Circulating library

“ I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the county, under such regulations as would secure their safe return in due time. ”

“ And in the corner by the window gable was a shelf with some books, and some from a circulating library. She looked. There were books about bolshevist Russia, books of travel, a volume about the atom and the electron, another about the composition of the earth's core, and the causes of earthquakes: then a few novels: then three books on India. So! He was a reader after all. ”

“ Sir ANTHONY Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! ”

“ The general public is comparatively indifferent to bibliographical rarities, and books which are merely curious or scarce should not be bought from the present restricted funds of British municipal libraries. There is a certain advantage in making a small special collection, on the museum plan, to trace and illustrate the evolution and history of printing and book production from the original manuscript forms, but the general connection of incunabula and rare specimens of typography by modern municipal libraries is neither possible nor desirable. ”

“ In recent years a strong reaction has set in against the prison-like rules and conditions which governed the early public libraries, and in this country, the United States, the British colonies, and also in various parts of Europe, the tendency is all in favour of making libraries efficient every day workshops rather than bonded stores. ”

“ There is no more important factor in the success or failure of a library than the classification of the books and other material which form its stock. Some of its uses are obvious to all readers; it brings the material on any subject together on the shelves and in the catalogues, and thus enables both librarian and reader to find books readily. It has perhaps more important uses, because it enables the librarian, and, in open access libraries, the public, to see the strength and weakness of the collection in various subjects ”

“ My contention is that it is for the advantage of libraries that intelligent booksellers, ready to place their knowledge at the service of the librarians, should exist, and it is unwise and uneconomic to do that which may cause this class to cease to exist. ”

“ It is thought by some that an open access library is itself a book exhibition, but even with this system, and certainly with the indicator system, there are many things that can be exhibited with advantage. Such works as Williams’s History of the Art of Writing, the facsimiles published by the British Museum, and other large treasure houses ”

“ Even the hundreds of itinerating libraries but meagerly meet the want. All the traveling libraries in all the United States have a total issue annually less than that of any one of twenty municipal systems that can be named. ”

“ In the Lending Department it is desirable to make the choice of books as easy and satisfactory as possible, and for this reason, elaborate mechanical devices for registering the issues of books and indicating them 'in' and 'out' are absolutely unnecessary. It is absurd to find municipal libraries in small towns fitted up with a huge rampart of indicator for the purpose of recording a daily issue of about 50 to 100 volumes. It is like employing a steam engine to sharpen one pencil! ”

“ Every member of the public over fourteen years of age has the right of free access to the library. The trustees have evolved an admirable system of a “travelling library,” for circulation among country residents of the state. ”

“ The Pears' soap plan of printers' ink is one of the finest and best.
If a library has or is a good thing for the community let it so be said, early, late, and often, in large, plain type. So doing shall the library's books enter—before too old to be of service—into that state of utter worn-out-ness which is the only known book-heaven. Another way, and by some found good, is to work the sinfully indifferent first up into a library missionary, and then transform him into a patron. A library is something to which he can give an old book, an old paper, an old magazine, with no loss to himself. ”

“ Typically, of course, the modern library does include many books, a whole separate building and a librarian, but even if the books are few, the place only a room, a chest, a bookcase, or a single shelf, and even if it is only the owner who is at the same time the keeper, it is still recognized to be a library if the books are kept for use and not for sale. ”

“ With the spread and rise in the standard of education, more exact and better work is now demanded in libraries than was the case during the early years after the passing of the first Public Libraries Act. The slipshod, unsystematic cataloguing at one time in vogue is not acceptable now, and the public demands something more than bald lists compiled upon no principle in particular, which [Pg 6] are often more bewildering than helpful to an inquiring reader. ”

“ Public library buildings should be erected, not on the principle of storing as many books as can possibly be collected in fifty years’ time, but of restricting the book accommodation to the reasonable limits which careful selection and cautious discarding will fix, and increasing the space available for readers, and giving them only the very best literature, imaginative or instructive, that the world has to offer. ”

“ Thus in such places as Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, the Free Libraries should be smaller British Museums, and in this spirit their founders have worked; but in smaller and less important towns a more modest object has to be kept in view, and the wants of readers, more than those of consulters of books, have to be considered. ”

“ Libraries for schoolrooms, to be composed of reference books, books for supplementary reading, class duplicates, and professional books for teachers, should be provided for in the public school law. School funds should be used and school authorities should manage these libraries. The business of lending books for home use is better and more economically managed by a public library, having an organization that is independent of the school authorities. ”

“ There is a certain fine excitement about taking a library in this fashion, a sense of spaciousness of joy in it, which one is almost always sure to miss in libraries—most libraries—by staying in them. The only way one can get any real good out of a modern library seems to be by going away in the nick of time. If one stays there is no help for it. One is soon standing before the card catalogue, sorting one’s wits out in it, filing them away, and the sense of boundlessness both in one’s self and everybody else—the thing a library is for—is fenced off for ever. ”

“ The chief reason for this is no doubt the cherished tradition that libraries are to be made as large as possible, because they are the repositories of the literature of the ages and the storehouse for every kind of printed matter. The museum idea of a public library, however, is now giving place to the workshop idea, and few librarians nowadays of average-sized municipal libraries hold the view that it is their function to provide and retain every book, irrespective of its value or appeal, and to attempt to rival the British Museum or Bibliothèque Nationale on a reduced scale. ”

“ There is one particular in which the architect has been specially out of touch with the administrator. The open-shelf is now all but universal, but many architects seem not to have heard of it. Many buildings, actually intended for administration on the free access system, seem yet to have been planned as closed-shelf libraries and opened to the public as an afterthought. A library without a special stack-room for book-storage is an unthinkable thing to most architects. ”

“ For after you have the library, you still have a set of people to deal with who lack initiative and must be aroused to interest in anything. She must also impress upon him that shelf-and-book or even accession numbers mean nothing, and that when, as in one library I know, all the books are covered and there is no hint of author or title on the back, the library is converted into a sort of literary grab-bag which is funny to the librarian but exasperating to the patient. ”

“ If its leading libraries have not yet matched those of the old world in extent, they are, nevertheless, unique in their freshness, exceptional in their number, original in their systems, and most effective in their uses. And what is here said of the leading libraries is still more true of the smaller, for in no country has the library system so ramified as in the United States, and come down to such close touch with the people. ”

“ The free reading room connected with most of our public libraries, and the library proper as well, if it be rightly conducted, is a powerful agent for counteracting the attractions of saloons and low resorts. Especially useful is it to those boys and young men who have a dormant fondness for reading and culture, but lack home and school opportunities. ”

“ If we are to make the library a vital influence in the community we must so conduct it that its loss would be felt as a calamity—that it could be spared no more than the postoffice could be spared, or the doctor, or the school. And we must do our best so to carry on every part of its work, every element that goes to make up its service to the public, that this part or element is contributing toward that service and not injuring it or delaying it. ”

“ Even we librarians claim for our public collection no such fine service as is rendered by those private treasures that stand on a person's own shelves, round which "our pastime and our happiness will grow." Books for casual entertainment are more and more easily come by. But so far as our imagination reaches, what private library will for most readers supplant a public collection of books for purposes of study and reference? Is it not then fitting that we spend time and effort to educate young people to the use of the public library? ”

“ We are having fewer temples of art that have to be made over to fit them for use as libraries and fewer buildings that are workable but offensive to the eye. The tendency seems to be toward simple dignity, although we certainly have some surprising departures from it. Probably the library of the future will be a simple and massive structure of much greater size than at present, with its decorations{82} largely structural, and combining ample open-shelf and reading facilities with greatly increased capacity for book-storage. ”

“ Give the people at least such liberty with their own collection of books as the bookseller gives them with his. Let the shelves be open, and the public admitted to them, and let the open shelves strike the keynote of the whole administration. The whole library should be permeated with a cheerful and accommodating atmosphere. Lay this down as the first rule of library management; and for the second, let it be said that librarian and assistants are to treat boy and girl, man and woman, ignorant and learned, courteous and rude, with uniform good-temper without condescension ”

“ Some libraries require a sponsor or guarantor for each one drawing books, but this is going out of favor and only an identification is demanded. When the library is small or the patronage is large it is customary to limit the number of volumes a person can have out at one time to two, one volume of fiction and one non-fiction. ”

“ For convenience sake, just as in the case of the public schools, you conclude to tax yourselves to maintain a public collection of books, instead of having to form private collections of your own, smaller and vastly more expensive. We are in communication with every one of you by telephone. The machine for which you have paid is all ready to work—stoked and cleaned and oiled. Why don’t you press the button? Those who don’t are just suffering from hysteresis—lag of apprehension. They think the library is what it was in 1850. They are behind the times. ”

“ THE SMALL MUNICIPAL LIBRARY With certain honourable exceptions, the smaller municipal libraries of the United Kingdom may be said to become formed by a process which involves the accumulation of books to the exclusion of literature. In other words, the matter-of-fact business men who usually control such institutions, prefer in most cases to have quantity rather than quality, and desire to see a number of books, no matter how useless, rather than a well-selected library of representative literature. ”

“ In the days before public libraries were common in this country, library associations were formed to secure good literature. Such associations are still useful in small communities that find it impossible to sustain a public library, and they serve as a medium for securing from the State a travelling library, which has the special advantage of frequent substitution of books. Or the school library may be the nucleus of a literary collection for the whole community—advantageously so if the school building is kept open as a community centre. ”

“ Without it, the librarian, teachers, and pupils are handicapped in their work and the library fails of its full usefulness. A knowledge of how to use a library will be of the greatest value to the student not only through his high school course, but even more so in college, if he goes that far, or in continuing his reading and self-culture through the means of the public library when he discontinues his academic career. ”