A Library Primer | Page 2

secured.
In chapters 44 and 45 will be found a list of state library commissions,
important provisions in library laws, and the names of the states having
the best library laws at present.
Before taking any definite steps, learn about the beginnings of other
libraries by writing to people who have had experience, and especially
to libraries in communities similar in size and character to your own.
Write to some of the new libraries in other towns and villages of your
state, and learn how they began. Visit several such libraries, if possible,
the smaller the better if you are starting on a small scale.
CHAPTER II
Preliminary work
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