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Page 3
Often it is not well to lay great plans and invoke state aid at the
very outset. Make a beginning, even though it be small, is a good
general rule. This beginning, however petty it seems, will give a
center for further effort, and will furnish practical illustrations
for the arguments one may wish to use in trying to interest people in
the movement.
Each community has different needs, and begins its library under
different conditions. Consider then, whether you need most a library
devoted chiefly to the work of helping the schools, or one to be used
mainly for reference, or one that shall run largely to periodicals and
be not much more than a reading room, or one particularly attractive
to girls and women, or one that shall not be much more than a cheerful
resting-place, attractive enough to draw man and boy from street
corner and saloon. Decide this question early, that all effort may be
concentrated to one end, and that your young institution may suit the
community in which it is to grow, and from which it is to gain its
strength.
Having decided to have a library, keep the movement well before
the public. The necessity of the library, its great value to the
community, should be urged by the local press, from the platform, and
in personal talk. Include in your canvass all citizens, irrespective
of creed, business, or politics; whether educated or illiterate.
Enlist the support of teachers, and through them interest children and
parents. Literary, art, social, and scientific societies, Chautauqua
circles, local clubs of all kinds should be champions of the movement.
In getting notices of the library's work in the newspapers, or in
securing mention of it from the lecture platform, or in clubs, and
literary, artistic, and musical societies, it is better to refrain
from figures and to deal chiefly in general statements about what the
library aims to do and what it has done.
CHAPTER III
What does a public library do for a community?
And what good does a public library do? What is it for?
1) It supplies the public with recreative reading. To the masses of
the people--hard-worked and living humdrum lives--the novel comes
as an open door to an ideal life, in the enjoyment of which one may
forget, for a time, the hardships or the tedium of the real. One of
the best functions of the public library is to raise this recreative
reading of the community to higher and higher levels; to replace trash
with literature of a better order.
2) A proper and worthy aim of the public library is the supplying of
books on every profession, art, or handicraft, that workers in every
department who care to study may perfect themselves in their work.
3) The public library helps in social and political education--in the
training of citizens. It is, of course, well supplied with books and
periodicals which give the thought of the best writers on the economic
and social questions now under earnest discussion.
4) The highest and best influence of the library may be summed up
in the single word, culture. No other word so well describes the
influence of the diffusion of good reading among the people in giving
tone and character to their intellectual life.
5) The free reading room connected with most of our public libraries,
and the library proper as well, if it be rightly conducted, is a
powerful agent for counteracting the attractions of saloons and low
resorts. Especially useful is it to those boys and young men who have
a dormant fondness for reading and culture, but lack home and school
opportunities.
6) The library is the ever-ready helper of the school-teacher. It aids
the work of reading circles and other home-culture organizations, by
furnishing books required and giving hints as to their value and use;
it adds to the usefulness of courses of lectures by furnishing
lists of books on the subjects to be treated; it allies itself with
university extension work; in fact, the extension lecture given in
connection with the free use of a good library seems to be the ideal
university of the people.
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