Chapter XVIII: Section 6 (3)

The ideal of the modern library is service to the community, but the tendency has been to estimate this service by statistics as printed in library reports. Columns of figures, showing the number of books cataloged and the cards made, represent but a small part of what can be done and should not be taken as a measure of value of the cataloging department to the library patrons. The old idea of the library was the omniscient librarian who served all the readers from his store of knowledge, but the development of the modern library movement, bringing an increased patronage, made it necessary to delegate some of this work, and libraries were set off into departments. Gradually mechanical appliances were introduced and personal aid was limited to the favored few while the average reader was helpless in the face of machinery whose workings were a mystery to him. It reminds one of the story of the fine hospital donated by a philanthropic citizen to a thriving town of the middle west. The building was a model of hospital architecture, the furnishings were the most modern obtainable and the institution was ideal in every respect, adjudged by experts the latest thing in hospitals. A poor citizen, foreign by birth, took his wife to this hospital for treatment. The next day he went to inquire for her and was told that she was too ill to see him, but the attendant offered to take him through the building and show him all the modern improvements. The man was interested and followed his guide through the various wards, listening attentively to his lecture on the advantages of the latest improvements in hospital service. The second day he returned to learn the progress of his wife's case, but she was still too ill to see him, so the attendant showed him some more improvements, which he had not seen the day before. The man was greatly impressed. The third day he returned and was told that his wife had died. When asked by a friend what disease had ended her life, he replied, "I don't know, unless it was the improvements." So the library has adopted progressive methods and among other improvements it has walled a room with the latest model of catalog trays filled with cards as silent guides to the collection of books. Printed signs, which no one reads, give intricate directions as to the use of this monster; a human assistant is rarely in sight. Has the library the right to expect the public to know how to use a catalog? A trained assistant should be stationed here, and who are better qualified for this service than the members of the cataloging staff? At this point is one of the opportunities for the cataloger's most efficient service to the community.

The chief requisite of a well-organized catalog department is a corps of intelligent, educated, trained assistants who have had several years' experience. The raw recruit from the library school is an expense to the service because library school graduates find difficulty in adapting themselves to the existing methods of most libraries. This fault is sometimes individual but more often it is due to the different methods of cataloging taught in the various schools. There should be uniformity of method on this point, full cataloging should be taught in all the schools because it is far easier for the cataloger to learn omissions than to acquire a knowledge of full cataloging when the short form only has been taught in the school. Subject-heading work can be taught only in a general way. Years of experience are needed before an assistant is competent to assign subject headings, therefore a constantly changing staff is an item of expense worthy of serious consideration. Subject headings might be in the hands of a few assistants but there is advantage in having the views of many minds under the supervision of one reviser.

An understanding of the community and of existing conditions within the library, added to a thoroughly assimilated knowledge of cataloging methods, increases the value of an assistant. Changes are usually due to small salaries, and to better financial conditions elsewhere, but adding a reasonable amount to the salary of a competent assistant is a good investment. To be sure, it foots up on the pay roll as a larger outlay than the substitution of a less experienced assistant at the same or a smaller salary. What the pay roll tells, however, is not borne out by the facts because on it there is no financial accounting for the time of the administrator of the department which is consumed in breaking in a new cataloger while the more important things wait, or go by default. Positions in the cataloging department should yield a financial return sufficient to make their incumbency more or less permanent for it is possible to accomplish more with a smaller staff of experienced assistants than with a larger number of those new to the business.

When the library has gathered together the best staff of catalogers it can afford it should not put them, like a collection of expensive bric-a-brac, behind closed doors with only the regulation catalogers' tools as guides, and expect them to yield the best return on the investment. The best cataloger needs the stimulus of personal contact with the public as an aid to the most intelligent work. When the cataloging department has a sufficient number of well-trained, experienced assistants, a schedule of work which permits direct contact with the public for at least one-third of the time and a system of co-operation between departments with freedom from unnecessary interruptions to the routine as planned, the catalog is a labor saving tool reducing the net cost of production by the time saved to the circulating and reference departments.

The cataloging for a large library system should be done at the central library for several reasons. The main cataloging offices are there with the collection of reference books and the official files showing what headings and entries have been used. The expert catalogers and revisers are better fitted for the responsibility of the cataloging than the assistants at the branches, distracted by other work. The enormous number of cards necessary for the various catalogs are more economically duplicated by writer press, or multigraph, than by hand or typewriter because time is saved in this way in the actual making of the cards, in numbering and putting titles on printed cards and in proof reading, or revising, for in revising typewritten cards, each card must be carefully scrutinized, while from the writer press only the first copy needs revision. When copies of the same title are to be purchased for several branches, the cost of cataloging is greatly reduced if all the copies reach the cataloging department together as time is thus saved in all the processes of preparing the books for circulation, from the accessioning to the pasting of the labels. In the case of fiction this is always possible but with other classes, while it is not always expedient to purchase for the main library and the branches simultaneously, the branch librarians and order department can simplify the process by prompt decision as to the number of branches to which titles are to be added, so that all cards may be ordered or made at the same time. By this means one order for printed cards and one setting up of copy for writer press or multigraph is sufficient. When books come to the catalog department singly and at odd times the labor of verifying author entries and subject headings is the same as for new titles, and the making of cards becomes a mechanical process only when they are to be made in large quantities. Every branch added to the library system increases the work of the cataloging department, a fact often lost sight of by the chief administrators of a library. There seems to be a popular delusion that each new addition to the library family means only a duplication of cards while the fact remains that most of the processes in the routine practically consume as much time and thought as if the title in hand were new in the library. In the case of shelf-listing it is obviously easier and takes less time to make a brand new shelf-list card for a book than it does to withdraw the card from the shelf-list, make an addition to it and refile the card.

If the main building is so arranged that one card catalog can be used conveniently by all departments much expense will be saved. But if there must be department catalogs, author and subject entries should be uniform so that the individual catalogs may be simply duplicates of certain divisions of the general catalog. Subject headings in the public library should be simple enough to be within the comprehension of the average reader. To simplify headings for children is a useless expense and an insult to the child who is often more intelligent than many adult readers. The public library being "an integral part of public education" should not be guilty of senseless simplification even though the kindergartners may accuse us of "taking away the joy of childhood." If the so-called simplified headings are used they can not be filed with other headings, therefore two separate catalogs in each branch must be maintained at extra expense.

All non-essentials should be eliminated from the mechanical processes of preparing books for the shelves. The time of high-priced service should be used for the scholarly work, duplication of cards and routine clerical work do not require a college education nor library school training. Printed cards should be purchased whenever possible. It is not necessary to become hysterical over the superfluity of information on some of the Library of Congress cards because the average user of a catalog in a public library does not read beyond the first line of the title, and therefore is not confused by bibliographical details. On the other hand, this same detail is valuable to the few readers who need it. Another groundless objection to the use of these cards is the statement that books must be held until the cards are received. If there is co-operation between the order and the cataloging departments, books and cards may be ordered and will come to the cataloger about the same time. When they do not the books should be sent through on temporary slips. This adds slightly to the cost of handling, but saves the reputation of the library in the circulating department. The printed card should be accepted when it agrees with the title page, but when the card requires changes which mar its appearance it should be rejected. When the cards must be made by the individual library the extra bibliographical detail should be omitted for purposes of economy, and the catalogs would still be uniform and accurate in essentials. Entries must be accurate, uniform and as consistent as possible that the catalog may save the time of the reference librarians, since effective reference work can be done only when the library is well classified and cataloged and quick service is possible only under these conditions.

The plan to combine the catalog and reference departments, the assistants working one-third of their time in reference work, brings excellent results. In the first place the assistants come in direct contact with the public for part of every day. The knowledge of books gained by examination for full cataloging can be made directly useful to the public. On the other hand, the demands of the reader, his peculiarities of expression and his general attitude toward the library give inspiration to the work in the cataloging department as to subject headings and analyticals to be made. The change of work is restful and enables the assistants to accomplish much in a day without becoming weary of either line of work. The efficiency of the assistants depends upon their ability to bring the book and the reader together and as the cataloger has the advantage of studying the books she should therefore bring this knowledge to the public through personal contact.

Emphasis is put on the increased usefulness of the staff by reason of the ability to appreciate the relation between the library and the public and to bring into the daily life of the community the increased knowledge of books.

What has been said is not intended as a criticism of any method of administering a cataloging department, but is an effort rather to present a plan which from practical experience has proved successful.

The discussion was then thrown open to the floor, with the suggestion from the chairman that it take the following lines:

1. Is the catalog department too confined in its organization and too distinctly separated from other departments?

2. How much mechanical work should be done by expert catalogers? Who should do the mechanical work and where should it be done?

3. What should be the relations between the catalog and the shipping departments?

Mr. Hodges, of the Cincinnati public library, said that each library had to use a system suited to its individual needs, that in Cincinnati there was no head of the order department, that he considered the use of catalogers in the reference department during rush hours a good plan as they were usually well fitted for the work, that in his library there was a single head of the catalog and reference departments.

Miss Hitchler, superintendent of cataloging of the Brooklyn public library, said that co-operation could be effected between departments without interchange of assistants.

Mr. Hopper said that the obstacle to combining the heads of the catalog and order departments in one person was that a knowledge of cataloging and a knowledge of the book trade were seldom combined in one person.

During the discussion of the second point--that of scientific management within the department--Miss Van Valkenburgh raised a laugh by inquiring where we are to draw the line in keeping track of our efficiency.

Mr. Martel, of the Library of Congress, in answer to the charge made against catalogers of over-elaboration, as for example in the matter of periodical records, said that under-elaboration often proved quite as expensive as over-elaboration.

SECOND SESSION

Friday, June 29.

The second session of the Catalog Section was held on Friday afternoon, June 29, Miss Gooch presiding.

Miss Van Valkenburgh, Miss Hiss, and Miss Dame, were appointed as nominating committee by the Chairman.

The session took the form of an informal discussion on simplified forms of typewritten catalog cards, and was held at the desire of the committee of the Professional Training Section on uniformity of forms of catalog cards. This committee was appointed in January, 1912, and consists of Helen Turvill, Chairman, Agnes Van Valkenburgh, Harriet B. Gooch.

The Chairman directed the discussion by taking up point by point the form of card recommended by the committee for the practice work of the library schools. Typewritten cards for a public library of about 50,000 volumes, to be filed with L. C. cards, were taken as a basis of discussion.

Among the details considered were the following, with the decisions which seemed most generally favored by those present:

=Brackets.= Omit brackets for material inserted in heading but use in title and imprint.

=Initial article.= Use initial article, unless including it would entail repeating author's name in the title.

=Initial possessive.= Omit author's name in the possessive case at the beginning of a title, and cancel it when used on L. C. cards.

=Editor, etc.= In the title use the name of the editor, translator, etc., in the form given on the title page.

=Imprint.= Include place, publisher and date of publication together with inclusive copyright dates if they differ from the date of publication.

=Collation.= Give main paging, illus., ports., maps. Give size only if unusual.

=Position of items.= Begin collation on a new line and indent.

=Secondary cards.= Give author and title only on secondary cards. (Main subject cards are not considered secondary cards.)

Other details discussed were use of points of omission, form of series note, tracing cards, headings in joint-author entries, the place for paging in an analytical note, entry under pseudonym versus real name, entry for adapter.

At the close of the foregoing discussion, the matter of having a permanent A. L. A. committee on cataloging was brought forward, and upon Miss Van Valkenburgh's motion, it was determined to request the Executive Board of the A. L. A. to appoint a permanent catalog committee to which questions in cataloging may be referred for recommendation.

Miss Sutliff then suggested that an A. L. A. code of alphabetizing would also be welcome. Mr. Martel, in response to a question by the Chairman, said that the Library of Congress followed the Cutter Rules, but had working notes that might be helpful.

A motion put by Mr. Keogh was then passed that the Executive Board of the A. L. A. be asked to send a request to the Librarian of Congress to furnish the code of alphabetizing used in the Library of Congress for publication.

An amendment to the foregoing to include the words "with changes for small libraries" failed of passage.

The nominating committee then submitted its ticket: Chairman, Charles Martel, Chief of the Catalog Division, Library of Congress; Secretary, Edith P. Bucknam, Chief of the Cataloging Department, Queens Borough public library.

After the election, the meeting adjourned.

SECTION ON LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN

FIRST SESSION

The first session of the Section on Library Work with Children was held in the ballroom of the Hotel Kaaterskill, at 2:30 p. m., June 24th, with the Chairman, Miss Power, in the chair. In the absence of Miss Lawrence, Miss Ida Duff acted as secretary.

Two papers on the subject of "Values in library work with children" were read; the first by Miss CLARA W. HUNT, superintendent of the children's department, Brooklyn public library.

VALUES IN LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN--I

You are probably familiar with the story of the man who, being asked by his host which part of the chicken he liked best replied that "he'd never had a chance to find out; that when he was a boy it was the fashion to give the grown people first choice, and by the time he'd grown up the children had the pick, so he'd never tasted anything but the drumstick."

It will doubtless be looked upon as heresy for a children's librarian to own that she has a deal of sympathy for the down-trodden adult of the present; that there have been moments when she has even gone so far as to say an "amen"--under her breath--to the librarian who, after a day of vexations at the hands of the exasperating young person represented in our current social writings as a much-sinned-against innocent, wrathfully exploded, "Children ought to be put in a barrel and fed through the bung till they are twenty-one years old!"

During the scant quarter century which has seen the birth and marvelous growth of modern library work with children, the "new education" has been putting its stamp upon the youth of America and upon the ideas of their parents regarding the upbringing of children. And it has come to pass that one must be very bold to venture to brush off the dust of disuse from certain old saws and educational truisms, such as "All play and no work make Jack a mere toy," "No gains without pains," "We learn to do by doing," "Train up a child in the way he should go," and so on.

Our kindergartens, our playground agitators, our juvenile courts, our child welfare exhibits are so persistently--and rightly--showing the wrongdoing child as the helpless victim of heredity and environment that hasty thinkers are jumping to the conclusion that, since a child is not to blame for his thieving tendencies, it is our duty, rather than punish, to let him go on stealing; since it is a natural instinct for a boy to like the sound of crashing glass and the exercise of skill needed to hit a mark, we must not reprove him for throwing stones at windows; because a child does not like to work, we should let him play--play all the time.

The painless methods of the new education, which tend to make life too soft for children, and to lead parents to believe that everything a child craves he must have, these tendencies have had their effect upon the production and distribution of juvenile books, and have added to the librarian's task the necessity not only of fighting against the worst reading, but against the third rate lest it crowd out the best.

It is the importance of this latter warfare which I wish mainly to discuss.

We children's librarians, in the past fifteen or twenty years, have had to take a good many knocks, more or less facetious, from spectators of the sterner sex who are worried about the "feminization of the library," and who declare that no woman, certainly no spinster, can possibly understand the nature of the boy. Perhaps sometimes we are inclined to droop apologetic heads, because we know that some women are sentimental, that they don't all "look at things in the large," as men invariably do. In view, however, of the record of this youthful movement of ours, we have a right rather to swagger than to apologize.

The influence of the children's libraries upon the ideals, the tastes, the occupations, the amusements, the language, the manners, the home standards, the choice of careers, upon the whole life, in fact, of thousands upon thousands of boys and girls has been beyond all count as a civic force in America.

And yet, while teachers tell us that the opening of every new library witnesses a substitution of wholesome books for "yellow" novels in pupils' hands; while men in their prime remark their infrequent sight of the sensational periodicals left on every doorstep twenty years ago; while publishers of children's books are trying to give us a clean, safe juvenile literature, and while some nickel novel publishers are even admitting a decline in the sale of their wares; in spite of these evidences of success, a warfare is still on, though its character is changing.

Every librarian who has examined children's books for a few years back knows exactly what to expect when she tackles the "juveniles" of 1913.

There will be a generous number of books so fine in point of matter and make-up that we shall lament having been born too late to read these in our childhood. The information and the taste acquired by children who have read the best juvenile publications of the past ten years is perfectly amazing, and those extremists who decry the buying of any books especially written for children are nearly as nonsensical as the ones who would buy everything the child wishes.

But when one has selected with satisfaction perhaps a hundred and fifty titles, one begins to get into the potboiler class--the written-to-order information book which may be guaranteed to kill all future interest in a subject treated in style so wooden and lifeless; the retold classic in which every semblance to the spirit of the original is lost, and the reading of which will give to the child that familiarity which will breed contempt for the work itself; the atrocious picture book modeled after the comic supplement and telling in hideous daubs of color and caricature of line the tale of the practical joker who torments animals, mocks at physical deformities, plays tricks on parents, teases the newly-wed, ridicules good manners, whose whole aim, in short, is to provoke guffaws of laughter at the expense of someone's hurt body or spirit. There will be collections of folk and fairy tales, raked together without discrimination from the literature of people among whom trickery and cunning are the most admired qualities; there will be school stories in which the masters and studious boys grovel at the feet of the football hero; in greater number than the above will be the stories written in series on thoroughly up-to-date subjects.

I shall be much surprised if we do not learn this fall that the world has been deceived in supposing that to Amundsen and Scott belong the honor of finding the South Pole, or to Gen. Goethals the credit of engineering the Panama Canal. If we do not discover that some young Frank or Jack or Bill was the brains behind these achievements, I shall wonder what has become of the ingenuity of the plotter of the series stories--the "plotter" I say advisedly, for it is a known fact that many of these stories are first outlined by a writer whose name makes books sell, the outlines then being filled in by a company of underlings who literally write to order. When we learn, also, that an author who writes admirable stories, in which special emphasis is laid upon fair play and a sense of honor, is at the same time writing under another name books he is ashamed to acknowledge, we are not surprised at the low grade of the resulting stories.

With the above extremes of good and poor there will be quantities on the border line, books not distinctly harmful from one standpoint--in fact, they will busily preach honesty and pluck and refinement, etc., but they will be so lacking in imagination and power, in the positive qualities that go to make a fine book, that they cannot be called wholly harmless, since that which crowds out a better thing is harmful, at least to the extent that it usurps the room of the good.

These books we will be urged to buy in large duplicate, and when we, holding to the ideal of the library as an educational force, refuse to supply this intellectual pap, well-to-do parents may be counted upon to present the same in quantities sufficient to weaken the mental digestion of their offspring beyond cure by teachers the most gifted.

There are two principal arguments--so-called--hurled at every librarian who tries to maintain a high standard of book selection. One is the "I read them when I was a child and they did me no harm" claim; the other, based upon the doggedly clung-to notion that our ideal of manhood is a grown-up Fauntleroy, infers that every book rejected was offensive to the children's librarian because of qualities dangerously likely to encourage the boy in a taste for bloodshed and dirty hands.

Now, in this day when parents are frantically protecting their children from the deadly house fly, the mosquito, the common drinking cup and towel; when milk must be sterilized and water boiled and adenoids removed; when the young father solemnly bows to the dictum that he mustn't rock nor trot his own baby--isn't it really matter for the joke column to hear the "did me no harm" idea advanced as an argument? And yet it is so offered by the same individual who, though he has survived a boyhood of mosquito bites and school drinking cups, refuses to allow his child to risk what he now knows to be a possible carrier of disease.

The "what was good enough for me is good enough for my children" idea, if soberly treated as an argument in other matters of life, would mean death to all progress, and it is no more to be treated seriously as a reason for buying poor juvenile books than a contention for the fetich doctor versus the modern surgeon, or for the return to the foot messenger in place of electrical communication.

It would be tactless, if not positively dangerous, if we children's librarians openly expressed our views when certain people point boastfully to themselves as shining products of mediocre story book childhoods. So I would hastily suppress this thought, and instead remind these people that, as a vigorous child is immune from disease germs which attack a delicate one, so unquestionably have thousands of mental and moral weaklings been retarded from their best development by books that left no mark on healthy children. In spite of the probability that there are today alive many able-bodied men who cut their first teeth on pickles and pork chops, we do not question society's duty to disseminate proper ideas on the care and feeding of children.

Isn't it about time that we nailed down the lid of the coffin on the "did me no harm" argument and buried the same in the depths of the sea?

Another notion that dies hard is one assuming that, since the children's librarian is a woman, prone to turn white about the gills at the sight of blood--or a mouse--she can not possibly enter into the feelings of the ancestral barbarian surviving in the young human breast, but must try to hasten the child's development to twentieth century civilization by eliminating the elemental and savage from his story books.

If those who grow hoarse shouting the above would take the trouble to examine the lists of an up-to-date library they might blush for their shallowness, that they have been basing their opinions on their memory of library lists at least twenty-five years old.

We do not believe that womanly women and manly men are most successfully made by way of silly, shoddy, sorry-for-themselves girlhoods, or lying, swaggering, loafing boyhoods; and it is the empty, the vulgar, the cheap, smart, trust-to-luck story, rather than the gory one, that we dislike.

I am coming to the statement of what I believe to be the problem most demanding our study today. It is, briefly, the problem of the mediocre book, its enormous and ever-increasing volume. More fully stated it is the problem of the negatively as the enemy of the positively good; of the cultivation of brain laziness by "thoughts-made-easy" reading. It is a republic's, a public school problem, viz.: How is it possible to raise to a higher average the lowest, without reducing to a dead level of mediocrity the citizens of superior possibilities? Our relation to publisher and parent, to the library's adult open shelves of current fiction enter into the problem. The children's over-reading, and their reluctance to "graduate" from juvenile books, these and many other perplexing questions grow out of the main one.

I said awhile ago that the new education has had a tendency to make life too soft for children, and to give to their parents the belief that natural instincts alone are safe guides to follow in rearing a child. I hope I shall not seem to be a good old times croaker, sighing for the days when school gardens and folk dancing and glee clubs and dramatization of lessons and beautiful textbooks and fascinating handicraft and a hundred other delightful things were undreamed-of ways of making pleasant the paths of learning. Heaven forbid that I should join the ranks of those who carp at a body of citizens who, at an average wage in America less than that of the coal miner and the factory worker, have produced in their schools results little short of the miraculous. To visit, as I have, classrooms of children born in slums across the sea, transplanted to tenements in New York, and to see what our public school teachers are making of these children--the backward, the underfed, the "incorrigible," the blind, the anæmic--well, all I can say is, I do not recommend these visits to Americans of the stripe of that boastful citizen who, being shown the crater of Vesuvius with a "There, you haven't anything like that in America!" disdainfully replied, "Naw, but we've got Niagara, and that'd put the whole blame thing out!" For myself I never feel quite so disposed to brag of my Americanism as when I visit some of our New York schools.

And yet, watching the bored shrug of the bright, well-born high school child when one suggests that "The prince and the pauper" is quite as interesting a story as the seventh volume of her latest series, a librarian has some feelings about the lines-of-least-resistance method of educating our youth, which she is glad to find voiced by some of our ablest thinkers.

Here is what J. P. Munroe says: "Many of the new methods ... methods of gentle cooing toward the child's inclinations, of timidly placing a chair for him before a disordered banquet of heterogeneous studies, may produce ladylike persons, but they will not produce men. And when these modern methods go as far as to compel the teacher to divide this intellectual cake and pudding into convenient morsels and to spoon-feed them to the child, partly in obedience to his schoolboy cravings, partly in conformity to a pedagogical psychology, then the result is sure to be mental and moral dyspepsia in a race of milksops." How aptly "spoon-fed pudding" characterizes whole cartloads of our current "juveniles"!

Listen to President Wilson's opinion: "To be carried along by somebody's suggestions from the time you begin until the time when you are thrust groping and helpless into the world, is the very negation of education. By the nursing process, by the coddling process you are sapping a race; and only loss can possibly result except upon the part of individuals here and there who are so intrinsically strong that you cannot spoil them."

Hugo Münsterberg is a keen observer of the product of American schools, and contrasting their methods with those of his boyhood he says: "My school work was not adjusted to botany at nine years because I played with an herbarium, and at twelve to physics because I indulged in noises with home-made electric bells, and at fifteen to Arabic, an elective which I miss still in several high schools, even in Brookline and Roxbury. The more my friends and I wandered afield with our little superficial interests and talents and passions, the more was the straightforward earnestness of the school our blessing; and all that beautified and enriched our youth, and gave to it freshness and liveliness, would have turned out to be our ruin, if our elders had taken it seriously, and had formed a life's program out of petty caprices and boyish inclinations."

And Prof. Münsterberg thrusts his finger into what I believe to be the weakest joint in our educational armor when he says: "... as there is indeed a difference whether I ask what may best suit the taste and liking of Peter, the darling, or whether I ask what Peter, the man, will need for the battle of life in which nobody asks what he likes, but where the question is how he is liked, and how he suits the taste of his neighbors."

What would become of our civilization if we were to follow merely the instincts and natural desires? Yet is there not in America a tremendous tendency to the notion, that except in matters of physical welfare, the child's lead is to be followed to extreme limits? Don't we librarians feel it in the pressure brought to bear upon us by those who fail to find certain stories, wanted by the children, on our shelves? "Why, that's a good book," the parent will say, "The hero is honest and kind, the book won't hurt him any--in fact it will give the child some good ideas."

"Ideas." Yes, perhaps. There is another educator I should like to quote, J. H. Baker in his "Education and life": "Whatever you would wish the child to do and become, that let him practice. We learn to do, not by knowing, but by knowing and then doing. Ethical teaching, tales of heroic deeds, soul-stirring fiction that awakens sympathetic emotions may accomplish but little unless in the child's early life ... the ideas and feelings find expression in action and so become a part of the child's power and tendency...."

Now we believe with G. Stanley Hall that, "The chief enemy of active virtue in the world is not vice but laziness, languor and apathy of will;" that "mind work is infinitely harder than physical toil;" that (as another says) "all that does not rouse, does not set him to work, rusts and taints him ... the disease of laziness ... destroys the whole man."

And when children of good heritage, good homes, sound bodies, bright minds, spend hours every week curled up among cushions, allowing a stream of cambric-tea literature gently to trickle over their brain surfaces, we know that though the heroes and heroines of these stories be represented as prodigies of industry and vigor, our young swallowers of the same are being reduced to a pulp of brain and will laziness that will not only make them incapable of struggling with a page of Quentin Durward, for example, but will affect their moral stamina, since fighting fiber is the price of virtue.

Ours is, as I have said, a public education, a republic's problem. To quote President Wilson again: "Our present plans for teaching everybody involve certain unpleasant things quite inevitably. It is obvious that you cannot have universal education without restricting your teaching to such things as can be universally understood. It is plain that you cannot impart 'university methods' to thousands, or create 'investigators' by the score, unless you confine your university education to matters which dull men can investigate, your laboratory training to tasks which mere plodding diligence and submissive patience can compass. Yet, if you do so limit and constrain what you teach, you thrust taste and insight and delicacy of perception out of the schools, exalt the obvious and merely useful things above the things which are only imaginatively or spiritually conceived, make education an affair of tasting and handling and smelling, and so create Philistia, that country in which they speak of 'mere literature.'"

In our zeal to serve the little alien, descendant of generations of poverty and ignorance, let us not lose sight of the importance to our country of the child more fortunate in birth and brains. So strong is my feeling on the value of leaders that I hold we should give at least as much study to the training of the accelerate child as we give to that of the defective. Though I boast the land of Abraham Lincoln and Booker Washington I do not give up one iota of my belief that the child who is born into a happy environment, of parents strong in body and mind, holds the best possibilities of making a valuable citizen; and so I am concerned that this child be not spoiled in the making by a training or lack of training that fails to recognize his possibilities.

It is encouraging to find growing attention in the "Proceedings" of the N. E. A. and other educational bodies to the problem of the bright child who has suffered by the lock-step system which has molded all into conformity with the capabilities of the average child.

The librarian's difficulty is perhaps greater than that of the teacher, because open shelves and freedom of choice are so essential a part of our program. We must provide easy reading for thousands of children. Milk and water stories may have an actual value to children whose unfavorable heritage and environment have retarded their mental development. But the deplorable thing is to see young people, mercifully saved from the above handicaps, making a bee line for the current diluted literature for grown-ups, (as accessible as Scott on our open shelves) and to realize that this taste, which is getting a life set, is the inevitable outcome of the habit of reading mediocre juveniles.

We must not rail at publishers for trying to meet the demands of purchasers. Our job is to influence that demand far more than we have done as yet. Large book jobbers tell us that millions and millions of poor juveniles are sold in America to thousands of the sort we librarians recommend. I have seen purchase lists of boys' club directors and Sunday School library committees calling for just the weak and empty stuff we would destroy. I have unwittingly been an eavesdropper at Christmas book counters and have heard the orders given by parents and the suggestions made by clerks. And I feel that the public library has but skirmished along the outposts while the great field of influencing the reading of American children remains unconquered. Until we affect production to the extent that the book stores circulate as good books as the best libraries we cannot be too complacent about our position as a force in citizen making.

An "impossible" ideal, of course, but far from intimidating, the largeness of the task makes us all the more determined.

This paper attempts no suggestion of new methods of attacking the problem. It is rather a restatement of an old perplexity. I harp once more on a worn theme because I think that unless we frequently lift our eyes from the day's absorbing duties for a look over the whole field, and unless we once and again make searching inventory of our convictions, our purposes, our methods, our attainments, we are in danger of letting ourselves slip along the groove of the taken-for-granted and our work loses in power as we allow ourselves to become leaners instead of leaders. May we not, as if it were a new idea, rouse to the seriousness of the mediocre habit indulged in by young people capable of better things? Should not our work with children reach out more to work with adults, to those who buy and sell and make books for the young? Is it not time for the successful teller of stories to children to use her gifts in audiences of grown people, persuading these molders of the children's future of the reasonableness of our objection to the third rate since it is the enemy of the best? May it not be politic, at least, for the librarian to descend from her disdainful height and make friends with "the trade," with bookseller and publisher who, after all, have as good a right to their bread and butter as the librarian paid out of the city's taxes?

And then--is it not possible that we might be better librarians if we refused to be librarians every hour in the day and half the night as well? What if we were to have the courage to refuse to indulge in nervous breakdowns, because we deliberately plan to play, and to eat, and to sleep, to keep serene and sane and human, believing that God in His Heaven gives His children a world of beauty to enjoy as well as a work to do with zeal. If we lived a little longer and not quite so wide, the gain to our chosen work in calm nerves and breadth of interest and sympathy would even up for dropping work on schedule time for a symphony concert or a country walk or a visit with a friend--might even justify saving the cost of several A. L. A. conferences toward a trip to Italy!

This hurling at librarians advice to play more and work less reminds me of a story told by a southern friend. Years ago, in a sleepy little Virginia village, there lived two characters familiar to the townspeople, whose greatest daily excitement was a stroll down to the railroad station to watch the noon express rush through to distant southern cities. One of these personages was the station keeper, of dry humor and sententious habit, whom we will call Hen Waters; the other was the station goat, named, of course, Billy. Year after year had Billy peacefully cropped the grass along the railroad tracks, turning an indifferent ear to the roar of the daily express, when suddenly one day the notion seemed to strike his goatish mind that this racket had been quietly endured long enough. With the warning whistle of the approaching engine, Billy, lowering his head, darted furiously up the track, intending to butt the offending thunderer into Kingdom Come. When, a few seconds later, the amazed spectators were gazing after the diminishing train, Hen Waters, addressing the spot where the redoubtable goat had last been seen, drawled out: "Billy, I admire your pluck--but darn your discretion!"

The parallel between the ambitions and the futility of the goat, and the present speaker's late advice is so obvious that only the illogicalness of woman can account for my cherishing a hope that I may be spared the fate of the indiscreet Billy.

Miss CAROLINE BURNITE, director of children's work, Cleveland public library, delivered the second paper on this subject, presenting the topic from another viewpoint.

VALUES IN LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN--II

To elucidate principles of value, I shall use, by way of illustration, the experience and structure of a certain children's department where the problem of children's reading and the means of bringing books to them has been more intensively studied in the last nine years than was possible there before that time. At the time we took our last survey of the department it was found that probably about six out of ten of the children of the city read library books in their homes during the calendar year, and that each child had read about twenty books on the average. Four of the six procured library books from a library center; two of the six procured them from collections, either in their schoolrooms or in homes in their neighborhood. In all, fifty-four thousand children read a million books, which reached them through forty-three librarians assigned for special work with these children, through three hundred teachers and about one hundred volunteers. Now, we know that six out of ten children is not an ideal proportion and that fifty-four thousand may endanger the quality of book influence for each child, but both of these statements indicate conditions to be adjusted so that the experience of each reading child may contribute to the whole and experience with numbers may benefit the individual. To accomplish this end, work with the children was given departmental organization. My concern in this paper is with departmental organization as it benefits the reading child, and with the principles and policies which have been developed through departmental unity.

We think ordinarily that one who loves books has three general hallmarks--his reading is fairly continuous, there is permanency of book interest, and this interest maintained on a plane of merit. These three results always justify the reader and those who have influenced him, and if the consequent book interests of the library child were entirely such, they would prove to all laymen, without argument, that the principles are basic. But in the child's contact with the library there are many evidences of modifications of normal book interests; for, instead of continuity of reading, the children's rooms are overcrowded in winter and have comparatively small book use in summer; instead of permanency of book interests extending over the difficult intermediate period, we know that large numbers of those children who leave school before they reach high school have little or no library contact during their first working years and we sometimes feel that the interesting experiences with reading working children, which librarians are prone to emphasize, give us an impression of a larger number than careful investigation would show. As for quality of reading of the individual working child we cannot maintain that it is always on a high plane.

All these conditions we know to be largely the result of environmental influences. Deprived for twelve hours a day, twelve months in a year, of opportunity for normal youthful activities, the child's entire physical and mental schedule is thrown out of balance and his tendency is to turn to reading, a recreation possible at any time, only when there is no opportunity to follow other avenues of interest. The strain upon the ear and eye, and back and brain, is even greater in the shop than in the school, and in the consequent intense physical fatigue the tendency is toward recreations in which the book may have no place. The power of the nickel library over the child can be broken by the presence of the public library, but no intermediate gets away from the suggestion, by voice and print, of the modern novel, with its present-day social interests. Consequently the whole judgment of the results of library work with children can not rest upon these general tests of normal book interests. Rather such variations from the normal are themselves conditions which influence the structure of the work and especially the principles of book presentation. If children are living in an environment which is not the best one for them, all the forces with which they come in contact should tend to correct the abnormal and give them the things their moral nature craves--freer and fuller thoughts, better and freer living, truth of expression, beauty of feeling. We must recognize that books also must be a force in reconstructing or normalizing the influences of their environment. Children with social needs must have books with social values to meet those needs--right social contacts, true social perspective, traditions of family and race, loveliness of nature, companionship of living things, right group association and group interests.

But while the pedagogical and moral values of books, that is the benefits of right reading for children of normal life, were fully analyzed, the children's department of which I speak had almost no written principle to aid in the enormous task of determining the influence of books on children with social needs. Appreciations of the social relationships and the interdependence of characters in books which have proven themselves moving forces in the lives of children, gained through the testimony of men and women who know their indebtedness to them--such books as "Little women," "Tom Brown," "Heidi," "Otto of the silver hand"--gave a fundamental principle upon which to work. Books should construct a larger social ideal for the reader instead of confirming his present one. Then arose this question: Should we have books with weak social values in the library as a concession to certain children, or by having them do we harm most those very children to whom we have conceded them? The gradual solution of this problem seems to me to be one of the greatest services which a library can render its children. So long as this question is in process of solution we may accept the following as a tentative reply: No books weak in social ideals should be furnished, provided we do not lose reading children by their elimination. If such books are the best a child will read and we take them away, causing loss of library reading interest, we permit him to sink further into his environment. With the last principle as a basis, the evaluation of books was accomplished in the evolution of the department. The cumulative experience of librarians working with children showed that many books which lead only to others of their kind were weak in social viewpoint, and that such books were the ones read largely by those children most occasional and spasmodic in their reading. Here was a determining point in the establishment of standards of reading, for it brought us face to face with the question, Shall we consider this situation our fault since we supply such books to children who need something better vastly more than do others, or shall we merely justify our selection by maintaining that those children will under no circumstances read a higher grade of books? However, it was proven at the same time that other books were read also by children with social limitations, which, although apparently no better on first evaluation, lead to a better type of reading and this gave us a fresh impulse to consider the evaluation of books as a constantly moving process, and prompted the policy of the removal of those types of books which were least influential in developing a good reading taste. This was done, however, with the definite intention that an increasingly better standard of reading must mean that no reading children be sacrificed, an end only possible by a fuller knowledge of the value of the individual book to the individual child.

Now let us see what changes have been evolved in the book collections in the department under consideration in the past seven or eight years.

In the first study of the collection and before any final study of books from the social viewpoint had been reached, the proportion of books of the doubtful class to those which were standard was considered, and it was seen that this proportion should be decreased in order that a child's chances for eventually reading the best might be improved. It was obvious that the reading of the young children should be most carefully safeguarded, and this was the first point of attack. As a result, these two types of books were eliminated:

1. All series for young children, such as the Dotty Dimples
and the Little Colonels.

2. Books for young children dealing with animal life which
have neither humane nor scientific value, such as the
Pierson and Wesselhoeft.

At about the same time stories of child life for young children were restricted to those which were most natural and possible, and stories read by older girls in which adults were made the beneficiaries of a surprisingly wise child hero, such as the Plympton books, were eliminated.