Part 17

“(1) A short time ago one of the patrons of Station 27 sent in a slip asking to have his book renewed, and requested that we send him information on peace conferences. The latter was duly sent, but through some error the renewal was overlooked. Consequently six days later an overdue postal was mailed. This gentleman is always quite prompt in returning his books, and evidently had never before received a notice. So he was most perturbed, and wrote us a very long letter explaining the mistake. He said that he felt that the librarian should know that he was not at fault, had not broken the rules, and had a clear record. But in imparting this fact to the librarian, he wanted it understood that the assistant committing the error should not in any way be punished for it, because she had helped him greatly in his work, by sending the very facts on peace conferences that he was looking for. He asked that the assistant be praised for her good work rather than blamed for her error.

“(2) Celia R----, whom we have never seen but all feel well acquainted with, tried in vain for some time to borrow a certain little volume of Eskimo stories, but succeeded only in getting substitutes. About the middle of December she sent in with her card the following request: ‘Please give me “Eskimo stories,” because it is Christmas and you never send the right book.’

“(3) The cards of Mr. and Mrs. M----, of Station 54, come in with a slip, ‘Please send a novel.’ We know that the books must be 7-day adventure stories, and must have publishers’ binding and an interesting frontispiece or they will come back to us on the next delivery unread.

“(4) At least one of the S---- family’s cards is reported lost each week. We immediately recognize Mrs. S----’s voice when she telephones, and ask whether it is Ralph’s or Walter’s card that is missing this time. In a tone of despair she probably says, ‘No; it is Morris’s.’ We promise to look the matter up thoroughly. Then we do no more about it. After two days we call up and tell her we are very sorry we have been unable to trace the card. ‘Oh, we’ve found it here at home; thank you so much for your trouble,’ she answers. ‘And, by the way, we have not been able to find Nicholas’ card all day.’ So we look up Nicholas’ card in the same way. No S---- card was ever known to be lost outside of the S---- household.

“(5) C39 of Station 6 has this note clipped to her readers’ index: ‘Give overdue notices to Stations Department.’ We hold her notices a few days to give the books a chance to come in, because she uses a bi-weekly station. Each time that she receives an overdue notice, it costs her ten cents carfare to come to the library to investigate, and it costs the library a half hour of an assistant’s time to pacify her. Our new method works beautifully, and both library and reader find it economical.

“(6) An old gentleman of Station 15 (at least we have pictured him as old, for it is a trembling hand that writes the titles) for a long time sent in a long list of German novels which we marked, ‘Not in catalog:’. We were out of printed German lists at the time, so selected a good German novel and sent it to him. It was immediately returned. We tried again--in vain. Then again! We sent him everything that the average German finds intensely interesting. But the books always came back to us on the next delivery. One day we substituted ‘Im Busch,’ by Gerstaecker. He kept it two weeks, and then his card came in with a list of Gerstaecker novels, copied from the title-page of “Im Busch.” He read all our Gerstaecker books and then wanted more. We wrote him that he had read all the books of this author and again substituted. Then a fresh list of Gerstaecker came in, and now he is reading all those books a second time.

“(7) One of the station men watches our substitutions and looks over them to get ideas for his own reading. Once when we had substituted Leroux’s ‘Mystery of the yellow room’ the station man ordered a copy of that book for himself, and finding it interesting read all the Leroux books in the library.

“(8) Here is a letter from a youthful station patron:

“‘Please send me the III Grade, The golden goose book! Please do. Kisses.

XXX.’”

These incidents, which of course might be multiplied indefinitely, show at least that the service rendered by a delivery station is not, or at any rate need not be, a mere mechanical sending of books in answer to a written demand.

So much for the element of personal contact and influence. Next let us consider for a moment that of actual contact with the books from which selection can be made. This of course does not take place in any closed-shelf system--least of all in one at long range. But in certain cases this contact is of no special advantage. In particular, if a reader wants one definite book and no other, he may get it as surely, or be informed as reliably that he cannot get it, and why, at a delivery station as at a set of open shelves. The only drawback in “long-range” work is that the user must wait longer before he can get his book, provided it is on the shelves. Against this wait must be set the time and cost of a personal visit to the distant library building.

Of the “browsing” contact there can be none, of course. This seems a more serious matter to me than it would be to those who deprecate “browsing,” or at any rate discourage it. But there is no question that the alternative between library and delivery station, if squarely presented, should always be answered by choosing the library. Here the alternative is between the delivery station and no use at all. This brings up another point:

May it not be, in some cases, that we really are offering the reader an alternative between delivery station and library and that through indolence he takes the former? Doubtless this is often the case, and it should not be so. The location of every delivery station should be studied from this standpoint, and its continuance should be made a matter of serious question. When all is said and done, there will remain some stations where a minority of users would go to the library if the station were discontinued, and would be benefited thereby at the expense of a little more exertion. The fact that there are some real advantages in long-range circulation should enable the librarian, in such a case, to strike some kind of a balance, satisfy himself that this particular station is or is not of resultant benefit to the community, and act accordingly. It is also possible, in some cases, to combine the deposit feature with the delivery station, and it goes without saying that this should be done just as the delivery feature should be added to every deposit and every branch, where it is feasible.

Finally, the long range circulation may be adapted to the use of the busy by enabling them to kill two birds with one stone. Libraries are always trying, with doubtful success, to get hold of persons who are busy about something else--factory workers, shoppers, and so on. A residential district is a better place for a branch library than a shopping district, although the number of different persons who pass the door daily is larger in the latter, because there is more leisure in the residence street--less preoccupation and bustle. But if it is made possible for the shopper to use the library with practically no delay, while he is shopping, will he not take advantage of the opportunity? A recent experiment in the St. Louis Public Library convinces me that he will. We are now operating a downtown branch in the book department of a large department store, and we have an hourly messenger service between the library and this station. I believe this is the first time that such frequent delivery service has been tried. This makes it possible to leave an order at the beginning of a shopping trip and to find the book ready at the close of the trip. The interval would never be much over an hour, and might be as little as fifteen or twenty minutes.

There are two favorable factors here which it might be difficult to secure elsewhere: The shopping district here is near enough to the central library to make frequent delivery possible, and the management of the store where our station is located is broad enough to see that the possibility of borrowing a book free, from the library, even when presented as an immediate alternative to the purchase of the same book from the counters of the store, does not, in the long run, injure sales.

It is not absolutely necessary, of course, to operate this scheme from a department store, neither is greater distance an absolute bar to frequent deliveries. I believe that this kind of long-distance service is well worth the attention of librarians.

And, in general, I believe that a realization that all long-distance service has its good points may do good by inducing us to dwell on those points and to try to make them of more influence in our work.

CONFLICTS OF JURISDICTION IN LIBRARY SYSTEMS[14]

At bottom, a departmental system in a large institution is simply an outcome of the fact that its head requires aid in administration. At first, perhaps, he can actually do everything with his own hand; next he requires helpers, but he can oversee them all; finally, he must have overseers, who are the only ones with whom he deals directly and for whom he naturally classifies the work and divides it among them accordingly. This is not merely a symbolical or fanciful account of such a development. There are plenty of heads of institutions, educational, commercial and industrial, who have personally seen every stage of it--who are now administering a complicated system of departments where they once did everything themselves. In particular, there are now librarians, at the head of great libraries, who began library work by performing, or at least overseeing directly, the elementary acts of which library operation may be taken to consist, and who have watched such a simple system of superintendence develop year by year into something complex.

Such a development, as I have said, is naturally based on some kind of classification. If one could sit down and, foreseeing the growth of his institution for years to come, settle upon the way in which that growth should be cared for, his classification might possibly be more logical and workable than most classifications now are. The best of them are wofully imperfect, as no one knows better than we librarians. And when division into classes proceeds _pari passu_ with growth, we are necessarily bothered with that troublesome thing--cross-classification. As our institution grows, one direction of growth and a corresponding set of conditions and needs comes into the foreground after another, and our basis of classification is apt to change accordingly.

In the library, for instance, territorial expansion has frequently claimed the right of way. It has been evident that wide regions within the municipality were not reached by the library’s activities; hence the establishment of branches--practically classification on a regional or territorial basis. Next, perhaps, some other need is pushed forward--say, the necessity for special care given to the children of the community. Here is a non-territorial basis for classification, founded only upon the age of the library’s users. These are not classes and sub-classes, but are entirely different primary systems of classification, whose dividing lines cross and do not run parallel. A man who should sit down and try to evolve, at first hand, some sort of classification of library work, might adopt one or the other, but not both. In one case he might divide his city into districts, with district superintendents and local librarians under each; in the other, he might divide his users by ages and tastes and have a superintendent for each. In neither case would there be cross-classification, with its over-lapping classes and consequent interferences of jurisdiction.

But this is not the way that things work out. The librarian finds it necessary to have his geographical subdivisions and also those based on age, and he adopts others also as they appear desirable, without much regard for the logic of classification. If he does take it into account, he feels that the troubles resulting from conflicts of jurisdiction will be more easily dealt with than those consequent upon a refusal to respond to the present demands of the work. Also--and this is an important factor--conflicts of jurisdiction, no matter how inevitable, are in the future, and the present demands of the work look vastly larger and press with insistence. Is there any wonder that he does what lies immediately before him and lets the future take care of itself?

Unfortunately, the future always does take care of itself very well indeed, and presents itself to demand a reckoning at the appointed time. The library, for instance, that has its branches for different regions and its children’s room in each gets along well enough so long as its cross-classification of work exists only on paper. But the time comes when departmental organization must begin, and this must be based on the classification. There may be a superintendent of branches and a superintendent of children’s work, or the branch librarians may report to the librarian directly, or there may be other dispositions with other duties and names. In any case, a children’s room at a branch library necessarily finds itself in two departments, under two jurisdictions and under two heads. If the branch librarian and the children’s superintendent are both yielding in disposition, the librarian may never have the conflict of jurisdiction brought to his attention. If either is yielding while the other is masterful, there will also be no trouble. In one case the branch librarian will run the adult end of her branch and leave the other to the children’s department; in the other there will be one branch, at least, where the children’s supervisor has little to say--a condition of things that may be tolerated, but is surely undesirable. But suppose that both heads are conscientious, assertive and anxious to push the work, fond of organizing administrative details and impatient of interference. Here we have the possibilities of trouble at once.

The first rumblings of the storm come usually in the form of complaints of interference, on the one side or the other. Then we have a demand from both sides for a definition of their respective rights and responsibilities. The librarian is asked, for instance, in just what respects the children’s librarian shall take her orders from the branch librarian and in what from the supervisor. This is a good deal like petitioning the legislature to pass a law specifying exactly when a child shall obey his father and when the mayor of the city. The librarian who enters on this plausible path will sooner or later be lost in the jungle. He has only himself to thank. Either he or his predecessor started the game and he must play it out to the end. We librarians are all responsible for each other’s faults. Let us see how he may play it.

In the first place, his is the power. What is done in any department is done by his orders or by the orders of some one endowed by him with authority to give orders. He has given two persons authority over the same field at one point, and it is his business to straighten things out. Here are some possible ways:

1. The authority of one head may be absolutely extinguished in the field where conflict exists. Here we have legalized the state of things described above as existing with a combination of one spineless department-head and one very spiny one. It works, but at the expense of everything that tends to the efficiency of the extinguished authority, and I do not recommend it.

2. An attempt may be made, as noted above, to draw a line between the two spheres of authority and keep each in its place. This appeals to those who are fond of detail, for it can be done only by considering and ticketing details. A line, defined by some one clear principle, cannot be drawn in a field of this kind between two things both of which logically cover that field. It is logical that the children’s librarian in a branch should be wholly under the authority of the branch librarian, since she is a branch employee like the others. It is just as logical that she should be wholly under the authority of the supervisor, of whose department she is a part. If we are to define the things in which she is to obey the one and the other, they must be enumerated one by one. And then other things will turn up that have not been thus enumerated, and we are in trouble again. This plan, as I have said, appeals to those who revel in regulations and specifications, but I can recommend it no more than the other.

3. One department may formally and distinctly be set above the other. Or, what is the same thing, the librarian may resolve, when a conflict arises, always to decide the matter in favor of one particular department. This means, in the special case that we have been using as an illustration, either that the children’s department shall be allowed to do nothing in a branch library without the consent of the branch librarian, or of the supervisor of branches, if there is one; or that all questions involving the administration of a branch children’s room must depend ultimately on the chief of the children’s department.

This may seem to be the same as the plan by which the authority of one department is absolutely done away in the disputed sphere. It is of the same type, but not so drastic. In the other plan one has not authority to do anything; in this, one must ask permission--not the same thing by any means. This plan is practically in effect at some libraries; it would probably be regarded as equitable by most department heads--provided their own department were put ahead of the other. The trouble is that it involves an arbitrary subordination--one that does not exist in the nature of the classification. And this subordination is local and partial; it cannot hold good for the whole department. No one would think of placing the branch department, as a whole, under the children’s department, or _vice versa_. And the objections, although not so strong as those to the extinguishment plan, are of the same kind. The efficiency of one department or the other is bound to suffer, and for this reason I do not consider this the best plan.

4. All department heads in conflicting spheres, may be regarded simply as advisers of the librarian and not as possessing authority in themselves to give orders. A conflict is thus reduced to contradictory advice from two sources. The librarian then pursues whatever course seems good to him. This plan has attractive features, especially to administrators of the type that like to keep a finger in every pie. There is doubtless danger in aloofness. The librarian must know what is going on, but I see no advantage in requiring him to decide questions of trivial detail at frequent intervals, as he must do under this plan; for conflicts generally begin in questions of detail and it is at the beginning or even earlier, in anticipation, that they must be caught and adjusted. This plan works, but it reduces the department head to a consulting expert and burdens the librarian with detail. It does not appeal to me at all.

5. The two conflicting departments may co-operate, intelligently and courteously without sacrifice of authority or self-respect, under the advice and orders of the librarian.

This is the plan that I recommend. It is the most difficult of all, and no regulations or specifications can be formulated for carrying it out. For this reason it will never be widely in favor. A wicked and rebellious generation demands a sign, and in this plan there is neither sign nor formula except that general principle of helpfulness and willingness to place the common whole above the selfish part that is at the antipodes of both wickedness and rebellion. It is a personal matter and it adds one important qualification to those already necessary in department heads--the ability to do team work. This qualification, however, is so important, quite apart from its necessity in connection with this plan, that we may consider it an advantage, rather than otherwise, that the plan puts it forward and insists upon it. On the whole I think that a library with mediocre department heads having this qualification is better manned, and will do more satisfactory work than one with a staff of supremely able experts, cranky, self-centered and all pulling different ways. The efforts of members of a body like a library staff are not to be measured arithmetically--they are what mathematicians call “vectors”--directed quantities, like force, velocity or acceleration. To know where a man will bring up one must have not only his speed, but its direction. The sum of two equal forces may be anything from zero up to their double, depending on their relative directions, and if the sum is zero, no matter how large the components may be, the result is precisely the same as if those components are small, or as if neither existed. It is this sort of thing that an eminent employer of labor had in mind when he advised, “If two of your subordinates don’t get along together, _discharge both_ of them, no matter how good they are.” In this man’s estimation the relative value of team work evidently stands pretty high. I should not follow his advice, however, without giving everyone a fair chance. I have known the opinions of one department head about another and their ability to work together to improve greatly on acquaintance.

The part necessarily played by the librarian in this scheme may be regarded by some as an objection. I have already referred to administrators who, like the late Czar of Russia, prefer to regulate all the details of the kingdom by personal supervision. There is also the precisely opposite type, who like to make a good machine, set it going, and then let it alone. The trouble is that machines will not run of themselves. They need oversight, oiling, cleaning and repairing. The best require a minimum of all this, but all must have some of it. And such machinery as there is in this plan requires a maximum of oversight. It is, however, not the control of details but rather the watching of general methods and results. Is everything running smoothly, without “lost motion” or “backlash,” and turning out a satisfactory finished product? If not can the trouble be located? Yes; these two cogs do not work smoothly together. Let us find out which is at fault and adjust or replace it; but if our investigation is fruitless, possibly the best plan is to discard both.

I trust I have misled no one by treating here specifically of two departments. I might have substituted the names of a dozen others. All through library administration, and especially in the administration of a system of branch libraries, these possibilities of conflict occur. In branches they are generally between the branch administration and the central departments--finance, supplies, cataloging, book-orders, reference and circulation.

The handling of this whole matter depends, of course, on the librarian. He it must be who is to decide on general policies or go to his Board for a decision in cases so important that he feels their action necessary. If the work of departments overlaps in some field where the library’s policy has not yet been decided upon and defined, he has no one to blame but himself if the adjustment is difficult. And if policies are defined in advance and pains taken to inform department heads thoroughly of their existence and import, the likelihood of serious disagreement will be considerably lessened.