Chapter II

Fifteen years ago there existed within the fifty-six thousand square miles of Wisconsin a mere handful of starveling public libraries, and only in three or four of the larger cities were these institutions properly housed. Most of them existed from force of habit rather than from action. But one library in the state employed trained service. There were no traveling libraries. The school district libraries had scarcely made a beginning, so that even that source failed to supply wholesome books for the use of the people. Here and there a volunteer fire department gathered a bundle of books, or a literary society would secure a similar collection from the attics of its members. Naturally, such efforts resulted in dismal failures. Ninety per cent of the population was absolutely without public library facilities.

But fifteen years ago, and now! Scattered all over the state, in cities and villages and hamlets, are to be found modern, up-to-date public libraries in charge of alert, trained, interested librarians, eager and active in extending the radius of their influence or helpful in every way to promote the interests of the community and of every individual in it. There are now 152 public libraries in Wisconsin. Sixty-one of them occupy buildings erected especially for them, and 28 others have quarters in city halls or other public buildings. Many of them have a children's department, with trained library workers in charge of the specialized activities there conducted. In the larger buildings, lecture halls are an adjunct, where it is possible to provide university extension and similar lectures, and where women's study clubs, young men's debating societies and similar groups of persons find hospitable meeting places for carrying on their work. Work with schools is carried on to an extent, and to a profitable degree, little imagined as possible in the early days of the library extension movement. Free access to shelves is now permitted in every library of the state except one.

There are now some forty librarians in Wisconsin who come from library training schools, and of the other librarians and assistants employed, approximately 100 have attended the summer school conducted by the Wisconsin Free Library Commission. The growing importance of the relation between library and school is evidenced by the fact that library instruction is now part of the course in every one of the seven normal schools, and a professional school for training librarians, with a staff of picked instructors, is maintained at Madison by the state. The candidates for admission are selected by competitive examination, and with special regard to suitability for the work by reason of temperament, education, address and experience.