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 inclusivecopyright 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.
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.
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 itsstamp 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 theoriginal 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 forthe 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 blamething 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 Hallthat, "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 thatonly 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.
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 modernnovel, 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.
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.
The successful elimination of these books, together with the study of the children's reading as a whole, suggested within the next two or three years that other books could be eliminated or restricted without shock to the readers. On the pedagogical basis, certain types of books for young children were judged; on the social basis, certain types of books for older children, with results as follows:
1. The elimination of word books for little children, and the basing of their reading upon their inherent love for folk lore and verse.2. The elimination of interpreted folk lore, such as many of the modern kindergarten versions.3. The elimination of the modern fairy tale, except as it has vitality and individual charm, as have those of George MacDonald.4. The elimination of travel trivial in treatment and in series form, such as the Little Cousins.5. The restriction of an old and recognized series to its original number of titles, such as the Pepper series. The disapproval of all new books obviously the first in a series.6. Lessening the number of titles by authors who are unduly popular, such as restricting the use of Tomlinson to one series only.7. The elimination of those stories in which the child character is not within a normal sphere; for instance, the child novel, such as Mrs. Jamison's stories.8. The restriction of the story of the successful poor boy to those within the range of possibility, as are the Otis books, largely.
1. The elimination of word books for little children, and the basing of their reading upon their inherent love for folk lore and verse.
2. The elimination of interpreted folk lore, such as many of the modern kindergarten versions.
3. The elimination of the modern fairy tale, except as it has vitality and individual charm, as have those of George MacDonald.
4. The elimination of travel trivial in treatment and in series form, such as the Little Cousins.
5. The restriction of an old and recognized series to its original number of titles, such as the Pepper series. The disapproval of all new books obviously the first in a series.
6. Lessening the number of titles by authors who are unduly popular, such as restricting the use of Tomlinson to one series only.
7. The elimination of those stories in which the child character is not within a normal sphere; for instance, the child novel, such as Mrs. Jamison's stories.
8. The restriction of the story of the successful poor boy to those within the range of possibility, as are the Otis books, largely.
Without analyzing the weaknesses of all these types, I wish to say a word about the series form for story and classed books. The series must be judged not only by content, but it must be recognized that by the admission of such a form of literature the tendency of the child toward independence of book judgment and book selection is lessened and the way paved for the weakest form of adult literature.
The last policies regarding book selection developed on the same principles within the past three years have been these:
1. The elimination of periodical literature for young children, such as the Children's Magazine and Little Folks, since their reading can be varied more wholesomely without it.2. The elimination, or use in small numbers, of a type of history and biography which lacks scholarly, or even serious treatment, such as the Pratt histories.3. Lessening the number of titles of miscellaneous collections of folk lore in which there are objectionable individual tales; as, for instance, buying only the Blue, Red, Green and Yellow fairy books.4. Recognizing "blind alleys" in children's fiction, such as the boarding school story and the covert love story, and buying no new titles of those types.
1. The elimination of periodical literature for young children, such as the Children's Magazine and Little Folks, since their reading can be varied more wholesomely without it.
2. The elimination, or use in small numbers, of a type of history and biography which lacks scholarly, or even serious treatment, such as the Pratt histories.
3. Lessening the number of titles of miscellaneous collections of folk lore in which there are objectionable individual tales; as, for instance, buying only the Blue, Red, Green and Yellow fairy books.
4. Recognizing "blind alleys" in children's fiction, such as the boarding school story and the covert love story, and buying no new titles of those types.
Reports of reading sequences from each children's room have furnished the basis for further study of children's reading for the past seven months. These have been discussed and compared by the workers, and are now in shape for a working outline of reading sequences to be made and reported back to each room, to be used, amplified and reported on again in the spring.
While those books which are no longer used may have been at one time necessary to hold a child from reading something poorer, we did not lose children through raising the standard, and the duplication of doubtful books in the children's room is less heavy now than it was a few years ago. Also there are more than twice as many children who are reading, and almost three times as many books being read as there were nine years ago, while the number of children of the city has increased but 72 per cent. Furthermore, the proportion of children of environmental limitations has by no means diminished, and the foreign population is much the same—more than 75 per cent. Of course, the elimination of some books was accomplished because there were better books on these subjects, but the general result was largely brought about because in the establishment of these higher standardswe did not exceed the standards of those who were working with the children.The standards which they brought to the work, and which they deduced themselves from their experience, were strengthened through Round Table discussion, where each worker measured her results by those of the others and thereby recognized the need of constant, but careful experimentation. A children's department can not reach standards of reading which in the judgment of the librarians working with the children are beyond the possibility of attainment, for with them rests entirely the delicate task of the adjustment of the book to the child. A staff of children's librarians of good academic education, the best library training, a true vision of the social principles, a broad knowledge of children's literature, is the greatest asset for any library maintaining children's work.
But it is true inversely that in raising the standards of the children the standards of the workers were raised. By this, I mean that there were methods of book presentation in use whereby the worker saw farther and deeper into the mentality of the child and understood his social instincts better. This has been evidenced in the larger duplication of the better books. The methods are those which recognize group interest and group association as a social need of childhood. Through unifying and intensifying the thoughts and sympathies of the children by giving them, when in association with their own playmates, a common experience of living in great and universal thought in the story hour, the mediocre was bridged and both the child and the worker reached a higher plane of experience. By giving children a chance for group expression of something which has fundamental group interest, not only the children recognized that books may be cornerstones for social intercourse and that there is connection between social conduct as expressed in books and social obligation, but, what is also vastly important, the worker learned that when children are at the age of group activity and expression they can often be more permanently influenced through their group relations than as individuals.
Through the recognition of the principle that there are standards of book use with individual children and other standards of book appeal for groups of children, it was shown that the organization of the work as a whole must be such that all avenues of presentation of literature could be fully developed. It was seen that far less than with the individual child couldwe afford to give a group of children a false experience or impotent interest, and that material for group presentation, methods of group presentation and the social elements which are evinced in groups of children should receive an amount of attention and study which would lead to the surest and soundest results. This could be fully accomplished only by recognizing such methods as distinct functions of the department, to be maintained on sound pedagogical and social bases. In other words, that there should not only be divisions of work with children according to problems of book distribution, such as by schools and home libraries, but there must be of necessity divisions by problems of reading. Whereas, in a smaller department all divisions would center in the head, the volume of work in the library above alluded to rendered necessary the appointment of an instructor in storytelling and a supervisor of reading clubs, which has resulted in a higher specialization and a greater impetus for these phases of work than one person could have accomplished. Here we have an instance of the benefit that a large volume of work may confer upon the individual child.
With the attainment of better reading results and higher standards for the workers, it was obvious that the reading experiences of the children and the standards of the workers must be conserved, that the organization should protect the children, as far as possible, from the shock of change of workers in individual centers. Within the past two years considerable study has been given to this, and yearly written reports on the reading of children in each children's room are made, in which variations of the children's reading in that library from accepted standards, with individual instances, are usually discussed. However, the children's librarian is entirely free to report the subject from whatever angle it has impressed her most. Also a written report is made of the story hour, the program, general and special reading results, and intensity of group interest in certain types of stories. This report is supplementary to a weekly report in a prescribed form of the stories told, sources used and results. All programs used with clubs are reported and a semi-annual report made of the club work as a whole. A yearly tabulation is made of registration from public and parochial schools, giving registration in all libraries, class rooms and home libraries. By discussion and reports back to individual centers, these become bases for a wider vision of work and a wiser direction of energy with less experimentation.
The connection between work with children and the problem of the reading of intermediates, referred to in the beginning, should not be dismissed in a paragraph. However, it is only possible to give a short statement of it. Recognizing that the reading of adult books should begin in the children's room, a serious study of adult books possible for children's reading was made by the children's librarians for two summers, the reports discussed and books added to the department as the result. A second report of adult titles which children and intermediates might and do read was called for recently and from that a tentative list has been furnished both adult and children's workers for further study. The increasing number of workers in the children's department who have had general training, and in the adult work who have had special training for work with children will make such reports of much value. It may be interesting to know that fifteen of the children's librarians have had general training and six adult workers in important positions have had special training for children's work. Four years ago there were only three in children's work who had had general training and none in adult work with the special training. In order to follow the standards of children's work, there is one principle which is obvious, namely, a book disapproved as below grade for juvenile should not be accepted for general intermediate work. This is especially true of books of adventure which a boy of any age between 12 and 18 would read. It has been possibleto raise the standard of books for adults in the school libraries above that of the larger libraries. This will furnish eventually another angle for the study of the problem of intermediate reading.
In conclusion, the chief influences in the establishment of right reading for children are an intensive study of the reading of children in relation to its social, moral and pedagogical worth to them, the right basis of education and training for such study on the part of the workers, the direction of such study in a way that brings about a higher and more practical standard on the part of the worker, and the conservation of her experience. These are the great services which the library should render children, and they can be most fully accomplished through departmental organization.
These papers were followed by a discussion, led by Miss Stearns and Mr. Rush, in which advice was given to those selecting children's books to eliminate, in buying new books, those which would be eliminated later, and the suggestion was made that children's librarians should enter the field of writing children's books. Dr. Bostwick of St. Louis then gave a report on
We may divide the history of work with children into three epochs. During the first, our libraries were realizing with increasing clearness the necessity of doing something for children that they were not doing for adults. During the second this conviction had taken the practical form of segregation, physical and mental, and its details were worked out with definiteness. In the third, in which we still are, the whole administrative work of the library for children is being systematized and co-ordinated. These three stages may be roughly styled the era of work with children, the era of the children's room and the era of the children's department. The first began, in any particular library, when that library began to do anything whatever for children that it was not doing for adults; the second, when it opened its first children's room; the third, when it co-ordinated all its children's work under one administrative head. In most libraries the first period was relatively short; the second relatively long. Some libraries began their work by establishing children's rooms, reducing the first period to zero. Some large libraries are still in the second period, never having co-ordinated their children's work. Here are the approximate dates for a few libraries:
I lay no stress on the accuracy of these dates, particularly in the first column, where in some cases they are matters of opinion. Pittsburgh appears as a unique example of a library that stepped full-fledged into all three stages at once, starting off, as soon as it began to do children's work at all, not only with a children's room, but with a definitely organized department to conduct the work.
With the idea of presenting comprehensively some idea of the volume and importance of children's work in the United States at the present time, a questionnaire was sent out to libraries (78 in all) whose total home use was 100,000 volumes or more. Of these 51 responded. These have been divided into five groups, five "very large" libraries, circulating more than 2,000,000; eight "large" ones, between one and two million; seven "medium," between half a million and a million; thirteen "small," between quarter and half a million, and eighteen "very small," from 100,000 to 250,000. The results for each of these groups have been stated separately—averaged where possible.
First, regarding the total volume of work. The answers to the questions showthat in 51 of the 78 largest public libraries in the country, graded by circulation—libraries containing altogether nearly 9,000,000 books and circulating a total of over 30 millions—there are now 1,147,000 volumes intended especially for children. Children drew out during the last year 11,200,000 volumes for home use. Volumes for children added during the year numbered 280,000. These libraries have 231 rooms devoted entirely to children and 180 used by them in part, with a combined seating capacity of 15,900. Classroom libraries are furnished for the children in the schools, by 31 libraries reporting, to the number of 5,000.
Children in 46 libraries reporting hold altogether 413,000 library cards. There are 42 supervisors of children's work, with numerous clerical assistants and staffs of 473 persons, of whom at least 177 are qualified children's librarians, 108 are graduates of library schools, and 54 have had partial courses.
The general conclusion deducible from the statistics gathered seems to be that in some ways library work with children has become standardized while in others it has not. Standards, whether permanent or not, we can not tell, have been reached or approximated in the number of books devoted to children's use and, in general, in the proportion of the library's resources, time and energy that is given to this branch of the work. But when we come to the specific number of assistants assigned to it, their supervision, their pay and the grade of experience and training required of them, then we all part company. Not only is there no general agreement here, but some of the discrepancies are so large that we can ascribe them only to the fact that we are still in the experimental stage.
For instance, to take first the fairly uniform or standardized conditions, the fraction of the stock of books allotted to children is about one-fifth in the larger libraries and decreases slightly in the smaller; in the very small it is about one-eighth. The proportion of juvenile books added yearly is much larger; it varies from nearly one-half in the very large libraries down to one-fourth in the very small. This would seem to be a result of the increasing stress laid on children's work. If this proportion is maintained in the annual purchases, that in the total stock may approximate to it in time, although we can not be sure of this without knowing the ratio of the life of a children's book to that of an adult book. The children's books are doubtless shorter-lived, and this would tend to keep the proportion down in the permanent stock. The circulation is still more nearly uniform, being about one-third to children in all the classes of libraries. The proportion of money spent for children is also uniform, being about one-fourth in libraries of all sizes. The same is true of the number of children's rooms, which throughout all classes of libraries, both large and small, are in the proportion of one to every 60,000 to 70,000 of circulation, and of their seating capacity, which is 60 to 70 per room.
Looking on the other side of the shield we find the greatest variation in the proportion of children's cards in use, which runs from less than one-half up to nearly all. From one to five supervisors are employed in each library but some of the very large libraries use only one and some of the small ones as many as three. The same is true of clerical assistants, of which some of the very small libraries report as many as three, while some of the very large get along with as few as two.
Salaries are fairly uniform, although apparently smaller than the work would warrant. Whereas the children's circulation is about one-third the total, the salaries in the juvenile department are from one-seventh to one-eighth the total throughout. In the "small" libraries they are only one-eleventh of the total.
The distribution of library-school graduates is very irregular. Some libraries in all classes have none at all. In the three lower classes no library has a larger number than three. In some of the larger libraries there may be as many as 20 or 30.
I am aware that some of this irregularity, which I have called a lack of standardization, may be due to differences in nomenclature. Assistants, for instance, having precisely the same duties may be described as supervisors in one library and not in another. This will not explain everything, however, and the conclusion is inevitable that in the respects just noted no uniformity has yet been reached by libraries. It seems to me that this lack of standardization has made its appearance in precisely the place where it might have been expected—namely in the third of the three periods already mentioned, that of co-ordination and systematization. This is the latest period; some libraries have not yet entered upon it and most of them are young in it. In other words, children's work is much older than the systematic administration of a children's department, or a system of children's rooms. Hence, children's work in general—the selection and purchase of books for children, the planning of children's rooms and their administration as units—has existed long enough to become standardized. We know what we want, having passed through the stage of experimentation.
This is not true of the administration of a children's department—the grading of assistants, the organization of a compact body of workers with its expert supervision, the settling of questions of disputed jurisdiction that necessarily arise in cases of this kind. It is on this part of their work that children's librarians need to focus their attention for the next few years. It is time, not perhaps to withdraw our eyes from the older questions but to transfer our gaze in part to the newer. We need to talk less about the size of our juvenile collection, methods of selection of children's books, the salaries of our assistants, ways of increasing our circulation, sizes and plans of children's rooms, and so on, and more about the organization and administration of the children's department as a whole—the duties of the supervisor and her assistants; her relations with the heads of other departments and with branch librarians, the measure of control shared by her with heads of branches in case of children's librarians of branches, the existence of separate grades, corresponding to separate duties or variation of qualifications, among the children's librarians; insistence on training adapted to these different grades. Time forbids me to go into details, and I can but suggest these points for your consideration. Into one point, however, I feel like going a little more fully:
We need more special training for children's work. It is the one kind of specialization that we have attempted in our schools, and we must have more of it and more kinds of it. This of course is but a single case in the more varied program of special training that I am convinced we shall have to take up before long. In the course of an interesting debate on this subject in the A. L. A. Council last January it developed that most of the librarians present looked upon specialization as impractical. In particular they believed it impossible for a student to look forward so definitely to special work that he could decide on the special courses that would benefit him. The man that had taken the college-library course might become a superintendent of branches; the qualified municipal reference librarian would go, perhaps, into an applied science room. This may be so now but it cannot long remain the case. Even now we can not carry this line of argument much further without making of it a reductio ad absurdum. Why go to a library school at all when, after all, you may accept the headship of a grammar-school on graduation, or even decide to travel for a hardware house? Why should we attempt to train one man for a lawyer and another for a physician when both may prefer farming? We are getting away fast from the old idea, born of pioneer conditions, that anybody can do anything if he tries. We shall have to travel further enough from it to satisfy ourselves that an expert university librarian will have to be trained for his post and not for that of head of the supplydepartment in a public library. We have learned that a children's librarian does her work better for special training; may it not be that we shall have to make some difference in the future between training, let us say, for supervisory work, for the charge of a branch children's room, and for the duties of an assistant of lower grade?
In closing, let me say again that we need to focus our attention at present on the organization and administration of a children's department, especially on the places where it interlocks with that of other departments. The study of this matter should not be entrusted to children's libraries alone, for the standardization of work involving more than one department should not beex parte. The matter should be in charge of a committee including in its membership both chief librarians and the heads of children's departments—possibly also the children's librarian of a large branch library and a branch librarian.
The volume of the work is now remarkable; its organization has gone beyond that of some other departments in attention to detail; the question of its co-ordination and of interdepartmental relations should now be taken up systematically.