Part 26

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A MESSAGE TO BEGINNERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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