Part 11

The advantages of basing a rural library service on a central library to which the readers can resort if they desire are manifold. Foremost is the supremely important point that the users can come if and when they will to see and handle the books and make themselves familiar with the library’s contents. Open access in town libraries has been, not merely an educational factor, but an inspiration. The box of books doled out from a repository that the reader has never seen, and to which he would not be admitted if he applied, is better than nothing, but it is a library service only to those who have hitherto had nothing. A town takes a pride in its library; the villager would have the same personal interest in the collection of books housed in the village hall. An inaccessible repository is not likely to excite the feelings of county patriotism which have been a valuable element in the success of the Brumback Library, Ohio. Such patriotism is needed, if the unanimous social effort required of this new experiment, much more than it was required in the towns, is to become a reality.

The ideal plan would be to divide the large counties into sections, each centering in a town or regional library. The town libraries exist, and if proper financial conditions were arranged the towns would probably not be averse from coming into a well-planned scheme. They would gain, not lose, by the change, since the available stock of books would be enlarged indefinitely and there would be a wider apportionment of overhead charges. At present, Somerset is worked from the little watering-place of Burnham, which has no library service for itself, and books are actually sent across the width of the shire into the suburbs of Bath, a town rejoicing in a large collection of lending-library books used mainly for desultory reference purposes. How much better were Somerset mapped out into districts served from the existing public libraries at Radstock, Weston-super-Mare, Taunton, and Bridgewater, with new ones established at Glastonbury, Wells, or other places, unable singly to afford a library. Why should not Sussex be supplied from the chain of admirable libraries in her south coast towns, with a new one in the hinterland at Horsham? Kent has public libraries at Maidstone, Gravesend, Chatham, Bromley, Canterbury, and Folkestone; Maidstone, with its Bentlif Institute comprising library, museum, and art gallery, would form a central magazine hardly to be surpassed, and with subordinate centres at the other places it would be easy to cater for the whole county. Wiltshire is served from Trowbridge, where the bookless inhabitants have to be sternly repulsed from the sacred repository, whilst Calne and Salisbury have libraries of their own that might co-operate in supplying this large agricultural area. Similarly, the Gloucestershire repository is in the county town, and has no dealings with the Gloucester Public Library. Examples might be multiplied; but the reader need only open the map of the United Kingdom to see how easy and natural a thing it would be to adopt the American county library system and centre our rural service in an accessible library building, with its reference collection, its reading rooms, and above all, its lending book-shelves thrown open to all comers. The Librarian of the National Liberal Club, Mr. C. R. Sanderson, prepared a scheme for Middlesex, one of the latest counties to accept the Carnegie grant, for organizing a regional service worked from a central library established within the joint boundary of Southgate and Friern Barnet, which have between them a population approaching 60,000. The alternative to this proposal is the usual travelling library system, and it remains to be seen which will be ultimately adopted. Middlesex, most of which is mere suburb of London, is in circumstances very different from those of the average county. It already has a score of public libraries in its towns and urban districts, many of which would be anything but worse off if they were linked into a county scheme. Failing that consummation, towards which, however, it may be hoped that future events will lead, there seems no reason but timidity and short-sighted frugality to hesitate in choosing the American pattern.

The more rapidly the method of the travelling book-box spreads into counties in which efficient urban libraries are already working, the sooner will its radical defects appear; common sense and obvious convenience will presently call for the abolition of such anomalies, and insist on a proper utilization of existing resources. The earlier this happens the better, for such utilization will be far more economic than an ineffective system, however cheaply run. The outcome will be something much nearer the goal indicated by the Adult Education Committee in their Final Report.[25]

“The hope lies in the recognition of the county market town as the natural centre for the surrounding villages and the gradual development of transport facilities radiating from the market towns.... The development of transport and the extended use of electric power will tend to the decentralization of industry and the movement of firms from the town to the country. It is improbable, however, that town workers will be prepared, in any large numbers--even when the housing shortage is remedied--to exchange urban life for life in the country so long as the latter is without the counterpart of the many and varied activities to which they have become accustomed in the towns.... The rural problem, from whatever point of view it is regarded--economic, social, or political--is essentially a problem of re-creating the rural community, of developing new social traditions and a new culture. The great need is for a living nucleus of communal activity in the village, which will be a centre from which radiate the influence of different forms of corporate effort, and to which the people are attracted to find this satisfaction of their social and intellectual needs. We conceive this nucleus to be a village institute, under full public control.... The institute should contain a hall large enough for dances, cinema shows, concerts, plays, public lectures, and exhibitions. At the institute there should be a public library and local museum. If arrangements can be made for games and sports, so much the better. The institute, in a word, should be a centre of educational, social, and recreational activity.... As the institutes will be used more and more for public and quasi-public purposes, it seems to us that they should be established out of public funds. In the main, the establishment of village institutes should be a national charge. The complicated social and economic questions which we call collectively the rural problem are a matter of the greatest national importance. They do not admit of any simple solution. They need to be approached by many roads; one of the most important is through direct encouragement to the establishment of a new communal organization and to the development of corporate activities and social institutions in harmony with modern social ideas. The State cannot create a new social spirit; it can but provide opportunities for its growth and expression. One of the chief of these opportunities is the village institute, and we can think of no more profound or far-reaching piece of rural reconstruction than the provision of buildings expressly designed as a focus of the social activities of village communities. Whether such institutes become active centres of social and educational work will depend largely upon the degree in which voluntary organizations of various kinds co-operate in utilizing the opportunities which the institutes present. It is clear that a village institute can never become the mainspring of organized life in the village unless the organized activities of the village centre in the institute. The success of village institutes in the future rests upon an appeal to groups of people with common interests, rather than to individuals. It is because they have, in recent years, begun to flourish that we look forward hopefully to a vigorous life within the village institutes.”

Only let the library hold the central position in these rural institutes that it held in the Mechanics’ Institutes before the Public Libraries Acts, and let the numerous libraries--and institutes--be knitted together in active fraternal union, and the Committee’s dreams may easily be accomplished.[26]

FOOTNOTES:

[18] The Adult Education Committee may have been justified in laying the blame for this state of things on “the want of foresight of the original promoters of the movement, who assumed that the institutions would appeal only to the artisan classes of the large centres of population”; but they were hardly right in going on to ascribe it more particularly to their mistake in allowing the legislature “to restrict the expenditure of public money to the product of a penny rate.”

[19] _A Report on Library Provision and Policy_, by Professor W. G. S. Adams (1915), p. 15.

[20] “Prior to 1920, pioneer rural schemes had been financed or assisted by the Trust in the counties or areas noted in column ‘A’ below; column ‘B’ shows the counties to which grants have been sanctioned this year; column ‘C’ shows the counties whose Authorities are in negotiation (preliminary or advanced) with a view to a grant.”

A Perthshire Caithness Montrose District Nottinghamshire Staffordshire Wiltshire Gloucestershire Buckinghamshire Dorsetshire Somersetshire Yorkshire Village Library Cardigan Carnarvon Brecon & Radnor Denbighshire Montgomeryshire Grantham District Westmorland Warwickshire

B Sutherland Clackmannan Renfrewshire Forfar & Kincardine Midlothian Berwickshire Peeblesshire Dumbartonshire Kent Pembrokeshire Glamorganshire West Sussex Cheshire Inverness

C Flint Carmarthen Anglesey Middlesex Hampshire (Isle of Wight) Hampshire (Southampton) Worcestershire Northamptonshire Cumberland Durham Northumberland Kirkcudbright Nairn Fife Bedfordshire Surrey Linlithgow Shropshire Cambridge Isle of Man

(Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, _Seventh Annual Report_, 1921; p. 9.)

[21] _Library Association Record_--“The Gloucestershire Rural Library Scheme,” by Miss A. S. Cooke (Feb., 1921).

[22] S. B. Antrim and E. I. Antrim, _The County Library_ (1914), p. 238.

[23] Total number of vols. accessioned (Dec. 31, 1920) 37,302; number in the library 30,597.

[24] J. H. Friedel: _Training for Librarianship_, p. 106.

[25] pp. 141-5.

[26] The character of the best type of village institute may be judged from the following account of the Nettlebed Working Men’s Club and Institute:--

“Perhaps the most original feature of the equipment of the hall is the provision of a cinematograph apparatus. The provision of picture palaces in all English villages would be a doubtful advantage, if they showed the baser sort of ‘cowboy’ and other sensational films. Given some restraint in the choice of subject, however, moving pictures make winter evenings more changeful. During 1918 the cinema was used very little, but it is now running every Saturday evening, and draws full houses. Mr. Fleming’s main idea in installing a cinema at Nettlebed was to make use of its educational possibilities. The Oxfordshire Education Committee welcomed the provision, as also did the Inspector of Schools, the more so because it extended advantages to the school children of six parishes near Nettlebed. The Education Code permits teachers to take the whole or part of a school for rambles or visits to places of educational interest during school hours, and films have been shown at Nettlebed on certain afternoons to a concourse of children. The subjects of the pictures were chosen to illustrate geography, history, English, and nature study. A village club can conduct its ‘cinema department’ by joining a lending library of films, so that the subjects can be duly varied.

“The higher aspects of village life have not, however, been neglected at Nettlebed. Concerts, lectures, and dances are held in the men’s hall, which is laid with a special dancing floor of oak, famous throughout the district, and this is protected in the ordinary way by a cloth covering. Dancing classes are held weekly for children in the afternoon and for adults in the evening, and are conducted by a lady resident in the village. An instructress, under whose care the young girls in the village and district are taught cookery, laundry work, and housekeeping, lives in a house near the hall. Across the road is the school garden, divided into some fourteen plots, each cared for by one boy. At the back of the playground is an old building converted into a carpenter’s shop, in which another section of the boys work under the supervision of the village schoolmaster. All of these branches are under the control of the County Education Authority. Altogether, it will be seen that in these various ways instruction as well as amusement is provided.” Sir Lawrence Weaver, _Village Clubs and Halls_ (1920), pp. 82-3.

V

A NATIONAL LIBRARY SERVICE.

Centralization proved to be the only way of extending a library service to the rural districts. No village, unless through the largess of a plutocrat, could build up and maintain anything worth calling a library for itself. Given a centralized system, some sort of service can be run cheaply, and a first-class service can be run economically. Does it not follow that some measure of centralization would be good for urban libraries, enabling them to save in certain directions, and making their resources go a great deal further than they go at present in the direction of widest utility? The largest libraries have managed to be self-sufficing, not merely because they have more money to spend, but rather because their service is organized on the principle of a centralized group. There is a point beyond which it does not pay a library to provide from its own resources all that its users may possibly require. Each library must determine this point for itself. The everyday wants of its readers ought to be satisfied on the spot and at the moment; but to go far beyond that point even should a local Crœsus provide the wherewithal, would be extravagant, entailing surplusage, overlapping, and waste. Spending money on books only in occasional request is to spend too little on books in continual demand. The library of moderate means cannot pretend to satisfy both daily and exceptional wants, unless it is able to call upon outside resources, such as a Central Library for Students developed to such a capacity that it forms a sufficient reservoir for supplementing all the moderate-sized stocks in the country. If most of the urban libraries were brought into a co-operative network of libraries, with mechanism for interchange by which the book lacking here would be supplied there, or else from a larger regional library or a clearing-house at the centre, obviously a service equal to the pooled resources of the whole system would be provided without the present waste on overlapping.

Central organization exists in the big provincial cities; that is the reason for their superiority, and they are superior in a degree far beyond that of mere size. It does not exist in London; that is why serious readers must have recourse to the British Museum or the big special libraries, to satisfy their requirements; or if, like the great majority, they can rarely do this, they must go without. London is the most glaring illustration of the vices due to mere parochial methods; it suffers, not so much because its library resources are limited, as because they are not mobilized. For certain purposes, it has already been noted, both London and provincial libraries acknowledge the economic value of some centralization. Thus every municipal library has given up buying books in Braille type for the blind, and relies for this branch of its service upon the National Library at Westminster. A great many subscribe to the Central Library for Students, and draw upon that for books required by specialist readers. A large number help to provide the funds for the great Subject-Index to Periodicals, which makes the contents of reviews, magazines, technical and scientific journals, filed in their reference departments, available for instant use. This may not seem much compared with the results of joint effort or of State supervision in America, where they have co-operative cataloguing, co-operative publication of bibliographies and aids for readers, and elaborate facilities for professional training; but it is a beginning. The Adult Education Committee can think of no way to endow the industries of the country with an adequate series of technical libraries except by centralization. Although many librarians, represented by the Library Association, do not approve of the particular scheme put forward, they are at one with the Committee in admitting that co-ordination of the separate libraries and the establishment of a central supply is the only way to solve this problem.

Although, however, the partial and unequal development of public libraries which the Adult Education Committee by a slip in their logic put down to the rate limit, is due, as the report conclusively shows, to their having had to struggle along in isolation, it would be disastrous to take the control of the local libraries entirely out of the hands of the local authorities. This would stultify all efforts to inspire public opinion and evoke local pride. No institution in a civilized society is more sure to be an expression of corporate life and local individuality than a communal library, in the building up of which the actual users have had a hand. A system, however complete and efficient, bestowed by a Government department, however benevolent, would be sure eventually to stifle all such aspirations. The local communities in both town and country must have a decisive voice in the management of their libraries. They must have a larger voice, not a smaller, than they have had hitherto. Local initiative has never had free play. Why is it that public libraries rarely excite that interest and enthusiasm in which the promoters hopefully confided? The answer is obvious. Libraries have suffered from official repression, and have not had even the doubtful advantage of official tutelage. If a town wished to spend liberally on its library, it was pulled up by the rate limit. If it wanted lectures, the Government auditor put in his veto: he does so still. And so with any of the excursions from the programme prescribed from above that would have helped to realize a higher ideal. Library authorities have been confined to the unimaginative duty of exercising circumscribed and inadequate powers, and the library committee has enjoyed the least prestige of all the council’s departments. More local control, more powers of initiative, and more representation of the actual users of the library are needed, if a vigorous and useful life is to be maintained.

But this is fully compatible with healthy co-operation between the different authorities under the guiding supervision of a central department. Some authorities may require a stimulus; they should not be allowed to victimize those among their constituents who crave the very necessities of civilized life. Cases are not unknown where borough councils have failed to carry out, or have deliberately emasculated, a library scheme approved by a majority of the ratepayers. Education is compulsory: it is a question whether one of the chief instruments of education should be at the mercy of a local body to grant or withhold. For, so inconsiderable a place does the library take at present in local politics, the average borough council, elected to manage the trams, the streets, water, electricity, and other mundane affairs, seldom represents the views of the citizen on such a different matter as libraries; and the committee appointed by such a council hardly ever represents or is fully cognizant of the views of the people who actually use the library.

Fortunately, the times when a policy of rate-saving at all costs, or the selfishness of a leisured class enjoying their subscription libraries and not in favour of too much education for the lower orders, or the interested opposition of the liquor trade and the music hall proprietor, were able to keep out or keep down public libraries, are gradually passing away. They have not gone altogether; but it would be invidious to name the two or three distinguished boroughs where these influences are still rampant. The problem now is to bring the great crowd of under-developed and under-nourished libraries into line one with other, to assist the halt, help the blind to see, and by schemes for concerted action enable all to reach the same level of efficiency as the big towns have attained without undue exertion. A simple licence to spend more than a penny rate will not secure this by itself. Reorganization on a co-operative ground-plan will do as much as the mere expenditure of money, and money will not be spent lavishly in these frugal days. The merit of such a reorganization is that so many and so great values will be secured at a minimum cost. The material is in existence for an enormous improvement of the services.

Had not the sweeping proposals of the Adult Education Committee for making the local education authority the library authority been negatived before the late Bill came into Parliament, the heterogeneous units that constitute the library service of London would after the Act of 1919 have come under the unifying influence of the London Education Committee. It was such a near thing that we may pause to consider the probable results. As already noticed, library development in the metropolis has been unequal in the extreme. Certain boroughs are still destitute of a public library system. The total number of books in the remainder is about a million and a half. All these metropolitan libraries are established under the same Acts; till recently they drew their income from a uniform rate (except in certain boroughs where a high rateable value allowed the penny to be reduced to a halfpenny); the governing bodies are in each district a committee of the borough council. Yet each group of libraries is a distinct entity. Each authority is a law unto itself. A ratepayer in one borough is not permitted to borrow from the library in the next though interchange of privileges would have been, not merely a logical but a great economic advantage. There has been no consultation between the authorities to avoid overlapping in neighbouring reference libraries, though correlative specialization would have been easy and remunerative.[27] Every reference library develops on individual lines, perhaps as a British Museum in miniature, with the result that, out of a number much larger than the total number of boroughs, not one is above the standard of a second-rate library in the provinces. Some committees offer a cordial welcome to students at school or college in their boroughs. Others repulse such students unless they are ratepayers or at least residents in the borough.[28]