire concerns could hope to undertake a work of that character. Therefore, each large business concern necessarily must supplement the resources of the public library by means of library facilities of its own. We shall hear something of this form of work this morning in the paper which is to be presented by one of the most successful of the libraries of this type, that of H. M. Byllesby & Co. of Chicago, whose librarian, Miss LOUISE B. KRAUSE, will give us the paper.

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LIBRARIES IN BUSINESS ORGANIZATIONS: THEIR EXPANDING FUNCTION

The service which books render mankind may in general be designated as falling into two classes; namely, books for inspiration and books for information. Dismissing the use of books as a means of inspiration, because the subject does not fall within the scope of this paper, let us consider the most important use to which printed information can be put, in the service of mankind. At first thought it might seem that the use of the printed page for purposes of information reached its highest service in the function of education, but granted that it does not play an important part in education, we know education to be something vastly larger than a mere knowledge of facts, and we also know that many men and women who are repositories of information derived from the printed page do not always put it into operation for the best welfare of their fellows; for, as James Russell Lowell has said, "There is nothing less profitable than scholarship for the mere sake of scholarship;" and truly scholarship without the ultimate purpose of practical service is one of the most selfish possessions in the world.

Let us therefore exclude the use of printed information in the service of education as its highest form of usefulness and consider the following statement. The use of print in furnishing information performs its most important service in the function which it exercises in modern business, because it is business which lays hold of abstract science and knowledge and puts them into practical operation for the greatest benefit to mankind; for the commercial age in which we live is not a sordid age, but an age which is distinctly marked by the development and conservation of resources for the supplying of man's needs, by means of the extension of applied science into the field of business. Now lest this statement should be too abstract, and the speaker be accused in the words of Leonard Merrick of "voicing the sentiments of the unthinking in stately language," let us consider this proposition for a moment in the concrete. It is business enterprise that has brought about, through the perfection of the steam engine, the swiftness and convenience which we enjoy in twentieth century travel by railroad. It is business that has brought the service of the telephone and telegraph to their highest perfection. It is business that has developed artificial lighting by gas and electricity and emancipated us from candles and kerosene lamps. It is business that is transforming raw and waste materials by the application of pure science, into products of service and value for the needs of innumerable homes, in addition to perfecting agricultural machinery, and producing fertilizers to enrich the land, thereby making possible the production of better crops. Thus we might continue to multiply illustrations of how business enterprise has equipped us with the means of meeting great needs which at various times have seriously threatened the welfare of human life. This fact of the application of abstract science to the world's practical needs, through the medium of business enterprise, has become permanently recognized by institutions of learning, as seen in the establishment of technical schools, schools of commerce and finance, and instruction in business administration, for, as a recent writer in the Journal of Political Economy has said, "The methods of American industry are rapidly being intellectualized."

A variety of professional work of which engineering and chemistry are noteworthy examples are also carried on by large business organizations, and we find professional men of the highest rank as prime movers in large commercial enterprises. (In this connection it might not be amiss to state that out of an experience as university librarian and business librarian the speaker is inclined to think that the professional business man keeps more adequately informed and up to date on his specialties than does the average university professor.)

An additional fact which bears directly on the general subject under discussion is, that the age in which we live is not only a business age, but that it is an age marked by the magnitude of its business organizations; an age of "big business," as some one has called it; and because of the economic conditions of our advancing civilization, business will undoubtedly continue to be "big business" even though subjected to federal and state regulation. Now correlating these two facts, namely, that modern business is conducted by means of large organizations and that its success is based upon the intelligent application of scientific knowledge to practical needs, we have cleared the way for an appreciation of the function of printed information as embodied in the work of libraries in business organizations.

The business organization builds up its own library, first, on account of the convenience of having close at hand the information constantly needed by its workers, and subject to no borrowing restrictions, which would be inevitable even if the facilities of outside libraries were available; and second, on account of the necessity for careful selection of material particularly adapted to its individual needs. Business organizations have for many years collected information in a desultory manner, but it has been only in the last few years that some of them have awakened to the fact that more was needed than mere collection of printed information, and for the same reason that they were availing themselves of all modern devices for the quick and adequate handling of their various products and were systematizing their methods to obtain more efficient results, so they must lay hold of modern library methods under experienced supervision if they were to keep up with the steadily growing and important mass of printed information. Therefore we find business organizations securing the services of professional library workers, trained to use books in the broadest and most practical manner. Some hesitation was at first expressed in various quarters as to whether so-called professional library methods used in public and university libraries were suited to business library needs, and as to whether library workers educated for general library work would adequately meet the business library situation. In fact it was intimated that the business librarian was a worker of a different brand than the ordinary librarian and therefore he had both knowledge and needs which set him apart from his library fellows, in a special class by himself. Out of four years' experience as a business librarian the speaker takes pleasure in stating that practical experience has proved the fallacy of both of these conceptions. It is true that business librarians are called upon to exercise certain functions which the librarians of public and university libraries are not, but which any efficient head of a public or university library would be quite capable of exercising if the occasion demanded it. In fact the recent rise of library interest in business men and their needs can be directly traced to the heads of some of our public libraries and the work they have inaugurated in making their libraries as helpful as possible to all classes of citizens.

The characterization of the function of libraries in business organizations by the word "expanding" in the title assigned to this paper by the President of the American Library Association, is most apt, and indicative of the real status of the case. The business library is in a process of evolution, and just what the final result will be, it is a little too early in its development to state.

The elemental idea of the function of a business library that was held by the officers of the business organization with which the speaker is most familiar, was to have the books and data which were the property of the company, classified and cataloged so that material could be found quickly, and a librarian was employed solely on the basis of this need.

With the acquisition of a librarian the library situation soon changed from the inquiry for certain definite books and periodicals, to the inquiry as to whether the company had any specific information on a given subject, and if not as to whether printed information on the subject was available elsewhere and how quickly it could be obtained.

The evolution in the function of a library from that of furnishing a definite book asked for, to furnishing all the information obtainable on a given subject as quickly as possible is decidedly expensive, and the what, how and where of the case would furnish ample material for a separate paper.

The evolution in the function of the library did not stop at this point; for it was soon expected that the librarian would understand the specific interests of the members of the organization, and to a certain degree think for them in keeping up with the field of print and in bringing to their attention, without a request on their part, certain facts of which they would like to be cognizant. To this duty was added the forecasting of possible future needs, and the collection of information in advance of rush demands.

The magnitude of the work of modern business organizations requires the division of labor into a number of departments, and the workers in any one department may not always be acquainted with the information which may be available in another department. The library, by keeping in touch with individuals in all departments, becomes a central bureau of information in being able to refer the members of one department to those in another who possess the particular information desired.

The business library also assembles and files the manuscript data of original research conducted by members of the organization, materials which constitute one of its valuable assets. Research data in the possession of business corporations is often a worthy contribution to scholarship. An illustration of this fact was recently brought to the attention of the speaker, by the statement of a university student, who said that in making a study of the drinking waters of a certain state the only analyses of waters on record were those which a railroad had made primarily for the purpose of ascertaining the suitability of the waters for boiler use on locomotives.

In addition to these briefly outlined functions, which are more or less technical, attention should be directed to several others, lest a mistaken impression be given that business library work is entirely technical in its nature.

Business men are often called upon to serve the public as good citizens in various capacities, and also to serve as officers or on committees of national business organizations, and thus have interests outside of their regular company work. Their librarian is expected to assist in any need which arises by reason of these outside interests, and not only may be called upon to furnish information but also to do editorial work in preparing material for publication.

The welfare and education of employees has also become a prominent feature in the work of many large business corporations, and the library is expected to be a prominent factor in this work, as it is the logical educational center of the organization. Some of our business libraries have recently been drawn rather deeply into welfare work with the result that certain phases of practical library service are being neglected. It does not seem advisable, however, that the business librarian should annex any line of welfare work which does not legitimately center in the library; for the librarian is best fitted to serve the interests of the organization by maintaining high standards of efficient library service rather than by annexing other kinds of work belonging solely to the sphere of a social worker. This is particularly important at the present stage of business library development, as the business world in many sections has not yet learned what professional library service really is, and how to utilize it most effectively.

In view of the fact that the business world except for comparatively few organizations is not utilizing the undoubtedly valuable service which professional librarians are able to render, and that the American Library Association has always endeavored to extend the use of books and their widest application, it might not be amiss to suggest that it would be legitimate work for the American Library Association with its library prestige and well known motives of personal disinterestedness, to undertake a campaign of education to bring before business men the subject of what library work really is, and the character of service it is prepared to render; for in these days of the over-emphasized and often superficial cry for more efficiency, there is no line of work that is more genuinely efficient than that of the trained librarian. The information, to be put before business men, should be free from library technicalities and details, and its arguments should be framed, not to enlighten librarians, but to convince busy men of affairs possessed of shrewd judgment and large foresight, as to the practical worth of the matter as a business proposition. For library work in business organizations is no longer a theory or a tentative experiment, but has proved itself in the firms adopting it to be an integral part of the successful work of the corporation. This fact is well illustrated by a bulletin recently issued by a large business firm, in which it endeavored to put before the public, in a pamphlet entitled "Why it is qualified" the value of the consulting services of one of its departments, and among the prominent reasons given under "Why it is qualified" is the fact of the commercial library maintained by the company, with the library's particular resources under competent supervision.

Because printed information has proved to be an integral factor in the successful prosecution of business and because it can be most effectively utilized by means of professional library methods, therefore, the business library hopes to take its place in the ranks of the American Library Association as one in purpose with all libraries in the realization of a common ideal, namely, the largest possible use of books in the practical service of mankind.

The PRESIDENT: I have just received a message that Mr. McAneny will be here in a very short time. In the few moments intervening it might be well perhaps to discuss some of the trenchant papers which we have had this morning.

Miss AHERN: Mr. President, I would like to take exception to one thing Mr. Ranck said in his paper. I do not believe that the idea that the contents of books are useful to men in the business world is of recent date. I think, perhaps, the second statement that these things have only come recently into the arrangement of resources of the library is the truer one. We certainly have had knowledge of chemistry and of geology and technical knowledge in manufacture for many, many years, only many librarians have been more interested in the purely educational or inspirational part of the library and have neglected that large field of usefulness and that large company of people who contribute to the welfare of work and of the world, as Miss Krause has pointed out. The best chemists in the country are being sought by the business houses; the best knowledge of soils, of minerals, of woods, of lumber, of stone has long been sought by the men who are making a commercial use of these things. And their information is not held in reserve: it is all in printed form and only the scope of the librarian's knowledge of where things may be obtained in the world of print places the limit on this material for the library shelves. And so I hope that librarians will not say that books on these subjects, that material on these subjects is a recent product. It is our knowledge of them, a knowledge that this is a part of the province of library work, that makes for recent activity.

The PRESIDENT: Mr. Ranck is here to answer for himself. The statement has been challenged and he can answer it.

Mr. RANCK: I think there is not so much difference between the view I take and the view taken by Miss Ahern. I do not know that I followed my manuscript very closely at that point, but what I had in mind was the business man rather than the professional, technical man. I fully grant what Miss Ahern says with reference to technical subjects, scientific subjects, and so on. As I said, I think there is no radical disagreement between Miss Ahern's and my position. There may be a misunderstanding.

Miss AHERN: I was not questioning what Mr. Ranck had said, but, rather, removing any excuse that the library folk may put to themselves for a lack of interest or a lack of activity along this line by saying that the material was scant or hard to command.

Dr. ANDREWS: There is the other side, that Miss Krause's paper emphasized and which Miss Ahern seems to neglect. Miss Krause's paper states that American industry is becoming intellectualized, and that this is a great factor in the development of business life. It ought also to be an extra incentive to the public library to meet the demands. I think that much of this development in the technical side of library work has come from the increasing study by business men of their own world and that we ought to remember that while the public libraries have neglected in the past to furnish business men with what they wanted, yet the latter did not want it then as much as they do now.

The PRESIDENT: Those of us-and I assume that that means every librarian-who read the June number of the World's Work were impressed by one strong article therein concerning the growing magnitude of municipal administration and the great problems that confront those who are charged with such administration. Without repeating to you the very striking comparisons which the author made with some of the governmental functions of states and even some of the kingdoms of Europe, showing the tremendous problems confronting the municipal officials, problems of tremendous budgets, of great public works, and so on, it will be sufficient for me to say that it is a happy omen that we are now getting into the public service men of high civic ideals and constructive ability and who are replacing men whose self-seeking interests or vanity led them to seek the votes of their fellow citizens. I am glad that we have with us today a man of this high type. I need not say further concerning him because we took advantage of his absence to get from Mr. Bowker a pretty good who's-who bearing upon himself, and I shall simply introduce to you at this time to speak to us upon the subject of "The municipal reference library as an aid in city administration," the Honorable GEORGE McANENY, president of the borough of Manhattan, New York.

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THE MUNICIPAL REFERENCE LIBRARY AS AN AID IN CITY ADMINISTRATION

It is a very real pleasure to meet with the American Library Association, and to convey in behalf of my colleagues in the administration of the City of New York, and in behalf of other colleagues in public business throughout the country, our hearty congratulations and possibly a friendly warning and a word of appeal.

Congratulations are due you for having established on so high a plane and in so short a time the profession of librarian. Especially are you to be congratulated for having welcomed the new profession of municipal reference librarian; for your adaptability in the constant extension of the reference work, and for the resiliency which is showing again in another field that real Father Williams never grow old. Could Benjamin Franklin look upon this gathering, and hear your reports of social service, through circulating, home, reference and municipal reference libraries, I am sure that no fruit of his patriotism would seem to him more promising than the recent application of the circulating library idea to government affairs.

My friendly warning has to do with your requests to fiscal bodies for appropriations. In many parts of the country, there is the feeling that the less the library has to do with public officials the better it is for the library, consequently, as a short cut, we find compulsory minimum appropriations-so many mills or so many parts of mills for library development. We also find that too many towns are satisfied with this compulsory minimum tax, and that the only time their fiscal representatives hear about libraries is just before the budget appropriations are voted. You must be indulgent with those who vote the money, if the outcome of this habit suggests the man who was exasperated by his wife, who he said "just nagged and nagged him for money, when he came, when he left, on Sunday, always." Finally, when a neighbor summoned the courage to ask, "What in the world does she do with all the money?" he, perforce, must answer; "Well, I don't know; you see I haven't given her any yet." Councils and Mayors will understand your library problem best if you will help them understand at those quieter seasons of the year when they are not harassed, as they are at budget time, by appeals from every other city department and for every other thing.

When presenting your budget, give the fiscal officer credit for wanting to know the whole truth, and for wanting reasons for giving you the money you request. Seldom will it help to ask for a great deal more than you need. Always, it will help not to present in a single total items that do not belong together. Classify your budget. State your program clearly. If all the money you want is not voted this year, stick clearly to the plan that has been voted, and show both the fiscal authorities and the town where your service has been crippled, if at all, for want of funds. It will be well to begin your budget campaign so that the first idea which the public and the fiscal officers get is that of the service you wish to render, rather than the money you wish to get. Most library budgets, like most other budgets of the United States, are apt to be put in without the explanatory matter which alone will make the dollar-and-cent facts show social reasons for library support.

Now for my appeal. In asking you to consider certain needs of public business, I want to speak quite frankly, as a city official who, like thousands of other city and county officials, must step into other people's business, with no time for getting acquainted with detail, and with a public to deal with that not only expects us on the first day we take office to use all the machinery of our predecessor and to get better results, but also really expects us to fail. We inherit a stack of mail. We are flooded with suggestions and complaints; many of them in confidence and most of them confusing. We are urged to attend club and church meetings, and dinners, and graduating exercises. We are expected, without any change in subordinate personnel, while giving our attention to large community problems and to the political aspects of public works, to get an efficient product out of our employees, no matter who they are or what they have been. In most places, we find no disinterested adviser, either on the inside or on the outside.

Such a situation would not necessarily be serious if we stepped into a thoroughly efficient organization where every employee and supervisor had his place, and where the institution as such had its "continuing memory." When Mr. Rea succeeded Mr. McCrea as president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, he inherited a splendid organization, every part related to another part; a system under which experts had tabulated within a moment's reach the successes and the failures of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the costs of its various contracts, the difference between estimates and final costs, and an efficiency ranking both of its various employees and its stations. When the present administration in New York City stepped into office, we inherited an aggregation of departments and divisions then spending-if we count in installments and interest paid on the city debt-more than $160,000,000 for the expenses of a single year. There were ninety thousand employees. Side by side with one another were clerks paid one $600 and another $1,800 for the same kind of work; in another grade were clerks paid $1,600 and others paid $2,400 for the same kind of work. When salaries had been increased, and why, was not a matter of record. Supplies were contracted for by no standard form. Specifications, either for supplies or for construction work, were worded differently at different times, according to the individual wish or whim of the department officer preparing them. The public was but poorly protected at any point. Plans were made for new buildings, for new roads, and for other vast improvements, often without estimates of cost; often with assurances of only slight cost, where, too frequently, cost had been estimated as an entering wedge only. Thus a great city would stumble into an experiment or public improvement demanding millions of dollars, without ever reckoning the ultimate amount of its obligation. For example it may be fair in this presence to recall that the first bill for the New York public library carried with it an appropriation of $2,500,000. The city decided to spend this $2,500,000 and actually it spent $10,000,000. The New York public library is worth every dollar it cost, ten times over; I am merely emphasizing that the public should have had its eyes open and, in this case as in every other, should have known what it was doing. Although this same gap occurred over and over again-between estimate and actual cost-no steps were taken to recall the fact when each new amount was under consideration.

Ignorant as we have been of our own experience, still less informed have we been regarding the experience of neighbor cities. Some years ago, Denver, in operating its street railway, found it expedient to substitute electric motor power for the old cables. After Denver had discarded these cables, Baltimore adopted the cable. Rochester has recently adopted a device to attach drinking fountains to its ordinary fire hydrants. The idea is a new one, and may prove valuable. I say it merely by way of instance; but if it is a good idea, New York City and your city should adopt it. Each successive experiment of the sort should, at least, be brought promptly to the attention of public officials.

Again, New York City has worked out an improved system of accounting and budget making. The village of Dobb's Ferry, the cities of Duluth and Cincinnati have used an improvement upon New York's budget exhibits-recently called a new kind of "confidence game"-that is, taking the public into official confidence about the public's own business. Instead of waiting a generation for cities to adopt these new methods, their officials should promptly be given the facts they need.

Is it not criminal waste and error for one city to introduce a system of sewer disposal, or of milk regulation, which another city has found endangering the lives of its citizens? If a measure has proved bad and dangerous for one city, modern science in the hands of a librarian should make it unnecessary for every other city to go through the same experience.

To help us in ending all this waste, and to help us, in short, in putting city government upon a thorough scientific and efficient basis, the municipal reference library is beginning to take its highly important place. Without a municipal reference library, it will in future be difficult for any administrative officer to do his best. I will not attempt to review the laborious steps of my colleagues in the present board of estimate and apportionment-our governing municipal body-to incorporate into standard specifications, standard salaries and standard contracts the memory of our past failures, so that we may hold the gains that we have made and avoid the weaknesses and the errors of our experience. But I venture some suggestions as to a reference library that, although general in their application, will indicate our reasons for establishing such a library in New York.

Our reasons for placing the library in our new Municipal Building-as we propose to do-apply everywhere. It must be made easy for officials to get information, and for the librarian to get the information promptly and directly to the officials. It is not enough to know that it may be had. To have important information an hour away from the office is almost as bad as to have it a thousand miles away. It must be easier for the busy official to get the information he wants than to endure the thought of going without it. In putting the library where the users are, instead of where they are not, we are following the simple rule of trade that meters city property by the foot instead of by the acre.

The municipal library is a place not for everything, but for particular needed things. If it were true that Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other constituted a college, it is even more true that a librarian in a bare room, anxious to serve the public via the public official and knowing where the material is, constitutes an infinitely better municipal reference library than a place perfectly equipped which suggests erudition rather than immediate help. There is great danger that our municipal reference libraries will become junk shops, as interesting and as helpful, as out of date or as unrelated to today's problems as an encyclopedia or a "compendium of useful knowledge." A municipal reference library should suggest answers to today's questions; not answers either to yesterday's questions or to next year's. Will you, the librarians, consider the importance and the advisability of keeping these libraries workshops, as they ought to be, and of using your general reference libraries as the place for the storage of materials.

The ordinary city official hasn't the time to plough through a mass of pamphlets looking for what he wants. He wants the facts collated and marshalled, ready for use-and "he wants what he wants when he wants it." Some time ago I was interested in drawing an ordinance to license all vehicles using the New York streets, and to regulate the weight, the width and size of tires, etc., of our great trucks that have been tearing up our pavements. I wanted to know about the policy of other cities in this matter, and to devise, if possible, a way of making those vehicles that destroy the streets help pay for their maintenance. Similarly, today, as Chairman of the committee on the height, size and arrangement of buildings within the city limits, I am interested in the adoption of some reasonable basis for regulating our modern skyscraper in order to keep the city, literally, from choking itself to death.

Again, we have had to restore to the public many miles of city sidewalks that had been preempted by stoops, and other encroachments. We have wanted to plan our public buildings and related matters with a view to the future, and to the grouping of building sites in a "Civic Center." So, in dealing with our transit problem; in investigating the health department, and in improving the type and quality of street pavements, I have wanted not all the information there was to be had-not books or formal reports-but concrete answers to immediately pressing questions. I wanted to be referred to the latest article or report which would make it unnecessary to go through twenty or a hundred other articles, books or reports. It is enough to know that in a great central library are all the working materials for scientific research. Frankly, I feel that the actual use that will be made of the municipal reference library will be in inverse ratio to the number of books that are in evidence, and that require the time of the librarian.

I would go so far as to say that anything that a public official has not just called for, or that the librarian is not about to call to the attention of a public official for departmental study or report, or for the drawing of ordinances, should be kept in the general library, and out of the municipal reference library.

Comptroller Prendergast and Librarian Anderson are even planning to have New York's official correspondence "clear" through the municipal reference library-so far as the writing and answering of letters calling for special information goes. I am told that when Portland recently started its municipal reference library the mayor promptly availed himself of its facilities for answering innumerable sets of questions and special questions that came from outside the city, and advised his heads of departments to follow his example. I wish the Carnegie Institution for Scientific Research or some other great foundation interested in the conservation of national resources and human energy would investigate what it is now costing this country to fill out the innumerable blanks from college boys wishing help on their commission government debate; college students writing theses; national organizations compiling reports, etc. Niagara unharnessed was wasting much less power than are we officials, school superintendents, mayors, and engineers who are answering such questionnaires. It would be lamentable enough if we always answered right; but most of us answer quite inadequately, and many of us answer wrong. Last year, a certain national society wrote me, asking certain questions about civil service reform. I had had more or less to do for some years with that line of public service. My instinct was to take time from pressing duties to answer these questions; but a neighbor who had received a similar set of questions was thoughtful enough to write to this national body and suggest that before he answered he would like to know how many other New York officials and private agencies had received the same set of questions. It appeared then that twenty different people, including a dozen officials, had been asked to fill out that blank. Whereupon it was suggested that instead of drawing upon twenty people who did not possess the facts, the investigator might turn directly to the Civil Service Commission that did possess the facts, and there, no doubt, he readily found what he wanted.

Now, if a municipal reference library could have served as a clearing house, it would have been brought to light at once that one answer would have served the purpose of twenty, or that one answer, at least, would have served the purpose of the dozen official answers. Moreover, just as the official reports give fresher material than published books, such correspondence, manuscript reports of investigating committees, etc., give fresher material than published reports.

Such data should be kept properly classified, available upon call or when the librarian sees its time for usefulness.

Another practical suggestion I make from my experience as an official. While it seems to apply especially to administrative departments or to private agencies specializing in certain fields, I really do not see much prospect of getting it unless from a municipal reference library or from the municipal reference activity of a general library. I refer to an up-to-date "Poole's" or cumulative index of the passing subject matter of city government. You get, the library gets, once a month a list of all the articles in the principal books. Why should we not have a list of the advance steps taken in public affairs? Just as soon as a few librarians call for such information, it will become commercially possible to reduce it. The individual library can then add to the material the particular points that are of interest to its own community.

Similarly, it would be of the greatest assistance to every city official if the matters under his jurisdiction were listed and material grouped under proper heads. For example, the president of the Borough of Manhattan has jurisdiction over the streets and sidewalks; encroachments and encumbrances; street vaults and street signs; the sewer system; the public buildings; the baths and markets; and the control of private buildings through the enforcement of the buildings laws. If information in regard to what other cities were doing in all these matters were listed, plus suggestions and advance steps taken in these same matters at home, the reference librarian would be of incalculable help to that office.

Finally, just a word about the expense of the municipal reference library. The amount which it is justified in demanding will depend naturally upon the service it renders. The merit of our new segregated and classified budget is that it calls for the work needing to be done, as well as the cost of not having the work done, and that it shifts attention from the personality that requests the budget allowance. A circumscribed program means circumscribed budget. Frankly, I believe that extension of program should and must precede extension of budget. But this new kind of social work which serves a community at those points where it is now least equipped to serve itself, will not want for financial support when it talks about the work that should be done-and not about itself.

No municipal activity will, in my judgment, find it easier in the next twenty-five years to secure adequate financial support than the municipal reference library which is not a compendium of knowledge but a forecaster of service needed and an ever-present help in time of trouble.

The PRESIDENT: May I express to you, Mr. McAneny, the thanks of the American Library Association for your coming and the assurance that we have profited greatly from it.

Adjourned.

* * *

SIXTH GENERAL SESSION

(Saturday morning, June 28, 1913.)

THE PRESIDENT: During the other sessions of the Conference we have been considering people-and books. At this concluding session the topics on the program have special reference to books-and people. The first paper invites our interest by its suggestion of the flavor which old books bring. Miss G. M. WALTON, of the Michigan State Normal College, will present this paper.

* * *

THE FRIENDLY BOOK

It was Mr. Lowell who reminded me the other day, by quoting Ecclesiasticus in one of his essays, that we owe the ideal of the man of leisure to a book of the Apocrypha wherein we read, "The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure."

Our profession standing as a guarantor of our wisdom and our learning, I am here today to bespeak a portion of our large opportunity of leisure for-The Friendly Book.

There is small fear that we librarians forget the books of power and the books of knowledge which DeQuincey (the ofttimes quoted) presses upon all men. And most of us undoubtedly possess that ardent zeal for knowledge which filled the soul of the literal-minded librarian who read quite seriously (and found therein a working category for her own improvement) Lamb's letter to an old gentleman whose early education had been neglected, where, among the qualifications of a preceptor, the following will serve to refresh your memories: "He must be a thorough master of vernacular orthography, with an insight into the accentualities and punctualities of modern Saxon. He must be competently instructed in the tetralogy, or first four rules. He must have a genius capable in some degree of soaring to the upper element, to deduce from thence the not much dissimilar computation of the cardinal points. He must instruct you in numeric and harmonious responses, and he must be capable of embracing all history, so as from the countless myriads of individual men, who have peopled this globe of earth-for it is a globe-by comparison of their respective births, lives, deaths, fortunes, conduct, prowess, etc., to pronounce, and teach you to pronounce, dogmatically and catechetically, who was the richest, who was the strongest, who was the wisest, who was the meekest man that ever lived; to the facilitation of which solution, you will readily conceive, a smattering of biography would in no inconsiderable degree conduce."

I sometimes question if professions are not tinged with the culture epoch epidemic. It is not so very long since we were half hesitatingly taking a place among the other learned professions, almost with the apologetic air of the young boy making his first appearance in long trousers, and wondering if his fellow-men appreciate his coming into their midst-but the youth soon assumes the aggressive attitude which compels attention-and one symptom of this attitude which I feel among ourselves is the large and learned talk about new books-the self-satisfied air and monumental confidence in our sometimes sophomoric knowledge and understanding of all things "in the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth," until I wonder if the pleasant counsel about reading "books at least a year old, that we like, and that are great books" must be relegated with the rest of our Emersonian philosophy to the lumber room of our many youthful joys and dreamings.

I believe we all love best to mark the passing years by the friends they bring us, and it were a barren year that brings not one more friend, and so with our friendly books, which like all friendships fill our lives with genial warmth and gratitude. Neither is really a matter of choice, for a book like a person yields its intimate charm only to the sympathizing heart. We have no care to answer why, other than, "because"-"We love them because we must love them." A new book friend comes to us now and then, and we cling to the old ones. Sometimes we lose the personal touch, but we see their kindly faces and after a separation from them we arrange them on the shelves, and we rearrange them, and, as Mr. Arnold Bennett says, "The way we walk up and down in front of those volumes, whose faces we have half forgotten, is perfectly infantile."

I remember once in Rome a friend, selecting photographs, said, "I must take a good Cicero to my son Frank, who used to say he felt as well acquainted with Cicero as he did with Bishop Huntington," and dear old Dean Hook, when a lad at Oxford expresses this same intimate feeling in one of his lively inimitable letters, "I have got into a very dissolute set of men, but they are so pleasant that they make me very often idle. It consists of one Tuft, H. R. H., Henry Prince of Wales, and a gentleman Commoner named Sir John Falstaff, and several others. I breakfast with them, drink tea, and sometimes wine with them," and, again, on hearing the good news of the recovery of his grandfather, he writes, "The minute I opened the letter and saw the news, I pulled down my Shakespeare and had a very merry hour with Sir John Falstaff. I was determined to laugh heartily all that day. I asked Sir John to wine with me. I decanted a bottle of my beloved grandfather's best port and Sir John and I drank his health right merrily. Perhaps you will want to know how my old friend Sir John drank my grandfather's health. Why I took care to find out the place where he drank Justice Shallow's health. And so when I said, 'Here's to Sir Walter,' I looked on the book and the Knight said, 'Health and long life to him.'"

Among the oldest and dearest of my friendly books is the "Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay," of which I became the happy owner, when it was fresh off the press, during a sojourn in the west, far away from my home library. The dates along the margins (one of Macaulay's habits which I adopted as I read) bring pleasant thoughts of a journey from Colorado to the western coast, and long before I knew Dean Hook (whom I first met here as the Vicar of Leeds) I was pulling Macaulay down from the shelf, not indeed to drink with Sir John, but to refer to some particular talk of men or of books-always to read on and on with equal delight whether he were breakfasting with a party of old Trinity College friends, reading in his study, or acting as a guide and escort on a half holiday of sight-seeing with his nieces and nephews, with whom he was always the prince of playfellows. It was on one of these excursions to the zoological gardens that Thackeray overheard someone say, "Never mind the hippopotamus! Never mind the hippopotamus! There's Mr. Macaulay!" When absent he exchanged long and frequent letters with the children, sealing those to his nephew at Harrow with an amorphous mass of red wax, which, in defiance of all postal regulations, usually covered a piece of gold.

A scrap from one of his letters to a little niece will serve also as an example of the poetry, which he usually attributed to the Judicious poet, for whose collected works the children vainly searched the library.

"Michaelmas will, I hope, find us all at Clapham over a noble goose. Do you remember the beautiful Puseyette hymn on Michaelmas day? It is a great favorite with all the Tractarians. You and Alice should learn it. It begins:

'Though Quakers scowl and Baptists howl,

Though Plymouth Brethren rage,

We churchmen gay will wallow today

In apple sauce, onions and sage.

Ply knife and fork, and draw the cork,

And have the bottle handy;

For each slice of goose we'll introduce

A thimbleful of brandy.'

Is it not good? I wonder who the author can be? Not Newman, I think. It is above him. Perhaps it is Bishop Wilberforce."

The Macaulays and the Wilberforces living at Clapham Common are very real people to me, and my firm allegiance to Trinity College, Cambridge, has never wavered since Macaulay's undergraduate days, not even when Samuel Wilberforce, the future bishop, went up to Oriel College, Oxford.

And how doubly precious is a book-friendship, whose introduction claims a personal touch; as when, with the same friend who bought the photograph in Rome, I afterwards visited Winchester Cathedral and standing beside the chantry tomb of Bishop Wilberforce she said, "When you go home, read his life. He was a great and good man," and I have continued reading it for nearly thirty years. Wilberforce was undoubtedly for twenty-five years the greatest figure in the English Church. His great sorrows made him tender and tolerant, and many who saw only the brilliant man little dreamed of the causes and depth of his power. He was made Bishop of Oxford in the troublous times of the Tractarian Movement, and so great was the work he accomplished and so devoted to him were his clergy that when translated to Winchester, Bishop Stubbs, who succeeded him, coming from quiet Chester, where his history was his chief occupation, ruefully asked, "Why am I like the Witch of Endor? Because I am tormented by the spirit of Samuel." His quickness and humor flashed an unexpected light on many a question, as when asked why he was called Soapy Sam he answered it was probably because he was always in hot water and always came out with hands clean. And his whimsical reply to "Who are the greatest preachers in England?"-is one of those comical self-evaluations which it is generally most hard to give-"I must refer you to an article on a lady's dress-Hook and I." His absolute freedom from personal animosity shows itself in the story I like best of all. During a stormy committee meeting in which he and the Bishop of London were violently opposed to each other, he threw a note across the table. Supposing it to be some point on the business in hand, the Bishop of London read, "My dear Bishop: You really should not wear such boots. Your life is too precious and valuable to us all to allow such carelessness."

Nothing could more touchingly express the devoted and loving esteem in which he was held than these words written at the time of his death: "With others who loved him, kneeling reverently beside the body, was Mr. Gladstone, whose sobs attested how deeply his feelings were moved by the sudden loss of his long-tried friend."

The last time I was in England I made a Sussex pilgrimage to his old home at Lavington. It was in June, and my companion smiled as I exclaimed with enthusiasm, "St. Barnabas day, the eleventh of June-the Bishop's wedding day!" We saw the trees he had planted and loved, the spot whence he would turn for a last homeward look, saying he was as proud of being a Sussex squire as a bishop; and best of all the great clumps of rhododendron which he planted with his own hands.

Since so many librarians are gardening as a favorite recreation, why not have a friendly corner in the garden, where we may "Consider the lilies of the field," as we are bidden in that dearest of all books, and where each mood, whether gay or somber, would find echo from the "eternal passion" of the poets-"Rosemary for remembrance, or pray you love, remember there's pansies, they're for thoughts." Growing next to these in my own garden is the fragrant Carolina allspice, because it was the best loved of flowers by Henry Bradshaw.

I sometimes question if a book is truly a friendly book unless I possess it, and yet this in a way would cut off both Thackeray and the friend whom he loved best of all, "dear old Fitz," for I gave away my "Fitzgerald's Letters" to a friend with whom I exchange many friendly books. A man of leisure and literary tastes, and in easy circumstances, Fitzgerald avoided fame as earnestly as most men seek it. Living in a country cottage with a garden, books, pictures and music, he cherished his many lifelong friendships, which he says were more like loves, by writing letters which have a touch of gentle humor and of tender and unaffected charm, as in a letter to Frederick Tennyson: "I have been through three influenzas; but this is no wonder, for I live in a hut with walls as thin as a sixpence, windows that don't shut, a clay soil safe beneath my feet and a thatch perforated by lascivious sparrows over my head. Here I sit, read, smoke and become wise, and am already quite beyond earthly things. I must say to you as Basil Montague once said in perfect charity to his friends: 'You see my dear fellows, I like you very much, but I continue to advance, and you remain where you are, you see, and so I am obliged to leave you behind. It is no fault of mine.' You must begin to read Seneca, whose letters I have been reading, else you will be no companion to a man who despises wealth, death, etc. I wish you were here to smoke a pipe with me. I play of evenings some of Handel's grand choruses which are the bravest music after all."

And again, to William Bodham Donne, when puzzled over his Agamemnon and the line of signal fires from Troy to Mycen?, he writes, "I am ignorant of geography, modern and ancient, and do not know the points of the Beacons, and Lemprière, the only classic at hand, doesn't help me. Pray turn to the passage and tell me (quotes three lines of Greek) what, where and why. The rest I know or can find in dictionary or map, but for these:

Lemprière

Is no-where:

Liddell and Scott

Don't help me a jot,

When I'm off, Donnegan

Don't help me on again.

So I'm obliged to resort to old Donne again."

A postscript in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton reads-"Only a word, to add that yesterday came Squire Carlyle from you, and a kind long letter from Mr. Lowell; and the first nightingale, who sang in my garden the same song as in Shakespeare's days."

And finally, to Lawrence the portrait painter: "Have we exchanged a word about Thackeray since his death? I am quite surprised to see how I sit moping about him, so little have I seen him the last ten years, and not once for the last five. To be sure I keep reading his 'Newcomes' of nights and now I have got hold of 'Pendennis.' I keep hearing him say so much of it; I really think I shall hear his step coming up the stairs to this lodging, and about to come (singing) into my room as in old Charlotte Street thirty years ago." And ten years later he writes, "A night or two ago I was reading old Thackeray's 'Roundabouts,' and (a sign of a good book) heard him talking to me."

I am sorry that so many people know Fitzgerald only because of the "Rubaiyat." I confess myself to be rather like-minded with

"That certain old person of Ham,

Who grew weary of Omar Khayyam,

Fitzgerald, said he,

Is as right as can be,

But this cult, and these versions,

O, Damn!"

And Thackeray, there is no one book which stands for him, save, perhaps, the dear little old brown volume of letters to the Brookfields. It is here that we learn much of "Pendennis." In one letter he writes, "I am going to kill Mrs. Pendennis presently, and have her ill in this number. Minnie says, 'O Papa, do make her well again! She can have a regular doctor and be almost dead, and there will come a nice homeopathic physician who will make her well again.'" We who truly know and love him find him ever in his own pages as he smiles kindly at us through his spectacles, or we feel the difficulty with which he is keeping his spectacles dry, and we too say, "Dear old Thackeray," as in the lines at the end of the White Squall, where with pages of nonsense, he writes how the Captain

"Beat the storm to laughter

For well he knew his vessel

With that wind would wrestle;

And when a wreck we thought her,

And doomed ourselves to slaughter,

How gaily he fought her,

And through the hubbub brought her,

And when the tempest caught her,

Cried, George some brandy and water.

And when its force expended,

The harmless storm was ended,

And as the sunrise splendid

Came blushing o'er the sea,

I thought, as day was breaking,

My little girls were waking,

And smiling and making

A prayer at home for me."

One of these little girls, Minnie Thackeray, became the wife of Leslie Stephen, of whom Mr. Lowell speaks as "that most lovable of men," whose Life and Letters, so full of rich and wondrous friendships, and of deep and subtle charm, is always a midnight companion if taken up in the evening. While our serious-minded librarian may find its chief value in the chapter on "The Struggle with the Dictionary," where as editor, I presume many of us first met with Stephen, (and which would prove invaluable to Lamb's old gentleman) she will find there only a small part of the Real Leslie Stephen, who wrote one day to Edmund Gosse, "No, R. L. S. is not the Real Leslie Stephen, but a young Scotchman whom Colvin has found-Robert Louis Stevenson."

It is a temptation to linger over Stephen's letters to John Morley and Charles Eliot Norton (perhaps his closest lifelong friends), and to the rich list of literary men whom he knew so well through his long years of literary and editorial work. Like those of Lowell and Stevenson, his letters lead one constantly to the reading of his books, wherein again one always finds himself. It were difficult to imagine more felicitous titles of self-revelation than "Hours in a library," "The amateur emigrant," and "My study window." I cannot leave Stephen without a word from the "Letters to John Richard Green" (little Johnny Green) which he edited. As Macaulay used to love to prove the goods he praised by samples of quotation, I will content myself with Green's questioning Freeman, in a long letter full of Early English history: "By the way, have you seen Stubb's Hymn on Froude and Kingsley?

'Froude informs the Scottish youth

That parsons do not care for truth.

The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries:

History is a pack of lies.

What cause for judgments so malign?

A brief reflection solves the mystery,

Froude believes Kingsley's a divine,

And Kingsley goes to Froude for history.'"

Long years ago my eye caught the title, "From Shakespeare to Pope," Gosse, and as I took down the book, I asked, "Well, what was there from Shakespeare to Pope?"-a question which the book answered so delightfully that I read it straight through twice, while the Critical Kit Kats is my particular joy in introducing to friendly books my young student readers, whom I send off armed with it, together with a volume of Fitzgerald, or Stevenson, or the Browning sonnets. Mr. Gosse has such a comfortable and intimate way of saying things that makes one feel it is one's own expression of one's own thoughts. I suppose most of us own to a pocket copy of Shakespeare's sonnets, wherein we have marked many a line, and then Mr. Gosse writes for us, as he sends the sonnets to a friend:

"This is the holy missal Shakespeare wrote,

Then, on sad evenings when you think of me,

Or when the morn seems blyth, yet I not near,

Open this book, and read, and I shall be

The meter murmuring at your bended ear;

I cannot write my love with Shakespeare's art,

But the same burden weighs upon my heart."

Do your friendly books ever find each other out upon the shelves? After reading in Mary Cowden Clarke's "My long life," of her childish, reverent awe towards Keats and Shelley, who were often guests in her father's house, the book found its place next to those poets, and was it Keats who was sitting on the sofa when the same little girl crept up behind and kissed his hand just because she had heard he was a poet? Gilbert White's "Natural history of Selborne," much in the same way stands beside Lowell, in whose "Garden acquaintance," I first learned its "delightful charm of absolute leisure," and here too, when it leaves my study table, stands that dear big book which still claims my leisure hours, "Charles Eliot, landscape architect," one of those rare books with a subtle and unconscious autobiographic touch, when one chances upon the fact that the writer was Harvard's president, telling the story as the brief fore-note says,

"For the dear son,

Who died in the bright prime-

From the father."

But this is all very personal and my only hope is that while I am reading, you are following the example of my sometime youthful nephew, who, on being asked about the sermon one Sunday after church, answered, "Why really, Mamma, I don't know what it was about. I got tired listening, and withdrew my attention and went fishing."

Finally, although we are admonished not to put new wine into old bottles, there fortunately is no admonition against old wine in new bottles, and friendliness is certainly the richest of wine both in men and in books. Nor am I at all certain that in the last analysis it is not the supreme grace which makes possible that joy in life, without which we are of necessity cast into a limbo of outer darkness, and so I commend to you the best of old wine which ever lingers in The Friendly Book.

THE PRESIDENT: Our good old friend, Dr. Canfield, once told a story about a critic who after a life devoted to the gentle art of making enemies was gathered to his fathers. Those who had known him, and who had for the most part been recipients of his buffetings gathered about his bier, and compared notes and estimates of the special qualities which the late departed had possessed. Yes, said one, "he loved us so well that he chastised us frequently." True, said another, "he could never catch sight of one of us without administering a vigorous kick." At this the eyelids of the deceased were seen to flutter a bit, and he sat bolt upright and his sepulchral voice made this response: "Yes, but I always kicked towards the goal."

Now perhaps this introduction may not seem to be a very happy preliminary to the paper about to be announced, and in some respects its application may not be evident, for certainly the speaker who is about to talk to us, on "How to discourage reading" is by no means a dead one. He has, however, been somewhat active in the kicking process-though always towards the goal. I present to you Mr. EDMUND L. PEARSON, of the Boston Transcript.

Mr. PEARSON: The president has very kindly referred to the fact that while I do not practice the profession of librarian, I tell other people how they ought to do it. He might have made use of a quotation or a sentence or two at the beginning of Mark Twain's "Puddin'head Wilson," only I fear that Mr. Legler was too courteous to use it. I have no hesitation in speaking of it myself. Mark Twain says of the Puddin'head Wilson maxims: "These maxims are for the instruction and moral elevation of youth. To be good is noble, but to tell others how to be good is nobler and much less trouble."

Mr. Pearson read the following paper:

* * *

HOW TO DISCOURAGE READING

When the "Five Foot Shelf" of books were published, three of my friends bought the set. One of them did so without any pretence that he was going to read them. He is a somewhat na?ve young man, able to indulge his whims, and he said he thought that buying the books "would help out President Eliot." That is a very meritorious sentiment to hold toward the compilers or authors of books-I wish that there were more persons who felt that way. I have no fault to find with him, at all.

Nor have I any complaint to make against the other two men. Blame is not what they deserve, but commiseration. Like the girl in the song, they are "more to be pitied than censured." The price was a consideration with them, and they gave up their money for the sake of being forever cut off from all those tremendous "classics." For that is what it amounted to. One of these men has a very pretty office, with some nice bookshelves, painted white. He added to the books of his profession and some other works of general literature, this "Five Foot Shelf"-which occupies, I believe, about eighteen feet of shelf room. He tried to read one of the books-I know he did that, because he admitted it-and he confided to me that he thought it was silly.

The third man bought the "Five Foot Shelf," and announced his determination "to read the whole thing right through." He did this with set teeth, as if he might have said: "I'll read 'em if they kill me!" Well, he started one of them. He read a little in Franklin's "Autobiography." I know he did, because he told me about it. He and I belong to that irritating class of persons who get up early and take long walks before breakfast, and then take care to mention it later in the day, as if to cast discredit on other people. We have to go early, too, because we intersperse the walks with runs, and he has dignity to maintain, and it wouldn't do for him to dash about the streets after other people are up. While we walked, or dog-trotted, about the country roads he told me about the "Autobiography." But I have noticed that he has left the "Five Foot Shelf." I doubt if he even finished that first one of its volumes which he attempted. When he talks about books now, it is about the "History of the American people." He is a Democrat, and like many Democrats he has discovered that our history has been truly written only according to Mr. Woodrow Wilson.

Will any one of those three men ever read two whole volumes from that set? It is doubtful-very doubtful. And their cases are, I believe, typical of thousands of others. And what is true of the "Five Foot Shelf" is true of a score of other collections-the Hundred Best Books, the Greatest Books of the Universe, the Most Ponderous Volumes of the Ages, the Selected and Highly Recommended Classics of All Nations. There are dozens of them-you all know them-these "standard" sets and collections, in which learned and well-intentioned men have innocently conspired with publishers to discourage reading.

The "Five Foot Shelf" is not picked out for especial disapprobation. As a matter of fact, I suppose it is far better, far more human in its selections, far more readable in some of its titles than most of these sets of "great" books. But there is something about every one of these collections of classics that acts like a palsy upon the reading faculty. It is a little mysterious, rather hard to define, but that it exists I have no manner of doubt. It would be impossible to doubt, after seeing it demonstrated so many times.

Take, at random, the titles of five famous books-books which are apt to turn up in these sets or collections. Plato's "Republic," the "Odyssey," the "Morte D'Arthur," the "Anatomy of melancholy," and "Don Quixote." Take the average man, the man usually known as the "business" man. Suppose that he has not read any of these books in his school days-that he has reached the age of forty without reading them. Now, the chances are at least a hundred to one that he never reads them. But let him buy one of the sets of thirty or forty volumes, in which these five books are included, and the chances against his reading any one of the five, instead of being diminished, are enormously increased. It is now certainly three hundred to one that he never reads any of the five books. There is something benumbing, something deadening, something stupefying, to the average man to take into his house six yards of solid "culture." And this I believe to be true as a general statement, in spite of instances which may be adduced here and there.

But, mind you, if this same man happens to have his attention called to one of the books-especially to either of the last two, as they are a little nearer the temper of our time-and if he gets one of them, by itself, there is now a fair probability that he may read at least part of it. He may even finish it.

If he really wishes to read the so-called great books let him forever beware of acquiring one of those overwhelming lumps of literature-the publisher's delight and the book-agent's darling-known by some such name as the Colossal Classics of the World. They breed hypocrites and foster humbugs. He buys them and thinks he is going to read them. They look ponderous and weighty and erudite upon his shelves-to the innocent. People exclaim: "My! What fine books you have!" He tries to smile a wise smile-to give the impression that they are the companions of his solitude, the consolation of his wakeful hours. He knows that these people won't ask if he has ever read any of them. They are afraid he might come back at them with: "Oh, yes, of course. Now, how do you like Milton's 'Areopagitica'?" After a time he begins to think he has read them-because he has looked at the backs, and started to cut one or two of them. Then it is all up with him. He never even tries to read them again. They just stand there and occasionally make him a little uncomfortable.

Making friends with books, and especially with those famous books which require some concentration, is like making friends with people. You can not do it in a wholesale, yardstick manner. If they come into our lives at all, they come subtly, slowly, one at a time. If a man should walk into this room saying: "All my life I have been without friends, I have decided that I wish to have friends-I am going to adopt all of you, every one of you, as a friend, here and now!"-you know how an experiment like that would succeed. It is the same with books.

In the competition for the best method to discourage reading, the second prize should be awarded to that pestilential invention-the Complete Works of an author. There was a publisher-he still lives-who told one of his agents: "Books are not made to read; they are made to sell." He was probably the inventor of that discourager of reading, the Complete Works.

If one of you wishes to keep a friend in total ignorance of any writer, there is an almost certain method-give him one of the sets of the Complete Works of that writer. It is a sure method to kill interest.

As in the case of the collections of classics, there is something wholesale and overpowering about such a set. It is thrown at your head, so to speak, in a chunk, and you never get over the blow. Imagine the case of a man who had never read Dickens. If he is wise, he goes at him one book at a time, he tests and he tries, and at the end of a few years he owns eight or ten books-well-thumbed books, that have been read, and that represent pleasure. But if he listens to the book-agent he contracts for a yard and a half of Dickens, and when it comes he gazes in despair at that rigid row of books-as unassailable as a regiment of Prussian grenadiers. That is the end of all intercourse between him and Charles Dickens.

"Oh, you might as well have them all," says the agent, "you needn't read the ones you don't like." That is what the waiter told the man when he brought him a breakfast-cup full of coffee, after dinner, instead of a demi-tasse: "You ain't got to drink all of it."

Miles upon miles of these sets of Complete Works are sold every year, and from one end of the land to the other, heads of families are sinking back comfortably upon their Morris chairs, and gazing in fatuous self-satisfaction at their bookcases, which they have just filled, at one swoop, with nine yards of the Complete Works of Scott, Cooper, Dumas, Dickens, and Thackeray.

"Look, Mother, we've got the bookcase filled up at last!" "Well, I am glad to see it! It was distressin' to see all those shelves so empty like."

Will they ever look at them? Never a look! It is even odds they do not cut the pages. Now that the noble art of pressing autumn leaves has gone out-you know how it was done, with wax and a hot flatiron, and then you put them between the pages of a book-now that pastime is forgotten, there isn't one remaining cause why those pages should ever be opened. The insides of those books will be the most secret place in that house henceforth. Talk about sliding panels and secret drawers in old writing-desks-they are open and conspicuous in comparison. They will be great for hiding places-I think I will write a melodrama and have the missing will turn up in the fifth act, sixty years later, hidden between page 1 and page 2 of one of the volumes in somebody's Complete Works.

For the third place in the list of best methods to discourage reading there are two competitors. They are so nearly tied that it is hard to choose between them. I am inclined to think that the honor should be awarded to the custom of setting up counsels of perfection in the matter of recommending the so-called "classics" to possible readers, of saying by word of mouth, or by printed page: "These are the great classics, the great books of the world" and adding, by implication, "If you don't like them, after making heroic attempts, then you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting."

This word "classics" covers a multitude of nuisances and perplexities. The "classics" include books which are still alive with humanity, which are delightful today to any person who is at all bookish, and they include books which are so utterly alien, so far removed from our time, place and habit of mind, that it is absolutely absurd to pretend that anyone in this year and land, except a few, a very few, specialists, can read them with any pleasure, or can read them at all, in fact, except under compulsion.

These lists of the great classics are too frequently compiled with a cowardly obedience to tradition. It matters a little what some great person of a hundred or a thousand years ago thought about a book-but it does not matter much. Recently, I saw in a book a list of great persons who had been influenced by this or that book. Some book or other influenced Madame de Maintenon-what of it? Doubtless other books, far less desirable, influenced her, too, so what does it prove? The value of books, as a recent writer has pointed out, shifts and changes with the changing years. What may have been truly a great book a thousand years ago is not necessarily great today-no matter how many famous personages have embalmed it in their praise, and no matter how many other personages have praised it, not because they enjoyed it themselves, but because the earlier ones did. Such a book is interesting-to specialists-as a milestone in the history of literature, but it is not to be forced, however gently, upon the general reader as a book he "ought" to read.

Museums of art, like the Louvre, contain paintings which ignoramuses like myself look upon with astonishment. Medi?val pictures of the most hideous description-how came they in the same building with these other beautiful works of art? Is it possible that anyone is so silly as to pretend to admire them? And then the explanation dawns upon the ignoramus: they are here to illustrate the development of the art of painting. This is a museum, as well as a collection of beautiful things. No one who is honest pretends to enjoy their beauty. It is thus with books. A great collection of books may well contain those writings which seemed full of meaning to people two thousand years ago, but they are not to be held up-not all of them, at any rate-as books which anybody "ought" to read today. The significance of any work of literature, however noble, is a thing to ebb and flow, and finally to vanish altogether. Professor Barrett Wendell reminded me once that Shakespeare's plays and my daily themes would alike, one day, be dust and atoms in the void of the centuries-but I do not think that he meant unduly to compliment Shakespeare by this association.

Since it is always better to come down to tacks in speaking of books, I will mention some of the classics which have little significance today. It is always dangerous to do this-somebody is sure to hold up his hand and exclaim: "Why, I like them, very much," or "I know an old gentleman who reads that, every night before going to bed." But I will take the risk, and say that the Greek and French dramas of the classic periods are works of literature almost certain to appear on most of these lists of Best Books, and that it is almost sheer humbug to put them there. So few people can read them, there is so little reason-especially in the case of the French plays-why anyone should read them, today, that their inclusion is a pitiful example of lack of courage. In the matter of the French drama I speak especially of Racine and Corneille-names almost certain to appear on these lists of the classics. Someone will relate the story about Napoleon saying that if Racine (or was it Corneille?) had lived in his time, he would have made him a marshal. Then some of his plays are smugly entered upon the list. With their stiff, set speeches, their ridiculous unbosomings of the leading characters of their "confidantes," they are as out of place in our life as were their Caesars, Alexanders, and Pompeys, teetering about the stage in high-heeled shoes, ruffles, wigs, and all the rest of the costume of Louis XIV.

It is good to recommend the classics, but it must not be forgotten that there are classics, and classics. There should be independence, and an ability to look things in the face, to realize that a change has come, when it is already here. Why should the people who deal with books let the politicians get ahead of them? There is a bright, clean air blowing through the nation, and those who worship fusty precedent are correspondingly unhappy. We have a president who cares not a rap for mouldy and senseless traditions-he has learned well the lesson taught him by one of his predecessors. If President Wilson has the courage to point out that the final authority on matters of factory legislation and mine inspection in the year 1913 is not necessarily Thomas Jefferson, is it not possible for the critics and choosers of books to understand that Dr. Johnson and Madame de Maintenon have not uttered the last word about literature? There might and should be a "new freedom" of literary criticism-not yesterday, nor today, nor tomorrow, but all the time.

Here is another way to discourage reading. You can do it by giving a man one of these over-annotated editions of a book. I mean a book which has so many footnotes that the text is crowded right out of bed; a book in which the editor is so pleased with himself for discovering that the father of Lady Hester Somebody (who is mentioned in the text) was born in 1718 and died in 1789 that he simply has not the decent manners to keep his useless knowledge to himself. No; he must tell it to you, even though he elbows the author-a better man than himself-out of the way to do it.

One of the best books of its kind-I speak under correction-is George Birkbeck Hill's edition of Boswell's "Johnson." It is, I believe, correct, and scholarly; it certainly represents a vast amount of labor, and it is "very valuable for reference." Also it is admirably arranged for driving a reader away from Boswell forever. It is positively exasperating to see page after page on which Boswell occupies two lines at the top, and Dr. Hill takes up all the rest of the room. Sometimes he takes up the whole page! Yet that edition is recommended to readers by persons who ought to know better.

Other excellent examples-I am speaking only of much-praised books-are found in the Furness Variorum editions of Shakespeare. When one of these volumes appears it is usually greeted by a chorus of "Oh's!" and "Ah's!" as when a particularly gorgeous skyrocket goes up on Fourth of July night. Such scholarship! Such a boon to earnest Shakespeareans! Such labor! Such erudition! Well, a great deal of that praise is deserved-each volume is certainly a tour de force. But I wish to read you from a review of the latest of them-a review written for the Boston Herald, by Mr. John Macy, the author of that vigorous and sensible book, "The spirit of American literature." It deals with "The tragedie of Julius Caesar" edited by Horace Howard Furness, Jr. "This," writes Mr. Macy, "is the latest volume in 'A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare,' and is the first under the sole editorship of the late Dr. Furness' son. From an enormous mass of commentary, criticism, word-worrying, text-marring and learned guesswork, Mr. Furness has chosen what seem to him the best notes. The sanity of his introduction and the good sense of some of his own notes lead one to suppose that he has selected with discrimination from the notes of others. His work is a model of patience, industry and judgment. He plays well in this game of scholarship. But what is the game worth? What is the result?

"Here is a volume of nearly 500 large pages. The text is a literal reprint of the folio. The clear stream of poetry runs along the tops of the pages. Under that is a deposit of textual emendations full of clam-shells and lost anchors and tin cans. Under that is a mud bottom two centuries deep. It consists of (a) what scholars said Shakespeare said; (b) what scholars said Shakespeare meant; (c) what scholars said about what other scholars said; (d) what scholars said about the morality and character of the personages, as (1) they are in Shakespeare's play, and as (2) they are in other historical and fictitious writings; (e) what scholars said about how other people used the words that Shakespeare used; (f) what scholars said could be done to Shakespeare's text to make him a better poet. I have not read all those notes and I never shall read them. Life is too short and too interesting. All the time that I was trying to read the notes, so that I could know enough about them to write this article, my mind kept swimming up out of the mud into that clear river of text. It is a perfectly clear river. Some of the obscurities that scholars say are there are simply not obscure, except as poetry ought to have a kind of obscurity in some turbulent passages. Some of the obscurities the scholars put there in their innocence and stupidity, and those obscurities you can eliminate by blandly ignoring them."

These learned and over-annotated editions-they are not intended, you say, for the casual reader. Yet they get into his hand-they are, sometimes recommended to him. And, as Mr. Macy asks, are they worth the labor they have cost-are they worth it to anybody? Looking at them reminds me of the ideal ascetic of the Middle Ages, St. Simeon Stylites. St. Simeon was considered the most religious man of his time because for twenty years he lived upon a pillar that "numbered forty cubits from the soil," and because he would

"'Tween the spring and downfall of the light,

Bow down one thousand and two hundred times,

To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the Saints."

In spite of that, St. Simeon is not the ideal religious man today. Will these fact-collectors be the ideal scholars a century hence?

Are we sometimes acclaiming as great scholars men who are really doing nothing but a tremendous amount of grubbing? Are some of the so-called scholarly editions really scholarly, or are they simply gigantic "stunts?" Whatever may be their value for reference, and that is vastly over-rated, they discourage reading.

It is also possible to drive people away from books, or make it difficult for them to get near books, by printing confusing things about them. It is possible to catalog a book-according to the best rules-in such a fashion as to make it an exceedingly unattractive, not to say repellant object. This is bad enough when it is done in the formal catalog, but when it is done in little leaflets, and book-lists-things which ought to be informal and inviting-the case is very sad. The other day I saw an entry in a book-list which read like this: "Dickens. Whipple, E. P. Charles Dickens." The expert is in no doubt; the uninitiated may well be confused to know which is the author and which the subject. When someone defends such practices by saying: "But the rules!" someone else, whose voice is a voice of authority ought to say: "Fudge! And also Fiddle-de-dee!"

The general subject today is "the World of Books." It is a delightful world-one so different from that into which we emerge every morning that it seems hard, sometimes, to realize that the one exists inside the other. It is a place of entertainment within the reach of any of us. There are a few obstructions around the entrance-some of which I have tried to describe. People have built up walls of impossible "classics"; publishers have tried to string a barbed-wire fence of Complete Works around it. Pedants stand outside, calling upon you to swallow a couple of gallons of facts before you go into the great tent. You can walk by them all. Inside, everything is pleasant. Over in one corner are the folk who like to play with first editions, unique copies, unopened copies, and all the rest of those expensive toys. Some of these gentlemen have about as much to do with the world of books as have the collectors of four-post beds and old blue china, but many of them are very good fellows. Most of them do not belong in here at all, but, like boys who have crawled in under the tent, now they are inside they think they have as much right as anybody. Some of them, indeed, are quite uppish and superior, and inclined to look down on the rest of us who have a vulgar notion that books are made to read.

Here is all you require-a comfortable chair, and a pipe. And the company! Well, look around:

Dear Lamb and excellent Montaigne,

Sterne and the credible Defoe,

Borrow, DeQuincey, the great Dean,

The sturdy leisurist Thoreau;

The furtive soul whose dark romance,

By ghostly door and haunted stair,

Explored the dusty human heart,

And the forgotten garrets there;

The moralist it could not spoil,

To hold an empire in his hands;

Sir Walter, and the brood who sprang,

From Homer through a hundred lands,

Singers of songs on all men's lips,

Tellers of tales in all men's ears,

Movers of hearts that still must beat,

To sorrows feigned and fabled tears.

At the conclusion of Mr. Pearson's paper a book symposium was conducted in which the following members of the Association briefly discussed the respective books here indicated:

Hine. Modern organization. Reviewed by Paul Blackwelder.

Crispi's Memoirs and the recent literature of the Risorgimento. Reviewed by Bernard C. Steiner.

Goldmark. Fatigue and efficiency. Reviewed by Katherine T. Wootten.

Tarbell. The business of being a woman. Reviewed by Pearl I. Field.

Antin. The promised land. Reviewed by Althea H. Warren.

Brieux. La femme seule. Reviewed by Corinne Bacon.

The great analysis. Reviewed by Josephine A. Rathbone.

Weyl. The great democracy. Reviewed by Frank K. Walter.

The PRESIDENT: Before inducting into office the president-elect I shall ask the secretary whether there are any announcements to be made or if any new business is to come up at this time? Is there any business for the Council to consider?

Dr. ANDREWS: There are some resolutions from the Documents Round Table to come before the Council and perhaps other routine work.

The PRESIDENT: They will be referred to the Council. We will receive the report of the tellers concerning the election.

The SECRETARY: The report of the tellers states that you have elected as your officers for the coming year the following persons:

* * *

REPORT OF THE TELLERS OF ELECTION

No. of Votes

President

E. H. Anderson, Director New York Public Library 144

First Vice-President

H. C. Wellman, Librarian City Library, Springfield, Mass. 141

Second Vice-President

Gratia A. Countryman, Librarian Minneapolis Public Library 144

Members of Executive Board (for 3 years)

Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress, Washington 146

Harrison W. Craver, Librarian Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh 137

Members of Council (for 5 years)

Mary Eileen Ahern, Editor "Public Libraries," Chicago 140

Cornelia Marvin, Librarian Oregon State Library 145

Alice S. Tyler, Director Western Reserve Library School 146

R. R. Bowker, Editor "Library Journal," New York 144

A. L. Bailey, Librarian Wilmington (Del.) Institute Free Library 142

Trustee of Endowment Fund (for 3 years)

E. W. Sheldon, President U. S. Trust Co., New York 143

FORREST B. SPAULDING,

JOHN F. PHELAN,

Tellers of Election.

The PRESIDENT: You have heard the result of the election. I shall ask Mr. Gardner M. Jones and Mr. Harrison W. Craver to show the president-elect the way to the platform.

(The committee escorted Mr. Anderson to the platform.)

Mr. President-elect, it is with special personal satisfaction that I have announced to you the result unanimously made by this conference in choosing you to the honorable position of president. I am personally gratified in that you represent, I think, so splendidly many of the elements which have been talked about during this meeting. You are yourself a graduate of a library school, yet you have sympathy with those who have not attained to that distinction. You have been associated with a great scientific library, you have been in charge of a medium-sized library and are now at the head of the largest public library in the world; and yet many of us have had evidences that you have the deepest and warmest sympathy for the small and struggling library, no matter where it may be.

Mr. President-elect, the retiring board of officers received this gavel not as an emblem of authority, but as a symbol of service. As such we commit it to your care for the next year.

For the retiring board of officers I may say, in the words of Wynken DeWorde in one of his colophons, "And now we make an end. If we have done well, we have done that which we would have desired; and if but meanly and slenderly, we yet have done that which we could attain unto."

The wish goes from the ex-president to the president that the most successful administration in the history of the Association may be the one which is about to begin.

(Mr. Legler then handed the gavel to Mr. Anderson and retired from the platform.)

PRESIDENT ANDERSON: Ladies and gentlemen, fellow members of the Association: In the first place, I want to express my heartfelt thanks for the gracious things the retiring president has just been pleased to say concerning my humble self. Furthermore, I have to thank him for giving me an opportunity to correct a mistake which has been current in this Association for some twenty years, namely, that I am the graduate of a library school. I was at the Albany library school-more years ago than I care to tell-between seven and eight months. My money ran out and I had to get a job. I did not even complete the first year. That is a reflection on me, not upon the library school.

The exigencies of trains and luncheons would make it unfair if not cruel for me to detain you here this morning with a speech and I shall make none. But I want to beg you on this occasion to forget and forgive the disagreeable things said or done by the officers-elect in the heat of a bitter partisan campaign. (Laughter-There was no opposition ticket.)

Seriously, I want to express to you all, not merely for myself but for every member of the incoming executive board and the incoming members of the Council, our appreciation of the honor you have conferred upon us and of the responsibilities you have placed upon our shoulders. We can only hope to maintain-and it will require a struggle and great and arduous work on our part to maintain-the high standard set by our predecessors. I thank you.

If there is nothing further to come before us the Conference will stand adjourned.

ADJOURNED SINE DIE.

* * *

EXECUTIVE BOARD

Meeting of June 23, 1913

Meeting called to order by President Legler. Other members present were Miss Eastman, Messrs. Anderson, Andrews, Putnam and Wellman.

Several matters of routine business were transacted, including the reception and adoption of the report of the Committee on Nominations.

Upon motion of Mr. Anderson, seconded by Dr. Putnam, Mrs. H. L. Elmendorf was elected member of the Publishing Board to succeed herself for a term of three years.

In behalf of the Committee on International Relations, Dr. Putnam reported that with such information as it had been able to gather the committee felt unable to make any affirmative recommendation as to participation by the American Library Association in the proposed Exposition of the Book and Graphic Arts at Leipzig in 1914.

Adjourned.

Meeting of June 28th

Present: President Anderson, Miss Eastman, Messrs. Andrews, Wellman and Craver.

Mr. Wellman presented his resignation as non-official member in view of his election to the office of first vice-president, which, upon motion of Dr. Andrews, was accepted.

Upon motion of Mr. Craver, it was unanimously voted that W. N. C. Carlton be elected to the Executive Board to fill the unexpired term of Mr. Wellman. Mr. Carlton was called to the meeting and took his place as a member of the Board.

A meeting place for 1914 was next considered. Miss Edith A. Phelps, librarian of the Carnegie library of Oklahoma City, appeared before the board and invited the Association to meet in Oklahoma City, her invitation being seconded by the Oklahoma Library Association and other organizations of the State. Invitations were received also by letter from the convention bureaus of New Orleans, Nashville, Wilmington, Del., Milwaukee, and other places. After informal discussion it was voted that the Secretary be instructed to investigate facilities for holding the conference at Madison, Wis., and if, in the opinion of the president and secretary, conditions at Madison are not favorable for a meeting, that Mackinac and Ottawa Beach be investigated in the order here named.

Invitations from the authorities of the Panama-Pacific Exposition to hold the conference at San Francisco in 1915 were read and from the California Library Association to the same effect, Mr. Everett R. Perry, of Los Angeles, bearing the invitation from the latter association. Invitations were also received from the library authorities of Seattle, seconded by the business organizations of that city and by the convention bureaus of other cities of the Pacific Northwest. It was voted to refer this information to the next Executive Board.

Mr. William Stetson Merrill presented the following report in behalf of the Committee on code for classifiers, which, upon motion, was accepted as a report of progress, and the request for an appropriation of $20 referred to the meeting of the Executive Board in January.

The Committee on code for classifiers begs to present a report of progress.

During the past year no general meeting of the Committee has been held, but the chairman has been in correspondence with several members of the Committee and considerable data have been collected for the proposed Manual for classifiers. Messrs. Bay and Merrill are more immediately concerned with this section of the work and over three hundred points have been assembled for future consideration.

An appropriation of twenty dollars ($20.00) to cover typewriting, postage and stationery is requested.

Respectfully submitted,

(Signed)

WM. STETSON MERRILL, Chairman.

At the request of the secretary a transfer of funds was authorized as follows: From the contingency fund to conference fund, $75, and to miscellaneous fund $75, leaving a balance in the contingency fund of $95.

Upon motion of Dr. Andrews, it was voted that members joining the Association after the annual conference shall only be required to pay one-half year's dues together with the usual initiation fee of $1.

Consideration of the question of issuing the annual handbook in biographical section form was postponed until the next meeting of the Executive Board.

A letter was read from Dr. Frank P. Hill, suggesting that a special committee be appointed to consider the matter of participating in the proposed Leipzig Exposition and to ascertain the cost of such participation as well as the possibility of securing a creditable exhibit from American libraries. It was voted that a special committee of three on this subject be appointed by the president, which committee shall make the report to the Committee on international relations. The president appointed as this committee Dr. Hill with power to add the other two members.

It was unanimously voted that an appropriation of $30 from the contingency fund be made to each of the three members of the Travel Committee as partial compensation for expenses incurred in the performance of association duties, and that the thanks of the Executive Board be expressed with regret that the finances of the Association did not permit a complete reimbursement of expenses.

A report was submitted from the Committee on cost and method of cataloging, but owing to the lack of time for proper consideration the secretary was instructed to have the report typewritten and copies sent to the respective members of the Executive Board. At the request of the Committee that two other members be added to the Committee, one of them to be located in Chicago, the other to be the head cataloger of one of the public libraries taking part in the investigation, the president appointed the following persons: J. C. M. Hanson and Margaret Mann.

The request of the Committee for an appropriation of not to exceed $50 was referred to the January meeting of the Executive Board.

The report is as follows:

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON COST AND METHOD OF CATALOGING

The present report is preliminary only. Before a final report can be made a more detailed inquiry must be undertaken of the way in which the work is handled in libraries of various types. The methods used in the libraries that have taken part in the present investigation vary to a considerable degree, and do not always seem to lend themselves to an accurate classification by character or size of library; in some cases this is possible, for instance when we find that the receipt of much duplicate material in the large public libraries having extensive systems of branch libraries has developed a method of handling these that is almost uniform for all. One element which disturbs the cataloging work in these libraries is that the withdrawal and cancellation of the records of lost and worn-out books is done by the cataloging departments. Five of the twenty libraries do not at present readily lend themselves to comparison in all respects with the others, the Library of Congress and the New York public library on account of their size and complicated organization, the libraries of Harvard University and the University of Chicago because of the disturbances caused by present work of reorganization and recataloging, and the New York state library on account of its rapid growth since the fire two years ago. In other libraries recataloging goes on simultaneously with the current work, but it does not cause the same disturbances as in the cases mentioned.

While most libraries count classification and shelf-listing as parts of the cataloging, only four include accessioning, and three do not include either of the four processes mentioned under point 2 in the questionnaire sent out by the committee. Three libraries state expressly that the assignment of subject headings is done by the cataloging force, but this is probably also the case with some who do not mention the fact. In one case the reference and cataloging work are combined in one department; in general, reference work seems to be the catalogers' favorite side line.

In some libraries the determination of headings and the form of entry is determined by the heads of the department, in others all the original work is done by the assistants and afterwards revised, while in at least one case such work as classification and the assignment of subject headings is done by specialists, each handling his particular subject. Two or three libraries employ a special assistant for the cataloging of serial publications. Two libraries have all statistical recording done by a special assistant or clerk.

Whether a library prints its cards or has them written or typewritten in several copies, does not seem to influence the method of work except at the final point, but the growing use of cards printed by some other library has introduced an element that did not exist when any of the libraries taking part in the investigation were organized.

The cost of cataloging can not be determined until a definite unit has been agreed upon. The way to reach such agreement might be in line with the method employed by the Boston public library, where a considerable number of volumes were set aside for this investigation and the time and money spent on each work carefully computed. By employing a similar way of investigating not only the cost, but also the routine gone through with a book in a number of libraries on its way from the unpacking room to the shelves, some definite unit might be found.

The work of the committee has only begun; it should be planned to go much more into details than the present questionnaire indicates. The purpose of the committee should be twofold; to find out whether a method of handling the routine with a minimum expenditure of time could be worked out that could be recommended as standard, and to study how the work might be so arranged as to be made in some degree less mechanical to those who are capable of more or less independent handling of literary material for the purpose of preparing it for use by readers in libraries.

AKSEL G. S. JOSEPHSON,

EMMA V. BALDWIN,

AGNES VAN VALKENBURGH.

Questionnaire

1. Give a short sketch of your catalog department indicating the processes into which the work is divided.

2. How many of the following items do you include as part of cataloging?:

(a) Accessioning.

(b) Classification.

(c) Shelf-listing.

(d) Preparation for the shelves.

3. Of how many persons does your cataloging force consist and how is it graded?

4. What are the minimum and maximum salaries in each grade and division of your cataloging force?

5. What was the total amount expended for salaries for the catalog department in 1912?

6. a. How many of the assistants in the catalog department spend full time on the cataloging work?

b. What other work are these engaged in in other departments of the library?

7. a. How many volumes did you add to your library during 1912?

b. How many of these were added as new titles to your catalog?

c. How many of these were on printed cards from the Library of Congress or from other libraries?

8. What do you estimate that it cost your library in 1912 to catalog a book, including accessioning, classification, shelf-listing and preparation for the shelves?

9. Give any special information about your library that will enable the committee to understand particular phases of your cataloging work.

Libraries Included in the Investigation

University and Reference Libraries

Columbia University Library.

Harvard University Library.

Princeton University Library.

University of Chicago Library.

Yale University Library.

John Crerar Library.

Library of Congress.

New York Public Library, Reference Department.

New York State Library.

Newberry Library.

Public Libraries

Boston Public Library.

Brooklyn Public Library.

Buffalo Public Library.

Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh.

Chicago Public Library.

Cincinnati Public Library.

Cleveland Public Library.

Philadelphia Free Library.

St. Louis Public Library.

Toronto Public Library.

A request was read from the catalog section, first, that the Executive Board be asked to appoint a permanent cataloging committee to which the questions in cataloging may be referred for recommendations; second, that the Executive Board be asked to send a request to the Librarian of Congress for the publication of the code of alphabeting used in the Library of Congress.

Voted, on motion by Dr. Andrews that the president and secretary be instructed to appoint a committee for this year to whom questions of cataloging may be referred, and that the chairman of the catalog section be consulted as to the proper form of a by-law providing for a permanent committee.

Upon motion by Dr. Andrews, voted that the secretary be instructed to ask the opinion of the Committee on code for classifiers as to the desirability of a permanent committee to consider specific questions of classification and as to the proper form of a by-law to provide for such committee.

The appointment of members to the various standing committees was next considered, and as a result of consideration at this meeting and of later correspondence between the members of the Executive Board and consultation with the chairmen of the various committees, the standing committees for the year 1913-14 are announced as follows:

COMMITTEES, 1913-14

Finance

F. F. Dawley, Cedar Rapids, Ia.

F. O. Poole, New York City.

Public Documents

G. S. Godard, State Library, Hartford, Conn.

A. J. Small, State Library, Des Moines, Ia.

Ernest Bruncken, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.

John A. Lapp, State Library, Indianapolis, Ind.

M. S. Dudgeon, Wisconsin Free Library Commission, Madison, Wis.

T. M. Owen, Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Ala.

S. H. Ranck, Public Library, Grand Rapids, Mich.

Adelaide R. Hasse, Public Library, New York.