Part 10

“We all feel greatly indebted to the Carnegie Trustees, it is impossible to over-estimate the boon that the Library is in these country districts. If the Trustees could see for themselves the excitement and pleasure when the books arrive, and the rush to see them and choose, I am sure they would realize afresh how well-spent their funds are. Our only difficulty is that there are never enough books for all who want them, but that, without doubt, is a difficulty common to all Carnegie rural librarians.”

The Carnegie Trustees calculated their grants on the understanding that purchases by the rural libraries should be restricted to the cheaper books in general demand (averaging 3s. 6d. new or second-hand), and that when other or more expensive books were required they should be obtained on loan from the Central Library for Students. To this library, which forms a central store of technical, scientific, and other high-class works, for supplying both the rural systems and those urban libraries that pay a small subscription, the Trustees are now making a subsidy of £1,000 a year. It may eventually develop into an invaluable auxiliary to all the public libraries in the kingdom, and money spent on increasing its stock is a thoroughly economic expenditure, since it saves an incredible amount of overlapping among the different units of the nation’s library service.

Different counties have employed different modes of distribution. Rail and carrier are the usual medium where the centres are not far from the railways, and some counties have secured half rates for conveyance of books by passenger train. Experiments have however been made with hired motor transport, with a saving on costs and a much more important saving in time and trouble, since more than a score of boxes can be delivered and the time-expired boxes collected in a single day’s trip. The Perthshire authority have acquired a motor-van of their own to be used for conveying books and also for the librarian’s tours of inspection. This will no doubt be the plan adopted elsewhere when the systems reach a further stage of development. More miscellaneous and more picturesque methods have had to be followed in the North of Scotland service, which feeds the Islands, including St. Kilda, with much-needed books. After many abortive attempts to reach St. Kilda, it was found that a trawler was going there from Fleetwood, and in this roundabout way the first box of books from Dunfermline arrived there last year. In the Orkneys, Shetlands, and Hebrides, crofters, fishermen, and cobblers, we are told, look eagerly for books on natural history, science, and philosophy, from the Central Library for Students. How many people passing the drab house in Tavistock Square have the remotest idea that from this centre, unmarked by anything more grandiose than a small brass plate, mental and spiritual light is being steadily radiated to the inhabitants of utmost Thule. In the island of Foula, where the grown-up people cannot leave their crofts in the scanty summer, the school-children are enlisted as carriers. A schoolmaster describes how in the winter he carried the books himself until he fell in with the sheep-dogs sent out to bring them to the distant croft. On this island a population of 175 borrows 1,300 books a year. Guiberwick, with a population of 200, calls for 700 every six months. Minute records are kept at Dunfermline of the kind of reading that appeals to various kinds of readers. “For the fiction,” says the librarian, Miss Thomson, “taken on a whole, they read very good novels. The general works are of a varied nature, but I have noticed that books dealing with the literature, fauna, flora, and topography of each island are much in favour. We also supply books in Gaelic, which are widely read both by adults and juveniles.” Anyone who has wandered in the lonelier parts of the Highlands will know what are the difficulties of a service to the remote glens and the foresters’ stations in the deer-forests, and what a priceless gift a handful of books always is.

It must be evident from this short account that the rural problem has been tackled on the cheapest lines. The maximum cost of any county scheme has in no instance exceeded the yield of a halfpenny rate; and until there are centres throughout a shire, or until supplementary means are employed, such as the establishment of stationary libraries at accessible points in certain areas, it is not likely to increase appreciably. The following typical examples of county expenditure are given by the Trustees in their report on the year 1920:--

Total School pop. pop. Cost Age of of area of area Total Rate per No. of County. Scheme. served. served. Cost. equiv. head. Centres. Staffordshire 4th yr. 246,000 35,000 £525 ¹⁄₁₈d. ¹⁄₂d. 206 Gloucestershire 2nd “ 212,000 30,000 500 ¹⁄₈d. ¹⁄₂d. 303 Cardiganshire 3rd “ 60,000 6,500 440 ¹⁄₄d. 1³⁄₄d. 45 Wiltshire 1st “ 181,000 34,000 435 ¹⁄₁₂d. ¹⁄₂d. 90 Notts 2nd “ 100,000 13,421 580 ¹⁄₆d. 1¹⁄₂d. 164 Somerset 2nd “ 335,000 52,000 450 ¹⁄₁₈d. ¹⁄₃d. 223

It was a wise stroke of policy to make a beginning through the schools and the children. A reading public is in process of manufacture, and through the books and the readers thus introduced into rustic households even the stubborn bucolic mind can hardly fail to receive some impression. But the risk of beginning in a small way is that people will be content with small results, or, even worse, that the service may have such insignificant consequences that nobody will mind if it declines into something like the old-fashioned school library or disappears altogether. The country districts are being supplied with boxes of books; they are not being put into contact with libraries--they are not yet supplied with what Professor Adams laid down as the first essential, “a permanent collection of certain important reference books and standard works.” Such a permanent nucleus is in truth the essential basis of a library service; a rotation of book-boxes is, in reality, but auxiliary to this. Unless it be firmly realized that what has been done is only a very small beginning, and that enormously more remains to be done before an adequate library service is provided, a fatal mistake will have been committed, as paralysing to future progress as the blunder of 1850, which made public libraries a failure on the whole throughout the first period of their existence. The warning ought by now to have been taken to heart. In their manner of dealing with the rural library, the county education authorities are on their trial. If the wonted errors of bureaucratic management are committed, if there is a lack of vision and of sympathy with the villager, especially the villager who will not be hustled inside the fold of organized adult education, failure to come to grips with the thorny problems of rural psychology, and, above all, a one-ideaed zeal for economy and a cheap sort of efficiency, not much can be hoped for until public opinion, when our new readers have grown up, imperiously demands more.

So far, little has been attempted, except in one or two counties blessed with an open-minded and energetic librarian, to secure the personal contact and the insight into local needs and local avenues of approach that are the indispensable preliminaries to success. For the extension work that has proved so lucrative in urban libraries there is doubly and trebly a need in the country, if libraries are to play any vital part in the rural economy. During the last few years, fortunately, many agencies have come into being or have acquired a new lease of life through which missionary enterprises can be carried on, granted the necessary intelligence and driving-power at the centre. Rural conditions have changed profoundly since the war. There is a keen desire to make life in the country interesting, to open the stagnant backwater into the general stream. Here there is a village club or a women’s institute, there a branch of the W.E.A.; the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A. have both identified themselves with these and other local activities and initiated fresh projects themselves, including small libraries, reading circles, and educational programmes; one place has a field club, another a musical society; almost everywhere there are boy scouts, girl guides, and other elements of social life, to all of which the library movement should come as an aid and a stimulus. Some of these may form a natural home for the village library; others will provide materials for reading circles and similar enterprises on the part of librarians having some insight into the rustic mind and a determination to break down initial barriers. But to make such efforts effective, the policy of the rural library authority must be pushing, adaptive, and not a parsimonious one, and the staff of librarians must be something more than machines for distributing books.

The directors of education and the county librarians who are in charge of rural systems might learn a good deal from the district organizers employed by the Village Clubs Association. This organization was founded during the war, with Government assistance, to stimulate social life in the country, and counteract the tendency of the villagers to migrate into towns. It works principally by encouraging the formation of village clubs and institutes, and assisting these with advice and practical help, especially by getting them to co-operate in schemes for lectures, classes, entertainments, sports, competitions, and the like. Several hundred thriving clubs are affiliated to the Association, and the staff of officials--men chosen for their experience of rural conditions and insight into rustic mentality--are in touch with everything that goes on throughout a radius extending over two or three counties. Many clubs have through local benefactions acquired large and beautiful village halls, which are obviously the destined home of the village library--in point of fact, they are not yet the actual home even where the village has a library centre, bureaucratic authority much preferring the school, official routine and discipline to mere human nature.

The Village Clubs Association takes an active interest in the intellectual side of rural life; it promotes the formation of village libraries, very sensibly urging every club to make itself the owner of a small reference collection, to buy some books for lending, and borrow from the Central Library to satisfy demands beyond the average. The Association, further, busies itself in promoting study circles, lectures, and evening classes, official or otherwise. It has its own library and education committee, whose activities coincide in large measure with the work that the county education committees and directors of education are doing, or ought to be doing, in carrying out the rural library scheme. Yet the Village Clubs Association and the educational authorities, even in counties where rural libraries exist and both are ostensibly engaged in furthering the same purposes, have done nothing yet in concert, have not availed themselves of each others’ services, and so far as a person who is not a Government official can make out, do not know of each others’ existence. In short, this is another notable instance of our national gift for doing things twice over and at the same time leaving them undone, of paying twice for the same job and declining to do it properly because of the expense. This too, in days of anti-waste campaigns and niggardly economy. The education committee and the director of education in each county work under the Board of Education; the Village Clubs Association is foster-mothered by the Board of Agriculture. It is, apparently, not official etiquette that the Association should recommend the village clubs to seek the benefits of the education authority’s library scheme--their pamphlets of information and advice do not mention the new possibilities opened out by the Act of 1919--or, on the other hand, for the education authority to utilize the organizing experience and fit its own schemes into the framework which the Association could put at its disposal.

If the education authorities ignore official or semi-official work such as this, it is to be feared that they will be slow to recognize and co-ordinate the thousand and one activities, the libraries and institutes founded by private effort, and the numberless bodies that are trying hard to infuse a new spirit into rural life. Will they take over or work in any kind of partnership with the library schemes of the Y.M.C.A., the village library association working in Worcestershire, or that centred in Barnett House, Oxford? Will they make the various field clubs and other local societies their coadjutors? Unless they do, all the elements of a real social and intellectual resurrection in the villages will be left just outside their radius. It was a good thing to begin with the schools, but the work must get beyond the school at the first opportunity. The village school is only a makeshift base for the great intellectual and civilizing crusade in which all available forces must be concentrated. It is very difficult indeed to evoke in a schoolroom the congenial atmosphere of the library, the reading circle, and the village institute. The very word education, with its narrow associations, is unpopular and repressive. Adult education will have to get rid of the second term before it can become an inspiration. The sooner, therefore, the rural library can leave the school and schooling behind the better. To do so everywhere, in most places perhaps, is not yet possible; but where it is possible, directors of education must not be allowed to frown upon the suggestion. Freedom and initiative, spontaneous personal development, are the chief things to aim at, and they will be attained most easily in regions outside the range of our present educational machinery.

Salvation will probably come to the rural library movement from such counties as are enlightened enough to form leagues between villages, with real not perfunctory libraries in convenient centres, or combinations of borough or urban district libraries with neighbouring villages. Only when a growing proportion of the rural public has the opportunity of direct contact with libraries, and not merely with small batches of books sent them at stated intervals, will they realize what a true library service can do. Only then will there be much hope of co-ordinating all the miscellaneous local efforts into active schemes of library extension. Incidentally, unless events have meanwhile hurried on the process of linking up all our public libraries into a national system, such combinations may furnish a suggestive example to the towns. But to achieve all this, it is doubtful if we should make heavy demands upon the county education committees, unless they depute this side of their work to a strong sub-committee, reinforced with co-opted members from outside. Representation of other interests than those of schools and education, representation of the many voluntary bodies who are striving to reanimate the countryside, representation, above all, of the people who read or whom we want to read the books, is a radical necessity. To this point there will be a return in the next chapter, where the general question of who shall manage our reconstituted libraries will arise.

In the United States, where the obstacles to a rural library service are still more formidable, the town population being only 45 per cent. of the whole, various plans have been tried, and a different method than that recently adopted in this country has met with most success, the method of expansion outwards from a library at the centre, freely open to the public. The State library commissions do not flatter themselves that they have completely solved the problem, for only 794 of the 2964 counties in the United States have as yet one or more libraries of not less than 5,000 volumes; but they are apparently on the highroad to success. At all events, they are fully aware of the extent and value of their opportunities. All the states in the union have State libraries, and most have library commissions, which operate in different ways, some with exemplary thoroughness, and some, it must be confessed, rather perfunctorily. Many states have systems of travelling libraries, that in New York being the most extensive and flourishing. Yet comparing this with the rival county system now to be described, a well-informed critic says, “The few people reached compared with the great rural population of the state of New York, wherein the travelling library under the direction of the State Library Commission seems to be more widely used than in any other state of the Union, indicates the futility of trying, by means of a travelling library system operated from the capital of the state, to supply farm homes with library privileges.”[22] Municipal libraries have reached their highest development in Massachusetts, which has on its public shelves more than six million volumes, about two to each inhabitant; but in the absence of a county system the rural population is neglected. Indiana also has an admirable township law, empowering townships to combine and work in concert; yet only one rural inhabitant in each eleven enjoys library privileges. A very different tale is told in those states where the system of the central county library has been set up, though the system is even now but in its infancy.

The pioneer county library was established in 1901 in Van Wert, Ohio, in a state where the library movement had hitherto made but indifferent progress. Funds for a building had been left to the county town by a self-made banker, J. S. Brumback, and his heirs decided that it should be a library for the whole county, whereby 30,000 people would enjoy benefits that would otherwise have been restricted to 8,000. The county is small and compact, measuring 405 square miles, and is predominantly a rural area, 16,300 persons at that time living on farms or in out-of-the-way spots, and the inhabitants of the towns depending largely for business on the rural population. The county spirit is strong. There are county parks, a county fair, a county hospital, a county Chautauqua, agricultural shows, sports, singing contests, and other county affairs. Hence the tree was planted in the right soil, and took hold at once. A county tax was sanctioned, a large initial stock of books was acquired, and has been continually augmented; and when the stock had increased to 25,000 the whole library service, which is threefold, dealing with the town of Van Wert, with fifteen branches, and with the schools in town and country, was run at an aggregate cost of $7,000 per annum. The staff is divided into three departments corresponding to the three divisions of the service, besides the custodians at the branches, who receive an honorarium for their attendance at certain hours. An equal if not a greater circulation of books is attained through the schools than even through the branch stations. Sunday schools are pressed into the work, and the extension activities are multifarious. Collections of 125 books are sent to each branch every three months; in addition, supply boxes of a hundred books go regularly to some branches, and when required to others. Every inhabitant of the county it must be understood, is entitled to borrow direct from the central library. This is an important point, and, observes the librarian, it would be still more important if the central library were worked on the open access system. In 1920, the total number of agencies in operation was 142, comprehending, besides the central library, five city stations, six city schools, fifteen branches, and 115 school collections. The registered borrowers comprise nearly sixty per cent. of the whole population, three-quarters of them using the central library, whether they live in the town or in the villages. Though weeding-out is a regular practice, obsolete books being ruthlessly discarded and the library supplied with the latest books so as to be a real workshop, the total stock is now 30,597,[23] which is rather more than one volume per head of the population.

Van Wert is a small county, and the compactness of the area served gives it an immense advantage over areas of the size of most English counties, which would have to be divided into library districts to be put on the same footing. But the superiority of the county system, with its facilities for direct access as well as its service through the branch stations and the schools, over the mere travelling library, was so manifest that the system rapidly spread. Among the states that have adopted county library laws, following Ohio’s example, are Wyoming, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, California, Maryland, Washington, Nebraska, Oregon, Iowa. Canada, also, has welcomed the system. California has the largest number of county libraries, and is not far from covering the whole area of the state with a library service. It has a state board of examiners in librarianship, and only certificated persons are eligible to county library posts. One laudable social object is clearly realized as a motive behind rural library policy in the United States, to encourage the people to live as far as they can from the heart of the cities, in spots where they can own a little ground for cultivation, and enjoy pure air and a wholesome environment. If the practical American looks at it in this way, we may be sure that there is much force in the contention that a first-rate library service in the country would be a real attraction and help materially in the movement back to the land.

Here it is worth while mentioning a different class of library that is multiplying fast in the United States, greatly to the furtherance of the same movement--agricultural libraries. There are three varieties of these, the library of the agricultural college, that attached to the experimental station, and the agricultural library formed by a private individual or a farming corporation. Their are sixty-five agricultural colleges in the States, maintained by state or federal funds. Primarily, such libraries serve the college students; but the colleges have adopted a strenuous extension policy, running short winter courses for farmers, organizing agricultural clubs, sending out instructive groups of exhibits, batches of books, reading lists and reading matter, in the form of pamphlets, cuttings, and answers to inquiries. The University of Wisconsin distributes books by parcel post and issues bibliographical bulletins; the Massachusetts Agricultural College has a system of travelling libraries; Purdue University prepares select libraries of agricultural literature and takes steps to sell these to farmers. “Through the farmers’ papers, on the special trains, at fairs and at institutes, the work was carried on.”[24] Agricultural libraries are an essential auxiliary to the experimental station, where the work is forwarded materially by the services of an expert librarian skilled in searching out information. The experimental station and its library play a part in answering queries from working agriculturalists, similar to that played by our commercial and technical libraries for the benefit of manufacturers and men of business.