A Book for All Readers Part 21

CHAPTER 20.

THE FORMATION OF LIBRARIES.

In the widely extended and growing public interest in libraries for the people, and in the ever increasing gatherings of books by private collectors, I may be pardoned for some suggestions pertaining specially to the formation of libraries. I do not refer to the selection of books, which is treated in the first chapter, nor to the housing and care of libraries, but to some important points involved in organizing the foundation, so to speak, of a library.

The problem, of course, is a widely different one for the private collector of an individual or family library, and for the organizers of a public one. But in either case, it is important, first of all, to have a clearly defined and well considered plan. Without this, costly mistakes are apt to be made, and time, energy and money wasted, all of which might be saved by seeing the end from the beginning, and planning accordingly.

Let us suppose that a resident in a community which has never enjoyed the benefit of a circulating library conceives the idea of using every means to secure one. The first question that arises is, what are those means?

If the State in which his residence lies has a Library law, empowering any town or city to raise money by taxation for founding and maintaining a free library, the way is apparently easy, at first sight. But here comes in the problem--can the requisite authority to lay the tax be secured? This may involve difficulties unforeseen at first. If there is a city charter, does it empower the munic.i.p.al authorities (city council or aldermen) to levy such a tax? If not, then appeal must be made to a popular vote, at some election of munic.i.p.al officers, at which the ballots for or against a Library tax should determine the question. This will at once involve a campaign of education, in which should be enlisted (1) The editors of all the local papers. (2) The local clergymen, lawyers and physicians. (3) All literary men and citizens of wealth or influence in the community. (4) All teachers in the public schools and other inst.i.tutions of learning. (5) The members of the city or town government.

These last will be apt to feel any impulse of public sentiment more keenly than their own individual opinions on the subject. In any case, the public-spirited man who originates the movement should enlist as many able coadjutors as he can. If he is not himself gifted with a ready tongue, he should persuade some others who are ready and eloquent talkers to take up the cause, and should inspire them with his own zeal. A public meeting should be called, after a goodly number of well-known and influential people are enlisted (not before) and addresses should be made, setting forth the great advantage of a free library to every family. Its value to educate the people, to furnish entertainment that will go far to supplant idleness and intemperance, to help on the work of the public schools, and to elevate the taste, improve the morals, quicken the intellect and employ the leisure hours of all, should be set forth.

With all these means of persuasion constantly in exercise, and unremitting diligence in pushing the good cause through the press and by every private opportunity, up to the very day of the election, the chances are heavily in favor of pa.s.sing the library measure by a good majority. It must be a truly Boeotian community, far gone in stupidity or something worse, which would so stand in its own light as to vote down a measure conducing in the highest degree to the public intelligence.

But even should it be defeated, its advocates should never be discouraged. Like all other reforms or improvements, its progress may be slow at first, but it is none the less sure to win in the end. One defeat has often led to a more complete victory when the conflict is renewed.

The beaten party gathers wisdom by experience, finds out any weakness existing in its ranks or its management, and becomes sensible where its greatest strength should be put forth in a renewal of the contest. The promoters of the measure should at once begin a fresh agitation. They should pledge every friend of the library scheme to stand by it himself, and to secure at least one new convert to the cause. And the chances are that it will be carried triumphantly through at the next trial, or, if not then, at least within no long time.

But we should consider also the case of those communities where no State Library law exists. These are unhappily not a few; and it is a remarkable fact that even so old, and rich, and well-developed a State as Pennsylvania had no such provision for public enlightenment until within three years. In the absence of a law empowering local governments or voters to lay a tax for such a purpose, the most obvious way of founding a library is by local subscription. This is of course a less desirable method than one by which all citizens should contribute to the object in proportion to their means. But it is better to avail of the means that exist in any place than to wait an indefinite period for a State Legislature to be educated up to the point of pa.s.sing measures which would render the formation of libraries easy in all places.

Let the experiment be tried of founding a library by individual effort and concert. With only two or three zealous and active promoters, even such a plan can be carried into successful operation in almost any community. A canva.s.s should be made from house to house, with a short prospectus or agreement drawn up, pledging the subscribers to give a certain sum toward the foundation of a library. If a few residents with large property can be induced to head the list with liberal subscriptions, it will aid much in securing confidence in the success of the movement, and inducing others to subscribe. No contributions, however small, should fail to be welcomed, since they stand for a wider interest in the object. After a thorough canva.s.s of the residents of the place, a meeting of those subscribing should be called, and a statement put before them of the amount subscribed. Then an executive committee, say of three or five members, should be chosen to take charge of the enterprise. This committee should appoint a chairman, a secretary, and a treasurer, the latter to receive and disburse the funds subscribed. The chairman should call and preside at meetings of the committee, of which the secretary should record the proceedings in a book kept for the purpose.

The first business of the Library committee should be to confer and determine upon the ways and means of organizing the library. This involves a selection of books suitable for a beginning, a place of deposit for them, and a custodian or librarian to catalogue them and keep the record of the books drawn out and returned. Usually, a room can be had for library purposes in some public building or private house, centrally located, without other expense than that of warming and lighting. The services of a librarian, too, can often be secured by competent volunteer aid, there being usually highly intelligent persons with sufficient leisure to give their time for the common benefit, or to share that duty with others, thus saving all the funds for books to enrich the library.

The chief trouble likely to be encountered by a Library committee will lie in the selection of books to form the nucleus or starting point of the collection. Without repeating anything heretofore suggested, it may be said that great care should be taken to have books known to be excellent, both interesting in substance and attractive in style. To so apportion the moderate amount of money at disposal as to give variety and interest to the collection, and attract readers from the start, is a problem requiring good judgment for its solution. Much depends upon the extent of the fund, but even with so small a sum as two or three hundred dollars, a collection of the very best historians, poets, essayists, travellers and voyagers, scientists, and novelists can be brought together, which will furnish a range of entertaining and instructive reading for several hundred borrowers. The costlier encyclopaedias and works of reference might be waited for until funds are recruited by a library fair, or lectures, or amateur concerts, plays, or other evening entertainments.

Another way of recruiting the library which has often proved fruitful is to solicit contributions of books and magazines from families and individuals in the vicinity. This should be undertaken systematically some time after the subscriptions in money have been gathered in. It is not good policy to aim at such donations at the outset, since many might make them an excuse for not subscribing to the fund for founding the library, which it is to the interest of all to make as large as possible.

But when once successfully established, appeals for books and periodicals will surely add largely to the collection, and although many of such accessions may be duplicates, they will none the less enlarge the facilities for supplying the demands of readers. Families who have read through all or nearly all the books they possess will gladly bestow them for so useful a purpose, especially when a.s.sured of reaping reciprocal benefit by the opportunity of freely perusing a great variety of choice books, new and old, which they have never read. Sometimes, too, a public-spirited citizen, when advised of the lack of a good cyclopaedia, or of the latest extensive dictionary, or collective biography, in the library, will be happy to supply it, thereby winning the grat.i.tude and good will of all who frequent the library. All donations should have inserted in them a neat book-plate, with the name of the donor inscribed, in connection with the name of the Library.

Many a useful library of circulation has been started with a beginning of fifty to a hundred volumes, and the little acorn of learning thus planted has grown up in the course of years to a great tree, full of fruitful and wide-spreading branches.

CHAPTER 21.

CLa.s.sIFICATION.

If there is any subject which, more than all others, divides opinion and provokes endless controversy among librarians and scholars, it is the proper cla.s.sification of books. From the beginning of literature this has been a well-nigh insoluble problem. Treatise after treatise has been written upon it, system has been piled upon system, learned men have theorised and wrangled about it all their lives, and successive generations have dropped into their graves, leaving the vexed question as unsettled as ever. Every now and then a body of _savans_ or a convention of librarians wrestles with it, and perhaps votes upon it,

"And by decision more embroils the fray"

since the dissatisfied minority, nearly as numerous and quite as obstinate as the majority, always refuses to be bound by it. No sooner does some sapient librarian, with the sublime confidence of conviction, get his cla.s.sification house of cards constructed to his mind, and stands rapt in admiration before it, when there comes along some wise man of the east, and demolishes the fair edifice at a blow, while the architect stands by with a melancholy smile, and sees all his household G.o.ds lying shivered around him.

Meanwhile, systems of cla.s.sification keep on growing, until, instead of the thirty-two systems so elaborately described in Edwards's Memoirs of Libraries, we have almost as many as there are libraries, if the endless modifications of them are taken into account. In fact, one begins to realise that the schemes for the cla.s.sification of knowledge are becoming so numerous, that a cla.s.sification of the systems themselves has fairly become a desideratum. The youthful neophyte, who is struggling after an education in library science, and thinks perhaps that it is or should be an exact science, is bewildered by the mult.i.tude of counsellors, gets a head-ache over their conflicting systems, and adds to it a heart-ache, perhaps, over the animosities and sarcasms which divide the warring schools of opinion.

Perhaps there would be less trouble about cla.s.sification, if the system-mongers would consent to admit at the outset that no infallible system is possible, and would endeavor, amid all their other learning, to learn a little of the saving grace of modesty. A writer upon this subject has well observed that there is no man who can work out a scheme of cla.s.sification that will satisfy permanently even himself. Much less should he expect that others, all having their favorite ideas and systems, should be satisfied with his. As there is no royal road to learning, so there can be none to cla.s.sification; and we democratic republicans, who stand upon the threshold of the twentieth century, may rest satisfied that in the Republic of Letters no autocrat can be allowed.

The chief difficulty with most systems for distributing the books in a library appears to lie in the attempt to apply scientific minuteness in a region where it is largely inapplicable. One can divide and sub-divide the literature of any science indefinitely, in a list of subjects, but such exhaustive sub-divisions can never be made among the books on the shelves. Here, for example, is a "Treatise on diseases of the heart and lungs." This falls naturally into its two places in the subject catalogue, the one under "Heart," and the second under "Lungs;" but the attempt to cla.s.sify it on the shelves must fail, as regards half its contents. You cannot tear the book to pieces to satisfy logical cla.s.sification. Thousands of similar cases will occur, where the same book treats of several subjects. Nearly all periodicals and transactions of societies of every kind refuse to be cla.s.sified, though they can be catalogued perfectly on paper by a.n.a.lysing their contents. To bring all the resources of the library on any subject together on the shelves is clearly impossible. They must be a.s.sembled for readers from various sections of the library, where the rule of a.n.a.logy or of superior convenience has placed them.

What is termed close cla.s.sification, it will be found, fails by attempting too much. One of the chief obstacles to its general use is that it involves a too complicated notation. The many letters and figures that indicate position on the shelves are difficult to remember in the direct ratio of their number. The more minute the cla.s.sification, the more signs of location are required. When they become very numerous, in any system of cla.s.sification, the system breaks down by its own weight.

Library attendants consume an undue amount of time in learning it, and library cataloguers and cla.s.sifiers in affixing the requisite signs of designation to the labels, the shelves, and the catalogues. Memory, too, is unduly taxed to apply the system. While a superior memory may be found equal to any task imposed upon it, average memories are not so fortunate.

The expert librarian, in whose accomplished head the whole world of science and literature lies coordinated, so that he can apply his cla.s.sification unerringly to all the books in a vast library, must not presume that unskilled a.s.sistants can do the same.

One of the mistakes made by the positivists in cla.s.sification is the claim that their favorite system can be applied to all libraries alike.

That this is a fallacy may be seen in an example or two. Take the case of a large and comprehensive Botanical library, in which an exact scientific distribution of the books may and should be made. It is cla.s.sified not only in the grand divisions, such as scientific and economic botany, etc., but a close a.n.a.lytical treatment is extended over the whole vegetable kingdom. Books treating of every plant are relegated to their appropriate cla.s.ses, genera, and species, until the whole library is organised on a strictly scientific basis. But in the case, even of what are called large libraries, so minute a cla.s.sification would be not only unnecessary, but even obstructive to prompt service of the books. And the average town library, containing only a shelf or two of botanical works, clearly has no use for such a cla.s.sification. The attempt to impose a universal law upon library arrangement, while the conditions of the collections are endlessly varied, is foredoomed to failure.

The object of cla.s.sification is to bring order out of confusion, and to arrange the great ma.s.s of books in science and literature of which every library is composed, so that those on related subjects should be as nearly as possible brought together. Let us suppose a collection of some hundred thousand volumes, in all branches of human knowledge, thrown together without any cla.s.sification or catalogue, on the tables, the shelves, and the floor of an extensive reading-room. Suppose also an a.s.semblage of scholars and other readers, ready and anxious to avail themselves of these literary treasures, this immense library without a key. Each wants some certain book, by some author whose name he knows, or upon some subject upon which he seeks to inform himself. But how vain and hopeless the effort to go through all this chaos of learning, to find the one volume which he needs! This ill.u.s.tration points the prime necessity of cla.s.sification of some kind, before a collection of books can be used in an available way.

Then comes in the skilled bibliographer, to convert this chaos into a cosmos, to illumine this darkness with the light of science. He distributes the whole ma.s.s, volume by volume, into a few great distinct cla.s.ses; he creates families or sub-divisions in every cla.s.s; he a.s.sembles together in groups all that treat of the same subject, or any of its branches; and thus the entire scattered mult.i.tude of volumes is at length coordinated into a clear and systematic collection, ready for use in every department. A great library is like a great army: when unorganized, your army is a mere undisciplined mob: but divide and sub-divide it into army corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, and companies, and you can put your finger upon every man.

To make this complete organization of a library successful, one must have an organising mind, a wide acquaintance with literature, history, and the outlines, at least, of all the sciences; a knowledge of the ancient and of various modern languages; a quick intuition, a ripe judgment, a cultivated taste, a retentive memory, and a patience and perseverance that are inexhaustible.

Even were all these qualities possessed, there will be in the arrangement elements of discord and of a failure. A mult.i.tude of uncertain points in cla.s.sification, and many exceptions will arise; and these must of necessity be settled arbitrarily. The more conversant one becomes with systems of cla.s.sification, when reduced to practice, the more he becomes a.s.sured that a perfect bibliographical system is impossible.

Every system of cla.s.sification must find its application fraught with doubts, complications, and difficulties; but the wise bibliographer will not pause in his work to resolve all these insoluble problems; he will cla.s.sify the book in hand according to his best judgment at the moment it comes before him. He can no more afford to spend time over intricate questions of the preponderance of this, that, or the other subject in a book, than a man about to walk to a certain place can afford to debate whether he shall put his right foot forward or his left. The one thing needful is to go forward.

Referring to the chapter on bibliography for other details, I may here say that the French claim to have reached a highly practical system of cla.s.sification in that set forth in J. C. Brunet's _Manuel du Libraire_.

This is now generally used in the arrangement of collections of books in France, with some modifications, and the book trade find it so well adapted to their wants, that cla.s.sified sale and auction catalogues are mostly arranged on that system. It has only five grand divisions: Theology, Law, Arts and Sciences, Belles-lettres, and History. Each of these cla.s.ses has numerous sub-divisions. For example, geography and voyages and travels form a division of history, between the philosophy of history and chronology, etc.

The cla.s.sification in use in the _Bibliotheque nationale_ of France places Theology first, followed by Law, History, Philosophy and Belles-lettres. The grand division of Philosophy includes all which is cla.s.sified under Arts and Sciences in the system of Brunet.

In the Library of the British Museum the cla.s.sification starts with Theology, followed by 2. Jurisprudence; 3. Natural History (including Botany, Geology, Zoology, and Medicine); 4. Art (including Archaeology, Fine Arts, Architecture, Music, and Useful Arts); 5. Philosophy (including Politics, Economics, Sociology, Education, Ethics, Metaphysics, Mathematics, Military and Naval Science, and Chemistry); 6.

History (including Heraldry and Genealogy); 7. Geography (including Ethnology); 8. Biography (including Epistles); 9. Belles-lettres (including Poetry, Drama, Rhetoric, Criticism, Bibliography, Collected Works, Encyclopaedias, Speeches, Proverbs, Anecdotes, Satirical and facetious works, Essays, Folklore and Fiction); 10. Philology.

Sub-divisions by countries are introduced in nearly all the cla.s.ses.

In the Library of Congress the cla.s.sification was originally based upon Lord Bacon's scheme for the division of knowledge into three great cla.s.ses, according to the faculty of the mind employed in each. 1.

History (based upon memory); 2. Philosophy (based upon reason); 3. Poetry (based upon imagination). This scheme was much better adapted to a cla.s.sification of ideas than of books. Its failure to answer the ends of a practical cla.s.sification of the library led to radical modifications of the plan, as applied to the books on the shelves, for reasons of logical arrangement, as well as of convenience. A more thorough and systematic re-arrangement is now in progress.

Mr. C. A. Cutter has devised a system of "Expansive cla.s.sification," now widely used in American libraries. In this, the cla.s.ses are each indicated by a single letter, followed by numbers representing divisions by countries, and these in turn by letters indicating sub-divisions by subjects, etc. It is claimed that this method is not a rigid unchangeable system, but adaptable in a high degree, and capable of modification to suit the special wants of any library. In it the whole range of literature and science is divided into several grand cla.s.ses, which, with their sub-cla.s.ses, are indicated by the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Thus Cla.s.s A embraces Generalia; B to D, Spiritual sciences (including philosophy and religion); E to G, Historical sciences (including, besides history and biography, geography and travels); H to K, Social sciences (including law and political science and economics); L to P, Natural sciences; Q, Medicine; and R to Z, Arts (including not only mechanical, recreative and fine arts, but music, languages, literature, and bibliography).

The sub-divisions of these princ.i.p.al cla.s.ses are arranged with progressive fullness, to suit smaller or larger libraries. Thus, the first cla.s.sification provides only eleven cla.s.ses, suited to very small libraries: the second is expanded to fifteen cla.s.ses, the third to thirty cla.s.ses, and so on up to the seventh or final one, designed to provide for the arrangement of the very largest libraries.

This is the most elaborate and far-reaching library cla.s.sification yet put forth, claiming superior clearness, flexibility, brevity of notation, logical coordination, etc., while objections have been freely made to it on the score of over-refinement and aiming at the unattainable.

What is known as the decimal or the Dewey system of cla.s.sification was originally suggested by Mr. N. B. Shurtleff's "Decimal system for the arrangement and administration of libraries," published at Boston in 1856. But in its present form it has been developed by Mr. Melvil Dewey into a most ingenious scheme for distributing the whole vast range of human knowledge into ten cla.s.ses, marked from 0 to 9, each of which sub-divides into exactly ten sub-cla.s.ses, all divisible in their turn into ten minor divisions, and so on until the material in hand, or the ingenuity of the cla.s.sifier is exhausted. The notation of the books on the shelves corresponds to these divisions and sub-divisions. The claims of this system, which has been quite extensively followed in the smaller American libraries, and in many European ones, are economy, simplicity, brevity of notation, expansibility, unchanging call-numbers, etc. It has been criticised as too mechanical, as illogical in arrangement of cla.s.ses, as presenting many incongruities in its divisions, as procrustean, as wholly inadequate in its cla.s.sification of jurisprudence, etc. It is partially used by librarians who have had to introduce radical changes in portions of the cla.s.sification, and in fact it is understood that the cla.s.sification has been very largely made over both in Amherst College library and in that of Columbia University, N. Y., where it was fully established.

This only adds to the c.u.mulative proofs that library cla.s.sification cannot be made an exact science, but is in its nature indefinitely progressive and improvable. Its main object is not to cla.s.sify knowledge, but books. There being mult.i.tudes of books that do not belong absolutely to any one cla.s.s, all cla.s.sification of them is necessarily a compromise.

Nearly all the cla.s.sification schemers have made over their schemes--some of them many times. I am not arguing against cla.s.sification, which is essential to the practical utility of any library. An imperfect cla.s.sification is much better than none: but the tendency to erect cla.s.sification into a fetish, and to lay down cast-iron rules for it, should be guarded against. In any library, reasons of convenience must often prevail over logical arrangement; and he who spends time due to prompt library service in worrying over errors in a catalogue, or vexing his soul at a faulty cla.s.sification, is as mistaken as those fussy individuals who fancy that they are personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's axis.

It may be added that in the American Library a.s.sociation's Catalogue of 5,000 books for a popular library, Washington, 1893, the cla.s.sification is given both on the Dewey (Decimal) system, and on the Cutter expansive system, so that all may take their choice.

The fixed location system of arrangement, by which every book is a.s.signed by its number to one definite shelf, is objectionable as preventing accessions from being placed with their cognate books. This is of such cardinal importance in every library, that a more elastic system of some kind should be adopted, to save continual re-numbering. No system which makes mere arithmetical progression a subst.i.tute for intrinsic qualities can long prove satisfactory.

The relative or movable location on shelves is now more generally adopted than the old plan of numbering every shelf and a.s.signing a fixed location to every volume on that shelf. The book-marks, if designating simply the relative order of the volumes, permit the books to be moved along, as accessions come in, from shelf to shelf, as the latter become crowded.

This does not derange the numbers, since the order of succession is observed.

For small town libraries no elaborate system of cla.s.sification can properly be attempted. Here, the most convenient grouping is apt to prove the best, because books are most readily found by it. Mr. W. I. Fletcher has outlined a scheme for libraries of 10,000 volumes or less, as follows: