Part 4

Reference libraries are the obvious complement to a service of books for home consumption. The boundary between their domains is not easy to mark out, nor will any attempt be made here to answer the favourite question of the gravelled examiner in library routine: What distinguishes a reference book from one for the lending library? In most cases the distinction is obvious; in the more difficult, local circumstances may settle the point. Librarians in charge of comparatively small libraries may well shirk a final verdict, and allow much latitude in the use of reference books for lending, and the converse when the lending library book is in. Thus the whole stock of books on the premises is at the reader’s disposal without any pedantic restrictions. As an American authority sensibly puts it, “Obviously there is no book that may not be used for ‘reference.’ A reader who consults one of Anthony Hope’s stories to ascertain the name of a character or to refresh his memory in regard to some incident, without reading it consecutively, is using it as a reference book.”[4] Even a magazine or review may be a work of reference. Back numbers of all that are worth taking in are worth preserving for reference purposes; and these, with the bound sets of past years, should be always available for use. Energetic librarians index all the important articles as they come out; the published indexes to periodicals forming a key to the older numbers. Lastly, the very newsroom has its place in the reference scheme, its contents being a daily appendix to the stores of information in the library. No department of the library economy should work in isolation.

In London, principally through the circumstance that the twenty-eight boroughs now existing were preceded by eighty-two parishes, two-thirds of which had set up libraries for themselves before the present library districts and borough authorities came into being in 1902, there are far too many reference libraries in proportion to lending libraries. Most of these are of indifferent or inferior quality, and, if they were suppressed and their collections centralized in a series of large district reference libraries, few would miss them, and the general gain would be enormous. All the same, more numerous ready-reference libraries are wanted. Every branch library should have a collection of dictionaries, atlases, and general encyclopædias, in short all the books that a business firm, a school, or the like usually provides for daily use. But, since reference libraries are so expensive, it is a vain and wasteful policy to duplicate them at random; and the result is merely a scattered series of middling libraries, far inferior to those open to all the world in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, with a crippling of resources in other directions. This is not said to belittle local effort. The point is that, though Islington, Westminster, or Chelsea may each build up a reference library not inferior to that found in the average provincial town of like population, Islington, Westminster, and Chelsea are, after all, parts of London, and the Londoner ought to be vastly better off than the average provincial--else why should he stay there?

Though to one acquainted with the exacting needs of all grades and varieties of readers the deficiencies of our reference libraries are evident enough, it is none the less true that the richness of their contents and the value they yield to judicious users are realized by only a fraction of the public. Librarians have never been allowed to advertize their wares; a notice in the press such as a university or a State department would not consider beneath its dignity would have called down a reprimand and probably a surcharge from the Government auditor. In a strange town, the visitor may have some trouble to find out, first whether a public library exists, and then where. Advertisements in tramcars and finger-posts in the street are usually looked for in vain. Things being so, it is better to lay stress on what the reference library can and does do than on any delinquencies, since public opinion is sure to learn in time from the books that are there to be read, the immensity of the desiderata. In the cities previously mentioned as possible abodes for a worker among books, one may acquire a competent idea of this immensity. In other large towns and in several London boroughs, one may find reference libraries sufficing for the ordinary demands of all but the specialist and the researcher, and, in addition, one commonly finds special collections that attract readers from far away.

Thus Manchester, besides the ample provision of general works that everybody would expect to find on its reference shelves, and a large mass of works on textiles which would also be anticipated in the metropolis of Lancashire, has a fine collection of English dialect literature, others on music, the gipsies, and shorthand, and in the Greenwood collection the largest library of works for librarians in this country. The magnificent Hornby Library of engravings at Liverpool is as great a pride to the city as its Walker Art Gallery. Birmingham is famous for its Shakespeare Library, and possesses smaller collections relating to Milton, Byron, and Cervantes. The Boulton and Watt collection is also there. Stratford-on-Avon, again, is a depot for Shakespeare literature, having the memorial building and the valuable collection housed at the birth-place as well as the town library. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, owns the Bewick collection, Northampton the library of the poet Clare, Nottingham another accumulation of Byron literature and association books, Kilmarnock a Burns library, Glasgow among its many special sections a vast collection including not only Burns material but Scottish literature in general; Bristol is rich in works concerned with Chatterton, Cardiff specializes in Welsh books, though the National Library of Wales, at Aberystwyth, designed to be a British Museum for the principality, is fast outstripping this as a storehouse of Celtic literature in the wider sense. A library is fulfilling only its obvious duty by specializing in the staple industry. At Stoke-on-Trent, however, the valuable library of ceramics collected by Louis Solon, and acquired after his death by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, has been placed, not in the public library, but in the National Pottery School, where the library of the Ceramic Society is also housed.

Many London libraries specialize in the same useful way, sometimes in response to local needs, sometimes as the accidental result of local associations. At Guildhall is the national Dickens library, at Hampstead the Keats collection, at Chelsea one devoted to Carlyle. The Bishopsgate Institute vies with Guildhall and St. Paul’s Cathedral Library in a huge collection of London books, prints, maps, and other miscellanea. The typographical library at the St. Bride Foundation contains the notable collection of William Blades, biographer of Caxton. But to consider London without taking into account the public and semi-public libraries that are not under the Acts, many of them highly individualized in the nature of their resources, and fitted to fulfil definite functions in the national library machine, would be absurd; and to treat them properly would require a volume. In fact, the volume exists, though it makes only modest and tentative suggestions for the wider application of all this intellectual wealth, much of which is lying dormant or only half-used.[5]

It goes without saying that every provincial reference library worthy of the name has a local collection of some importance. Most county towns collect county literature, and other large places have their regional collections. Regional surveys are largely carried on now by schools and local organizations, often with the library and its local collections as their central depository, and at all events helping and helped by the library. Some public libraries have been made depositories for the local records, and there is a strong case for conferring or imposing this duty upon them by law. A librarian, properly trained in palæography and the treatment of archives, is the right sort of custodian; a well-appointed library is the right place for the safe preservation, calendaring, and public use of documents. The historian, social student, biographer, and genealogist would always know then where to go for local information not to be found in London.

There are many other abiblia which Charles Lamb himself would approve that are rightly supplied in generous measure by a good reference library: modern maps, both of our own country and of the world, those of the neighbourhood within a wide radius, including large-scale Ordnance maps, accompanied by older maps of historical importance; prints and drawings in well-organized series, and lantern-slides for illustrating library lectures, or even to be issued on loan. The systematic collections of lantern-slides at the Croydon Public Library will be mentioned again later on. In this enterprising library numerous other things are collected and made accessible for general use; for example, illustrations, cut out and preserved, not because of their individual merit as prints, but because of the value they acquire in organized sets illustrating definite subjects. They are mounted in uniform style and classified in vertical files; thus they are available for reference purposes, and may be borrowed by teachers to illustrate lessons in class. Croydon has about 12,000 such illustrations, and the stock is constantly growing. Photographs of lace, woodwork, astronomical phenomena, and other subjects are collected on similar lines, and lent in sets to artists, craftsmen, and students. The vertical file in which the Manchester commercial library stores its press clippings and other items of information will be mentioned later; it is an object-lesson in the preservation, classification, and indexing of material which was erstwhile discarded as soon as it had served the moment’s use, a lesson in the value created out of the well-nigh valueless by mere organization; and teachers and business organizers have not failed to bring their pupils and their staffs to study what sheer method can accomplish.

But the whole library should be an object-lesson of high educational value. A large, well-organized collection of books, especially if the public be admitted to the interior, is a graphic example of method and order, not to mention the enormous increment of value given to any stock of material by systematic indexing. The art of classification is not only an excellent mental discipline, but may be applied with advantage in every province of business and life. Though a classification of books is not the same thing as a classification of things, and may depart widely from the exactness of logical theory, there is no better way of inculcating the benefits of system than by allowing the reader to find his way from shelf to shelf, and follow the tracks pointed out for him to other book-cases the contents of which are more distantly connected with his subject. It is superfluous to point out the assistance the library gives in the choice of books, not only to the reader who relies on it for his whole supply, but on the book-lover and the purchaser of books. Of the aid offered to the student and the potential student, over and above the library organism itself as an efficient reading machine, more will be said under the heading of library extension. In American libraries certain members of the staff are told off for “floor duty,” that is, to keep a sympathetic eye on persons looking out books and to offer guidance. It is a duty calling for high attainments and insight into the particular requirements and idiosyncrasies of readers. It would be unfair to say it is a duty unfulfilled in libraries over here, since the more active public libraries are beginning to organize themselves as real bureaux of information; but in the precise form just described it is practically unknown. Our method is to be ready with advice when it is asked for; and in big libraries, such as the British Museum, it is the most useful kind of advice, that of the specialist, which is our particular forte. Yet we still repeat, “The librarian who reads is lost!” More specialism, not less, is what we want.

NEWSROOMS AND MAGAZINE ROOMS.

Among the old-established departments the reading rooms where newspapers and other periodical literature are displayed must, to judge by statistics of use, take a foremost place. Hundreds of thousands enter these newsrooms daily, twice as many as come into the lending libraries. Until the question was raised ten years ago by the late J. D. Brown, a librarian who attempted reconstruction in library administration long before the word began to be written with a big R, it seemed the most natural and unchallengeable thing in the world to put a newsroom in every library building and furnish it with a motley array of dailies and weeklies of all denominations. Brown induced the committee of the Islington Public Libraries to reform the reading room in a drastic way. No newspaper except the “Times” was provided for public consumption, though the advertisement columns were cut out from others and posted for the benefit of the unemployed.

This violent departure from routine did bring out the fact that newsrooms, at any rate as they were and as they are at present, occupy a somewhat illogical position. At first sight, there hardly seems any better justification for their inclusion in a library than that they also provide reading matter. But it is reading matter, too often, of a very different and doubtful kind; and the awkward fact that it is not the same people who use the newsroom that use the library, in short that the library proper and the newsroom, but for an inconsiderable overlap, cater for two different publics, gives occasion for thought.

To put it roundly, the proper place in the library scheme for the newspaper and its like has never been thought out. Brown went too far, and the library which was the scene of this experiment is now furnished with a careful selection of newspapers as well as with magazines and reviews of good standing. But he gave the problem serious thought. In the various public reading rooms which were under his care, he saw to it that the right kind of periodicals were provided, and the best of each kind. Among his many publications on library practice was a classified and annotated list of English and foreign periodicals, which ought to have done even more than it has to help provide something far better and more scientific than the mere hotchpotch of journalism with which too many tables are littered. Here again, economy of the baser sort has been the offender; for the poorest journalism is, of course, the cheapest, and a steady provision of the high-class periodicals recommended by Brown is an expensive drain on slender funds.

The library cannot do without the newspaper any more than it can do without the review, the technical periodical, and the learned society’s journal. All of these are necessary supplements to the books, since they are records of new knowledge; and they require the same care in selection, the guiding principle of which must be a clear idea of what they are there for. The much-debated dictum that history is past politics and politics current history needs no debate as a reason why the leading newspapers and the weekly reviews should be accessible in public libraries. Almost every one takes in a paper suited to his opinions: the public newsroom should give the opportunity of studying other opinions, and also of checking information by comparison of different sources and versions that conflict. The newsroom is to the library as the open-air excursion to the botany class, the laboratory to the lecture-room. Here theory and doctrine are seen in action; applied politics, applied sociology, all the different phases of the science of life set forth in books illustrated, tested, verified, or confuted. Which study is of more importance than the other? Fortunately, that is a futile question: the relevant one is, how incalculably each gains by conjunction with the other.

There is no need to provide the paper that every one buys. Nor are those that deal in police news, divorce cases, spice and sensation, the journals that a public institution is called upon to buy. The most authoritative journals, representing each of the recognized parties, weekly reviews of similar credentials, and the leading provincial organs, are all that need be supplied in this group. Even in a large and prosperous library, it is better to duplicate such than to make too wide a selection. Subsidized journals, sent gratis by political or social cliques or by advertising agents, might as well be rejected altogether; where they are accepted, the approved course is to pigeon-hole them until there is an applicant. The least approved is to employ this worthless stuff to cover serious gaps, and offer the public a stone when it asks for bread. A library committee should feel the same responsibility for a newspaper as for a book. By admitting either, they virtually give it a public guarantee.

But if the newspaper is to be treated as the organ of current history, then the newspaper room should be equipped with every facility for rendering current history real and intelligible. Maps of every part of the world should be hung over the reading stands. The room itself should be in the closest contiguity with the reference library, and should contain a ready-reference collection on open shelves, enabling readers to consult dictionaries, encyclopædias, statistical year-books, compendiums of geography, and other sources of general information as they read. That it should not be separated from the reading room where the periodical magazines and reviews are kept goes without saying. Files of such as are preserved should be close at hand. All this means that the reading room for newspapers will be another expensive department; yet the policy of making it a vital part of the whole library undertaking is in the long run economic. Here, surely, that training for citizenship which so many are preaching may be carried on without the features that make it objectionable to the old-fashioned party man. The existence of public newsrooms where the daily papers are read intelligently and their pronouncements checked and compared, might, in the course of time, react healthily on the daily press itself.

As to the lighter class of periodical, the same discretion has to be exercised in shunning the frivolous and worthless as an intelligent and responsible committee, not devoid of a sense of humour, would display in handling fiction. It is high time that the policy of treating this department as a kind of bait for the unregenerate, something to make the library popular, were abandoned. It is a delusive policy, grounded on two false assumptions--the first, that it is our duty to get people to read, no matter what they read; the second, that if you start them reading and bring them into the library they will eventually proceed to higher things. Every librarian knows that the habitual consumer of silly and pernicious reading-matter never can, without some almost miraculous change of mind, be taught to read and enjoy anything else. If you lure him with rubbish, you are encouraging tastes that are a greater obstacle to library progress than absolute illiteracy; you are putting obstacles in the road you propose to take him. The remark of an American librarian about certain popular novelists, that the people who like that sort of thing would be more sensible and better educated had they never learned to read, applies even more forcibly to the besotted victims of our periodicals of the baser sort. But the mere fact that the public who kill time with this sort of chewing-gum are not the public that borrow books or use the reference library, at once disposes of such a plea. By all means, let us have light literature, but let it be literature, and not an unrecognizable imitation.

Much, however, and far the largest amount of the material in a well-appointed reading room will not be literature at all, but simply information. In the chief London and many provincial libraries a large number of scientific and technical periodicals are taken, including publications of research societies and a good many foreign periodicals. More are required, and, as our public libraries are able to spend more money, one at least in each large area of population ought to be as well provided in this respect as are the science libraries at South Kensington, the university libraries, or, say, the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Institution, to take a good provincial example. These publications are as necessary as it is to keep editions of scientific and technical books thoroughly up to date. Their contents should be fully accessible, and to ensure this every library must subscribe to the Subject-Index to Periodicals. A practice increasing in frequency is that of indexing the current periodicals as they arrive, and mounting the entries in a mechanical guard-book or vertical file. Such libraries as possess a stock of long sets will naturally be provided with Poole’s and the other older indexes to periodicals; even libraries not possessing such long sets ought to have the indexes, for the same reason as they have other bibliographical guides, namely, to show inquirers in what books or periodicals information exists, an intelligent staff being relied upon to point out in what nearest libraries the books or periodicals are to be found.

SPECIAL READING ROOMS.

Not much is to be said nowadays in favour of separate reading rooms for ladies; the segregation of the sexes is going out of fashion, even in railway travelling. Yet they are still provided; for instance, the fine library building now all but completed at Dunfermline has a ladies’ room worthy of its scale and dignity. Far more urgent is the need for separate rooms where students can read and write in peace and quiet; children’s reading rooms will be discussed under another head. The Adult Education Committee wisely emphasized this desirability. “It is, in our view, essential that in all public libraries, in addition to the usual reading room where newspapers and magazines are consulted, there should be a room for the purposes of study. It is too often forgotten that many students have no place where they can study in comfort. It is also most desirable that all public libraries should possess a room large enough to be used for classes, lectures, and discussions.”[6] The latter requirement should have been framed differently. A lecture room is not a good class room. Every library should have its lecture room; it should also have one or more small rooms suitable for classes, tutorial or other, of the cosy size and character that help so much to bring out comradeship and intimacy. Whoever has tried to conduct a seminar numbering more than a dozen members will have experienced how difficult it is to break down shyness and evoke a frank and genuine exchange of thought. Rooms that are small and intimate are wanted for reading circles and discussions; at a pinch, the study room can be utilized; but both purposes must be served, and often at the same hour. The need for still other rooms dedicated to special uses will appear when we deal with the various forms of library extension.

THE CHILDREN’S DEPARTMENT.