city has, then it is useless to argue. If you were in the business of receiving money for stopping deaths of children, would you not get together all the data upon milk inspections and all milk ordinances? Just sit down and take a pencil and reckon up what the milk ordinance was worth to the city of Rochester. Think of what it was worth in dollars and cents, if you please. Think what it was worth in human happiness, which you can't measure in dollars and cents, and just ask yourself if it does not pay to get the great experience from other cities for your own. I venture to say that there are mighty few writers in this country who know much about the recent literature upon the milk supply and there are still fewer libraries where these valuable documents are advertised to the public. I have given one instance. I can give a hundred. The whole investment in the city library is small compared with what you can do with one ordinance upon a great subject. What is it when you consider the hundred subjects which are coming into the daily life of the city? I ask you, am I exaggerating it one bit, when I tell you that the city library is neglecting its duty and that it should be the greatest investment, the greatest business proposition which the city possesses? I am willing to put these facts before any business man and I don't fear the results. Is it not plain common sense to make a special effort to collect comparative data? If we were engaged in any business of any kind, would we not try to hunt up the experience of other places, and the history of previous progress? If we did not, we certainly should not have the civilization that we have today. As many of the great thinkers have pointed out, we differ from the lower animals in the very fact that our environment and our previous history can be built upon and can be used to make our lives better in the future, and civilization is, fortunately for us, cumulative. The truths of this statement can be seen at once. If we should think of all human knowledge now written in books and manuscripts being destroyed at once, how could we build up our system in jurisprudence? The painful experience of the Chinese Empire at the present time, in the reorganization of its laws, shows the The Value of truth of this statement. Our civilization, our art and our literature are built upon the foundation of the past, and built upon the experience of the past. But what has the ordinary city library to do with the experience of the past in the government of the cities? You may find a few books, stray ones, upon civic government, but many libraries will have the ordinances of their own cities, and let alone the ordinances of other cities. How many have ever tried to get this experience from the past, from history, from other cities, in order to make laws and ordinances of their own city better, so that the people may have less expenses, less taxes, more helpfulness, better educational facilities and more of good things that life has in store for us? This may seem a utilitarian theory, and it is. The Mistakes of Ignorance Let me repeat and reiterate. Let us get down to business. Let us have an institution where dearly bought experience can be collected, so that we won't make the awful mistakes that we have been making, not merely through corruption, but through ignorance and lack of information. Let us pursue in our library, in our store-house of knowledge, the similar methods that we would in our ordinary business. Let us make our city library, not only a beautiful place-a home for our children, our women, and our young men, but let us make it the best paying proposition that the city has. You convince your business men of the city that your library is a business institution, saving time and money. If they understand this, they will go down deep into their pockets and see to it that you will have everything that you want in that library. If you want stained glass windows and beautiful books and ornaments for your library, you will get them and nothing will be said if you show them that you are saving them money, so that it is not only, then, from a point of business, but also from the point of political expediency, to your interest, to establish departments of this kind and keep up with the great interests of today. It is not only in getting the data, such as I have explained above, that the library is useful, but a library is much like a banking system in our national credit system. The amount of money in the system does not depend merely upon the abso lute amount, but it depends largely upon the rapidity of circulation and it depends upon many other elements of that kind. It is the same way with information. If you get hold of a good book on tuberculosis, you have done a worthy thing, but the efficiency of that book depends upon the number of people who read it and the number of times you got that information out to the great mass of people. In this way you can help out public sentiment and consequently you make good government. It takes a long while to get new ideas to people; the quicker you get them to the people, the more efficient you are. Your library should be like a lump of yeast. You should have an organization which would have some way of sending a growing plant through the body politic. The system with which you get your information out, the rapidity of circulation, the wideness of the field of circulation, are just as important factors as is the factor of getting the material in first place. We need some machinery for getting this information more quickly to the people. We need this as a part of this general business proposition. A business man, if he had a good thing, would certainly advertise, and the advertising part certainly should be a great department in the library. If you were going to go into business tomorrow to cure tuberculosis, you would not sit down quietly in some back room and say nothing about it. If you were going to make money out of it and make it the best, you would flash it upon every wall, so that people could understand it. Now when we know of the scientific discoveries in the prevention of tuberculosis and we have this scientific information in our library, we should flash it out some way to the people. If we have information about any of the important things in our civic life, the great improvements in human thought, we ought to flash it out in the same way. It is not a question of ancient sentiment as to the dignity of library methods, it is one of doing good by whatever means you can do good. It is a simple business proposition. What I have said here today, I can only say to any business man and he cannot criticise it and the only criticism I am getting upon a proposition of this kind, is from mossbacked indi viduals who have been kept carefully within the artificial sanctions of the past. I am not afraid of a business man looking at this proposition any other way than the way I look at it. Our libraries should be a part of our civic life. If your city is advertising its facilities in trying to build up great manufactures, then the library should cooperate with the citizens and organize for that purpose. It should be in every act or movement for the betterment of the city, both from the business side and from the city beautiful side. We are met by a hundred things in the cities, where one thing touches from the national government, or from the state. The national government and the state government take but slowly the things from the foreign countries. We get them into cities first and they are strange to us and we know nothing of their history or their inception. As we have become crowded in our cities, we are meeting problems which we never thought of before, and we must meet them largely in the way in which people have met problems of the same kinds in other cities, where crowded conditions have existed. Those cities are in the crowded districts of Europe, and the strange new things which we have in our city life today are coming from those cities, and we must make no mistakes in dealing with them. Those mistakes will be costly. They effect vitally the happiness of human beings, and as we reduce the number of those mistakes, so will we make happiness for human beings. I know of no greater joy than the realization that a man knows that he is doing good in the world and making greater happiness in the world, and I will tell my brother librarians tonight that they will find no greater happiness than working in these new city problems, and you can see every day you work, however little you do, what wonderful things you can accomplish. We want a man who can get hold of these ideas, who knows how to get a hold of them, and who uses them as a carpenter does his lumber, to take something out of it-to build something out of it. We need the teacher-librarian. The teacher-librarian is a librarian of the future. We need the specialist, especially in the great field of sociology, because it is in this great field that the city activities and great civic improvements are being agitated. What I have given you about coöperation and gathering of comparative data, is not any new idea. It is already at work in many cities and has been especially successful in Germany. Quoting from Annals of American Academy, May, 1908, describing the German Stadtetag: The German More important than the meetings of the Stadtetag is the central bureau opened on April 1, 1906, in Berlin. The director of this bureau is selected by the administrative committee and must be a man educated in law or in political economy and familiar with city laws and city administration. He is furnished with a staff of helpers and secretaries, and under the oversight of the administrative committee carries on the work pertaining to the office. The tasks which this central office have undertaken are many. A preliminary step for all its other activities is the creation and maintenance of a special library dealing with city affairs. Designed to be of use in research work, it includes not only books and other publications common to all libraries, but also a variety of material such as schedules, public announcements, copies of important documents and newspaper clippings. Each member of the Stadtetag is pledged to furnish free of charge a copy of all its more important printed matter relating in any way to city government or to city life. In addition scientific studies and standard works are purchased directly with money set aside out of the income of the Stadetag. Not counting some six hundred books and written articles presented by the city exposition of Dresden, the library now includes over a thousand general administrative reports and city budgets, more than eight thousand local laws, tariffs, and service instructions, hundreds of police regulations and city council decrees, historical works and statistical material of all kinds. The material is grouped according to the following arrangement: 1. (a) Administrative reports. (b) Current bills, municipal journals, reports of sittings. (c) Personal information, directories, etc. |