Library school. Under this head comes also the work of the university in conducting the library school, with its corps of experienced teachers and its 30 students pursuing a two years' course, crowned for the honor students with well-earned degrees of library science. Expert assistance. Many also are the requests for temporary help in rearranging and cataloging libraries, to which a response can usually be made by sending an expert worker from the staff of the state library or from advanced students of the school for a longer or shorter time, as needed. At times this service is required for a month or more, and sometimes only for three or four days. Libraries pay for such services at current rates. 3. Organization and charter. The next step in the work of the university is to organize libraries and receive them by charter, admission, or registry. The law gives the regents power to grant charters. The details are settled in consultation. If a charter is already held, it need not be surrendered unless the new standard charter is preferred. The university can either admit with existing charter or reincorporate. Either course constitutes the library an institution in the university, precisely as the great colleges are. Or, if for any cause, the libraries do not seek so close a relation, they may, on request and approval, be registered and have like privileges, though not so fully identified with the university. Previous to 1892 there was one library chartered by the regents. In the years 1892-93, 26 were chartered and two admitted; the next year, 26 chartered and six admitted. Since Oct. 1,❘ 1894, 20 have been chartered and six admitted. Adding eight that have been registered, the total number of libraries now under visitation (Mar. 1, 1895) is 95. Out of 73 chartered libraries, 44 include libraries transferred by the school authorities. book accounts, shall merit approval, and that it conform to certain hours of opening, graded according to the size of the community, but sufficient in the judgment of the regents to entitle the library to be fairly counted free and public. Under these rules the essential condition is a connection of the library with the university either by charter, admission, or registry, marking it with honorable approval. The formal application for money is then made, the amount being limited in most cases to $200 a year, and certificate being made that an equal amount from local sources is already in hand. Each month an apportionment is made. The number of applications the first year was 44, the second year there were 84, and since Oct. 1, 1894, to March 5, 1895, 55 have been received, or 183 in all. A few have not been granted. 97 different libraries have shared in the distribution. Some have improved the privilege for three successive years. The money is placed in their hands on their agreement to spend it in accordance with the rules. When it has been spent, an account is rendered, containing a full list of the books bought and the cost of each one, and this total must be sufficient to account, not only for the public money, but for the equal amount raised at home. This list is examined in the regents' office, and for any book disapproved an equal amount must be spent for an approved book to balance the account and open the way for another grant when asked. When small libraries are to be started or reorganized, it is not required that all the money should be used for books the first year, but a part may be used for shelves, cataloging, printing, services, and other like expenses. This provision has been specially useful in the small beginnings through which many village libraries have been struggling into existence. 5. Travelling libraries. A part of the public 4. Public library money. A most practical and money has been used by the university in deinteresting part of the work is the distribution veloping its system of lending small libraries for of public library money. $25,000 a year have a limited time. Selections of 50 or 100 volumes been given for three years, being placed in the each are lent to libraries or communities for six hands of the regents for the benefit of free libra- months, the university paying all expenses and ries, with three plain conditions. A library re-receiving a fee of $3 or $5, according to the ceiving aid must be free; an equal amount must be raised from local sources; and books bought with the money must be such as the regents approve. The rest is left to regents' rules. These rules require that the library shall be under state supervision; that the character of its books as a whole, its methods of work and keeping of number of volumes sent. A full account of this system and its working may be read in the Forum for January, 1895, and need not be repeated. The number of 125 libraries reported Oct. 1, 1894, increased to 178 by Jan. 1, 1895, and a marked feature of the work specially noticeable interest has commanded an attention in small 6. Lists of best books. The travelling library in the last three months is the growing number In all these things the university is the servant of the libraries, anxious to know in what way it can serve them best, seeking to promote popular interest, helping each one by the experience of the rest, advising in organization, certifying to good work done, publishing re THE SELECTION OF BOOKS FOR A PUBLIC LIBRARY.* BY J. N. LARNED, of the Buffalo Library. THE end of a public library is public educa- | among people specially competent to appraise tion - education of the whole people, in the them. On that point I shall have something to large sense which comprehends all culture and say later on. every mode of advancement and elevation, in mind, in manners, in character. So the selection of books for a public library is always to be made with that end in view. To a certain point this gives us some quite definite principles of selection. The primary idea of education is an idea of imparted knowledge, and we easily feel ourselves on safe ground in collecting books of knowledge in our library-books of history, biography, science, philosophy, and their kin. Here, the only serious questions are between the best books in their several fields and the books which are less than the best, and generally it is practicable to decide these on most subjects of importance, not by any venturesome judgment of one's own, but by the standing which the books in question take * From some remarks on the subject made to the Library School, at the New York State Library, May 28, 895. But it is not the books of knowledge which present the greater problems of selection to the librarian. Education in our broad sense does not end with knowledge, and a public library is not completed as an educational institution by the most exhaustive collection of the literature of philosophy and fact. To say this is to contradict the opinion of many people, who recognize few useful books outside that class. Their view is wrong. The total result of the education of mankind is that which we call Civilization, which means progress towards the finer and finer fitting of men and women for life in the social state. Most of us are too much inclined, I think, to measure the civilization of our own day by its Science, which is no true measure at all. The science of the present age has grown to be very wonderful; but, much as it may excite us to astonishment, there are fruits of civilization, even in whether skill or clumsiness appears in its construction, are not the first questions to be asked. The prior question, as I conceive, is this: does the book leave any kind of fine and this crude period (and it is very crude), which command our admiration more. The finest and most beautiful human products of the time, whom even the Philistines would join us in choosing for honor, as exemplars to their genera-wholesome feeling in the mind of one who reads tion, might not pass an examination in biology it? That is not a question concerning the mere or physics. They are the men and women, sweet morality of the book, in the conventional meanwith the sweetness and luminous with the lighting of the term. It touches the whole quality which Matthew Arnold never tired of extolling, who represent that side of civilization which is refinement more than knowledge, or which is knowledge refined. I speak wrongly, however, when I say that refinement is one side of civilization, for it is civilization, and all science that lacks it is barbaric, even though steam-engines and the dynamos of Niagara are shaking the earth at its command. Now, the refinements of life come chiefly from its pleasures. That is true to an extent which is sure to surprise us when we think of it first. Unfortunately, it is no less true that the meaner influences which vitiate and vulgarize life, making it gross and coarse, come from the pleasure side of existence, too. There the main sources of the two are together: on one hand, the springs of all art-music, poetry, romance, drama, sculpture, painting brimmed with delights of the imagination and the joy of the beauty of the world; on the other hand, the muddy wells into which so many people choose perversely to dip. These contrary influences are working in every region of pleasurable art, but nowhere else so actively as in the field of letters, and they give rise to the greatest difficulties that are met in the selection of books for a public library. In disseminating the literature which aims at pleasuregiving more than instruction, and at the moving of emotion more than thought, where can a proper line of restriction be drawn? Shall we, in the first place, incline to parsimony in the restriction, and yield no more of this literature than we must to the readers who demand it? I say, no; because, as I have asked you to note, there is a great stream in this channel from the very sources of refinement in civilization, and that stream should be unstintingly diffused. Against the other tide, which flows by the side of this one, but distinguished from it by a thousand mud-marks, we cannot build dikes too busily. On which of the two currents an offered book of entertainment has been floated to us is what we must know, if we can. Whether the book is alive with genius or dead with the lack of it, whether it be brilliant or commonplace, of the work as one of true literature. "Does it leave any kind of fine and wholesome feeling in the mind of one who reads it?" There is no mistaking a feeling of that nature, though it may never seem twice the same in our experience of it. Sometimes it may be to us as though we had eaten of good food; at other times like the tasting of wine; at others, again, like a draught of water from a cool spring. Some books that we read will make us feel that we are lifted as on wings; some will make music within us; some will give us visions; some will just fill us with a happy content. In such feelings there is a refining potency that seems to be equalled in nothing else. The simplest art is as sure to produce them as the highest. We take them from Burns' lines to a field-mouse, from Wordsworth's "Poor Susan," from the story of Ruth, from the story of "The vicar of Wakefield," from the story of "Picciola," from the story of "Daddy Darwin's dovecote," as certainly as from "Hamlet" or from "Henry Esmond." The true pleasure, the fine, pleasure, the civilizing pleasure to be drawn from any form of art is one which leaves a distinctly wholesome feeling of some such nature as these which I have tried to describe; and the poem, the romance, the play, the music, or the picture which has nothing of the sort to give us, but only a moment of sensation and then blankness, does no kind of good, however innocent of positive evil it may be, If the wholesome feeling which all true art produces, in literature or elsewhere, is unmistakable, so, too, are those feelings of the other nature which works of an opposite character give rise to. Our minds are as sensitive to a moral force of gravitation as our bodies are sensitive to the physical force, and we are as conscious of the downward pull upon us of a vulgar tale or a vicious play as we are conscious of the buoyant lift of one that is nobly written. We have, likewise, a mental touch, to which the texture of coarse literature is as distinct a fact as the grit in a muddy road that we grind with our heels. And so I will say again that the conclusive test for a book which offers pleasure rather than knowledge is in the question, "Does it leave any kind of wholesome and fine feeling in the mind of one who reads it?" ་་ All this which I am saying is straightly opposed to a doctrine much preached in our day, by a school of pretenders in art, who have gained such a hearing by their talkativeness that they are seriously dangerous. It first appeared, I believe, in France, among the painters. French literature took infection from it; then England became diseased, and America is in peril. It is the false and ignorant doctrine which phrases itself in the meaningless motto Art for Art's sake!" "Pursue Art for Art's sake -enjoy Art for Art's sake!" say these æsthetic prophets of our generation, who have no comprehension of what Art is. As well talk of sailing a ship for the ship's sake-of wheeling a cart for the cart's sake. of articulating words for the words' sake. Art is a vessel, a vehicle, for the carriage and communication of something from one mind to another mind from one soul to another soul. Without a content, it has no more reason for its being than a meaningless word could have in human speech. Considered in itself and for its own sake, it has no existence — it is an imposture — a mere simulation of Art; for that which, duly filled with meanings and laden with a message, would be Art, is then but the handicraft of a skilful mechanic. But the truth is that there is a cunning deceit in this pretension to "Art for Art's sake." Those who lead the cry do not mean what their words seem to imply. They do not mean the emptiness that one might suppose. What they do mean, as their practice proves, is to put something ignoble in the place of what should be noble, something vulgar or something vile in the place of what should be wholly pure and wholly fine. What they are really striving to do is to degrade the content of Art, and to persuade the world that it can be made the vehicle of low suggestions and mean ideals without ceasing to be Art in the noble sense. In literature, the workers to that end are nowadays very busy, and the countenance they receive is disheartening to see. It is for us who are among the custodians of good literature to set our faces against them, I offer you as the one most important maxim that can be laid down for your guidance in the selection of booksBeware of the literature of the school which preaches "Art for Art's sake." So much for the theory of the matter. It is a theory that we may not be able, perhaps, to wholly carry out, but it is our duty to go as far in that way as we can. THE TRAINING OF LIBRARY EMPLOYES.-III. BY ADELAIDE R. HASSE, ACCESSION work. In almost all libraries the general routine is based in the main upon identical lines, differing only in so far as these are influenced by local conditions. So all libraries support a purchasing department, whose chief adjunct is the accession department. Since the card system has been extended to other than cataloging purposes, the librarian has delegated to the staff the care of a large part of the work of the purchasing department, such as keeping records of books to be purchased, books ordered, periodical subscriptions, etc. Here belongs also the filing and indexing of correspondence, and, as much of this work must come from the librarian's office, some attention should be given here to the relations of the librarian with the board, the filing of committee reports, the indexing of the minute book, the form of the librarian's monthly reports to the board, the preliminary arrangements attendant upon meetings of the board, etc. Encourage the inventive faculty of pupils in matters of filing and arrangement; never hesitate to acknowledge defects in your own methods. Bright pupils have often been led in this way to develop an interest which resulted in valuable suggestions. Purchasing Books: Pupils having been required to submit monthly lists of new books, with references where obtained, etc., they are now more or less familiar with all the book reviews to be found in the library. Let them extend their acquaintance to at least all the American and the leading English book reviews, by reporting upon the scope, special features, departments, editorship, manner of publication, whether m., w. or qr., etc., price, size, address, how long established, etc. To do this the person in charge of the class should have provided sample copies of the reviews; lists published by periodical agencies; the Review of Reviews indexed, in place of which the monthly index may be used, etc. These, with publishers' catalogs, comprise the tools by the aid of which the average public library compiles its order lists. To acquaint the pupils at once with publishers, their specialties, catalogs, etc., set them to work in some such manner as this: Prepare a list of five largest American publishing firms, firm-name, place of business, with at least three important publications of each. Same, English. Name five English and five American secondhand dealers, giving firm-name, place of business, etc. cises covering this ground may be given to pupils as follows: Prepare lists of leading American periodicals specially devoted to economics, music, art, industry, education, women, drama, engineering, history, electricity, science, agriculture, outdoor sports, juvenile interests, etc., stating any decided points of variance among magazines of one subject, place where published, size, cost, how long published, important contributions, etc. Prepare a subscription list of your own selection. Let pupils make their own selections of the above without suggestions; have the lists comName American publishing houses making a pared in class; let pupils defend all questioned specialty of the following: maps, atlases, etc.; selections. Give some attention with pupils to medical books; complete editions of American | subject of filing of current periodicals; of temauthors; engineering; photography; transla-porary binders, varieties, advantages and cost; tions, music, etc. Who publishes the following: Variorum Shakespeare; Story of the nations; red line edition of the poets; Contemporary science ser.; International education ser. ; Sacred books of the East, etc.? of binding of periodicals for circulation and reference; of the various uses to which periodicals may be put (see ann. rpt. Los Angeles P. L., 1893-4). Pupils should be taught methods of keeping subscriptions, expirations, etc., in both card References: Publishers' Weekly; “American | and ledger systems. See L. J., and Denver P. Catalogue," with supplements; "Trade List L. "Handbook"; "Hints for small libraries," Annual;" "Annual Catalogues;" "A. L. A. Plummer. Catalog;" Publishers' Circular; Whitaker's "Reference Catalogue;" Low's Catalogues ; Sonnenschein, 1st and 2d eds.; Poole. Let the pupils early form the habit of using reference books, and require of them, when submitting the result of such exercises as the above, to include a list of the reference books which they have used, other than those which have been suggested, thereby giving an indication of their own ability of research. Let pupils prepare model forms for ordering books; fill out all blanks used by the library in ordering books; examine blanks of other libraries, etc. For practice many of these exercises may be typewritten, or when done in manuscript, a good library hand should be insisted on. Pupils should have explained to them in this connection the system of average library discounts; cost of transportation by freight, book post, mail; an outline of copyright laws; of the laws governing the importation of foreign books. References: Indexes in yolumes of Publishers' Weekly; U. 5. Official Postal Guide; Putnam, "Law of copyright." Periodicals: Many libraries now number among their most desirable features the circulation of periodicals, and almost every library carries a large stock for reference. Exer Newspapers: Newspapers were a feature of public libraries before periodicals had begun to be considered as within their province. Let pupils prepare lists of leading newspapers of various political parties, leading German-American papers, also French and Italian, showing where and by whom published, cost, how often issued, etc. Study newspaper files; systems of checking receipt of newspapers; methods of caring for old files; care of clippings; binding, etc. In a public library it will be quite impossible for even one person to take the time to oversee a continuous course of work such as the above; and it should therefore be scheduled in relays, as suggested in the July L. J., or it may be given for "busy work" in instalments during those hours when the pupil is not actually employed in one of the departments. For a guide in the practical work of the accession department use the Library School accession rules; have pupils make a note of the specifications for an order for an accession book. Fac-simile sheets of the accession book should be furnished them, or they should rule them themselves, and fill them out with sample entries of various kinds of books, such as newspapers, books of more than one volume, periodicals, maps, music, etc. |