Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 6
The librarian should have culture, scholarship, and executive ability.
He should keep always in advance of his community, and constantly
educate it to make greater demands upon him. He should be a leader and
a teacher, earnest, enthusiastic, and intelligent. He should be able
to win the confidence of children, and wise to lead them by easy steps
from good books to the best. He has the greatest opportunity of any
teacher in the community. He should be the teacher of teachers. He
should make the library a school for the young, a college for adults,
and the constant center of such educational activity as will make
wholesome and inspiring themes the burden of the common thought. He
should be enough of a bookworm to have a decided taste and fondness
for books, and at the same time not enough to be such a recluse as
loses sight of the point of view of those who know little of books.
As the responsible head of the institution, he should be consulted in
all matters relating to its management. The most satisfactory results
are obtained in those libraries where the chief librarian is permitted
to appoint assistants, select books, buy supplies, make regulations,
and decide methods of cataloging, classifying, and lending; all
subject to the approval of the trustees. Trustees should impose
responsibility, grant freedom, and exact results.
To the librarian himself one may say: Be punctual; be attentive; help
develop enthusiasm in your assistants; be neat and consistent in your
dress; be dignified but courteous in your manner. Be careful in your
contracts; be square with your board; be concise and technical;
be accurate; be courageous and self-reliant; be careful about
acknowledgments; be not worshipful of your work; be careful of your
health. Last of all, be yourself.
CHAPTER VII
The trained librarian in a small library
Julia A. Hopkins, of the Rochester (N.Y.) Public library, in Public
Libraries, December, 1897
The value of training for the man or woman who shall take charge of a
large city library is now so firmly established that no one thinks
of discussing the question. If it is true that technical training is
essential for the headship of a large library, why is it not equally
necessary for that of a small library? Trained service is always of
greater value than untrained service, be the sphere great or small. If
a woman argued from the standpoint that, because the house she was to
take charge of had only seven rooms instead of twenty she needed to
know nothing of cooking, sweeping, and the other details of household
work, I am afraid that her house and her family would suffer for her
ignorance. So in many departments of library work the accident of size
makes little or no difference; the work is precisely the same. The
difference lies in the fact that the head of a large library oversees
and directs the work done by others, where the village librarian
must, in many cases, do all of the work himself. In the distinctly
professional duties, such as the ordering, classifying, and cataloging
of books, there is a difference only in amount between the greater and
the less. And it is precisely these professional duties of which the
person untrained in library work is in most cases wofully ignorant.
It is inevitable that in starting a library there should be some
mistakes made; but with a trained librarian in charge, these mistakes
will be fewer in number. For example, what does the novice know of
classification? He realizes that the books, for convenience in use,
must be grouped in classes. If he has had the use of a good library
(as a college student would) he has some idea as to how the class
divisions are made, and knows also that there must be some sort of
notation for the classes. Necessity being the mother of invention, he
contrives some plan for bringing together books on the same subject.
But with the addition of books to the library and the demand which
growth makes, he finds that constant changes have to be made in order
to get books into their right places; and then some day he awakens to
the fact that there is some perfectly well-known and adopted system of
classification which will answer all his purposes, and be a great deal
more satisfactory in its adaptability to the needs of his library than
the one he has been struggling to evolve. Then he exclaims in despair:
If I had only known of that at the beginning! He feels that the hours
which he has spent in rearranging his books, taking them out of one
class and putting them into another, although hours of such hard work,
are in reality so many hours of wasted time. And he is right; for
every minute spent in unnecessary work is so much lost time. Not only
that, but it is unnecessary expense, and one of the most important
things which a small library has to consider is economy.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|