Traveling library

“ There is no better way of educating them than to supply them from traveling libraries furnished by private associations working from a central library. Associations, like women's clubs and organizations of normal school students, have done so much good with traveling libraries, when they have managed them wisely, that it seems best to state the conditions necessary to succeed, frankly, and in some detail. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There will also be a permanent need for traveling libraries in supplementing the scant collections of the smaller libraries and in supplying the temporary needs of isolated study clubs. A special library on American history with a suggestive outline may incite careful study in a score of villages before its brief life is ended, when the meagre local opportunities would discourage students. ”

“ FOLLOWING in the wake of the great public library movement, which in less than two decades has dotted the cities of the United States with buildings that house millions of books for the people, came systems of traveling libraries. ”

“ Of one more thing I should speak because of its provision for the children—the expansion of the library ideal; not so many years ago branch libraries and traveling libraries were unknown; now we feel that one library is not enough for a large city; it must have branch libraries and delivery stations to take the books to the people, while traveling libraries carry them into the scattered districts in the country. For the future, we have visions of a system of libraries so complete that in no town or country district of the state will a little child be deprived of the pleasure of good books ”

“ If traveling libraries are advertised to be sent for a fee, even a moderate one, they will be drawn to the most intelligent communities where people are most willing to pay for library privileges and where they first hear of new opportunities. If, however, agents for traveling libraries can be sent out, they can find the most needy communities and the persons best fitted to be librarians. Such communities need personal, hand-to-hand work in the cause of education, and associations of individuals working near their own homes can do a work that cannot be done at present by state systems. ”

“ The public library system is a most valuable auxiliary to the school system, and is fast becoming indispensable. This is one of the great advantages which city pupils have over those whose home is in the country, and it will lead in the end to district libraries. In some States, as in New York, a successful effort has been made to inaugurate a system of traveling libraries, whereby a case of fifty or one hundred volumes, relating to a particular topic, will be lent for a time to any circle of readers. ”

“ For some years careful students of the library movement in the United States have felt confident that every resident of a city would soon have good library privileges without fee. The rivalry of cities, the growing belief in the necessity of free libraries in our general system of education, and the feeling that public libraries are the most enduring monuments are uniting to secure for such libraries great private and public gifts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Travelling Libraries.—Of much greater importance are travelling libraries, which can be made to serve every purpose of delivery stations, with the great additional advantage of furnishing, in part, the same alternative selection of books as a branch library affords. These libraries are much used in the United States, and take the form of boxes of books numbering from fifty upwards, which can be deposited at fixed points in towns and rural districts, where borrowers can attend and make a choice of reading matter. ”

“ A well-arranged and classified museum, whether of a general character, or which is confined to local botany, zoology, geology and archæology, has great bearing on the educational work of public libraries. It enables a reader to realize the material side of his studies, and by showing him related objects in a definite order, broadens his outlook on the subject, and brings home to him the reality of the matter. As object-lessons are to school-children, so are museums to library readers. ”

“ It supplies the public with recreative reading. To the masses of the people—hard-worked and living humdrum lives—the novel comes as an open door to an ideal life, in the enjoyment of which one may forget, for a time, the hardships or the tedium of the real. One of the best functions of the public library is to raise this recreative reading of the community to higher and higher levels; to replace trash with literature of a better order. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ After all the mechanical detail is done, when the cover has been labelled, when the catalogue notation has been figured, when the class distribution has been determined, the librarian stands middleman in a threefold capacity. She is a purveyor, in the sense that she passes a book over the counter; she is a custodian, in so far as books need protection; she is the high priestess, since the library is a temple of treasures, a storehouse for our literary heritage. ”

“ There are relics of the age before circulating libraries, there are fragments of the lettered store of some scholarly great-grandfather, and these, with a few odd numbers of magazines, a few primers and manuals, some sermons and novels, make up the ordinary library of an English household. But the amateur, whom we have in our thoughts, can never be satisfied with these commonplace supplies. He has a taste for books more or less rare, and for books neatly bound; in short, for books, in the fabrication of which art has not been absent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In, alas! too many English homes, the Library is no more than this, and each generation passes without adding a book, except now and then a Bradshaw or a railway novel, to the collection on the shelves. The success, perhaps, of circulating libraries, or, it may be, the Aryan tendencies of our race, “which does not read, and lives p. 34in the open air,” have made books the rarest of possessions in many houses. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Poetry, drama, essays, biography, letters, travel—here is a world from which to choose.
Supplementing the lists and adding to their attractiveness are collections of the books themselves. In large libraries most people are more or less at sea. Who has not seen them wandering aimless and bewildered from shelf to shelf, and who has not noted the relief with which they turn to almost any small selection of books. ”

“ There is nothing debateable about a book-museum any more than about any other kind of a museum—a collection of historical or geological specimens, for instance, that often finds place in a library building, not because it is a library, but because it is a convenient place, or because it has been thought best to build a library and a museum under one roof, as has been done in Pittsburgh. ”

“ Nearly all of the public libraries mentioned in the report send books to playgrounds when the playgrounds desire it. The use of books in the roof reading-rooms of libraries is very similar to their use in the playgrounds. Here and in children's reading-rooms boys and girls are free to choose the books they really want to read. In his book entitled "The American Public Library," Dr. Arthur E. Bostwick makes this statement: "There are no intellectual joys equal to those of discovery. ”

“ Another difficulty is the long summer vacation; and still another is that to place the library in the school house makes the travelling library merely a side issue.
Mr. Dewey: Where would you put it?
Mr. Hutchins: Find somebody to take it in special charge. A travelling library in a community is bound to find some good woman who would rather have charge of it than anything else in the world. ”

“ All librarians are so familiar with the excellent work done in the Children's Departments of public libraries, which have developed so rapidly in almost every town and city throughout the country during the past decade, that it is not necessary to refer at length to them. Suffice it to say, that the work of the Children's Museum and its library are quite different in plan and scope from any of the museums and libraries to which reference has been made. ”

“ There is nothing out of place in the comparing of the library to the school and the college, but its true mission is not to be so limited. To a large extent it is to be compared, as an object of public care and expense, with the park, the modern common, where there are flower-beds, rare plants in conservatories, lakes with boats in summer and skating in winter, and music by excellent bands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fig. 44.—British Museum Reading Table with Desk and Rack (Section 161) .
Fig. 45.—Reference Room Table (Section 161) .
161.
161. In reference libraries, especially in those designed for students with open access to the shelves, quite a liberal space should be allowed. It has not hitherto been the practice, save in large libraries like the British Museum, to give reference [156] readers as much table room as is desirable, nor to give students the amount of isolation which they require. ”

“ Many who will not identify themselves with clubs, from an aversion to organization, will appreciate the freedom from it here, for there will be no officers, no rules, no fees.
If there is no especial note that the librarian thinks it would be well to sound, he may let it be known that the first of a series of entertainments to be given by the library, at the library, will be, for instance, a talk upon the Child in History, Our American Illustrators, or some attractive subject. ”

“ Everywhere, in city, town and suburban library, the effort to reach the Child is apparent. Special attendants are in readiness to meet him the instant he comes into reading room and station after school hours. Thoughtful women are assigned to overlook and guide his reference work. Entertainment is offered him in the form of blocks to play with, scrap-books to look at, story hours to attend. Books specially selected with regard to his supposedly individual needs are placed on the shelves. ”

“ Up to the period when free town libraries were first formed, collections of books were usually intended for students; but when the Public Libraries' Acts were passed, a great change took place, and libraries being formed for general readers, and largely [Pg 74] with the object of fostering the habit of reading, an entirely new idea of libraries came into existence. The old idea of a library was that of a place where books that were wanted could be found, but the new idea is that of an educational establishment, where persons who know little or nothing of books can go to learn what to read. ”