The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 6
Of all fields in which to sow her energies, the well-educated but otherwise untrained girl who suddenly faces the problem of self-support will find the modern library the most promising. So far the profession is not overcrowded, and the good worker is in demand.
It is a field open alike to the graduate of college, finishing school or high school, but it is absolutely closed to the girl who barely managed to pull through the graded schools, and who, through either force of circumstances or inclination, stopped when she acquired a rudimentary knowledge of the English branches. It is an ideal field for the woman who is intellectual, yet lacks ability to express this intellectuality in literary form. It often proves a most profitable and pleasant field for the teacher of methodical habits, good education and bookish tastes, who somehow lacks the gift of disciplining and instilling knowledge in the youthful mind.
But it is not the field for that common type
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of girl who likes books, yet is not a student, who imagines that in the library she may familiarize herself with such books as please her fancy, and ignore those which do not appeal, and pictures herself exchanging books during the busy hours and reading the new novels when visitors are few.
In the modern library there are no idle hours, no slack days. There is always something to be done. There is always more to be learned.
The delicate woman who wants "ladylike employment and genteel hours" should avoid library work, but if any girl is earnestly seeking a profession in which she may rise by her own merits and through her own industry, broaden her mental life by constant association with the best in literature, and at the same time do something for her fellow men, she will find such work in the public library.
The circular of information concerning the training-school for children's librarians, conducted in connection with the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh, Pa., states:
"The library of to-day does not wait for the people to come to it; it goes to them, carrying books into schools and homes. A large share of this work belongs to the children's librarian, whose function it is to awaken an interest in good reading in as many children as she can reach. Her work lies wherever children are gathered together—in the children's room of the library, in the school, the playground, the street and the home. She must also work with organized philanthropies, such as university and social settlements. This work should appeal to the earnest, broad-minded young woman who wishes to devote her efforts to the moral, esthetic, as well as the intellectual, education of children."
And what is true of the children's librarian, to a large extent is true of the reference librarian who comes in contact with the reading public. In stimulating the interest of all her visitors, in directing their reading along broader lines, in feeding the starved minds of those to whom the public opens for the first time the door to literature and literary pleasure, she is doing something more than earning her salary and serving the board which appointed her. She is uplifting humanity. In so doing she finds the fine, if narrow, path to happiness, and she is mastering the first principles of the joy of living.
With this broader view of the librarian's duties and privileges, let us consider the advantages and disadvantages of the work. This summing up of the arguments for and against the profession must not be taken as the opinion of a single worker, but as the result of much investigating, the sifting of many opinions.
Its advantages, except in departments where the work is largely mechanical, such as recovering books, pasting labels, running indicators, etc., are that it keeps one in touch, more or less, with the intellectual life and progress of the world; it pays regularly and fairly well; it brings one in contact with agreeable and often gifted people; and, unlike teaching, it is put aside at the day's end.
On the other hand, however, the unthinking, mechanical library worker can very easily lead a most superficial life, because her work lays undue emphasis on the intellectual side of life. Some librarians hold, however, that there really is no great goal in sight for the very able and ambitious girl; that is, she has not the same wide scope for achievement and the development of her creative faculties as the writer, the musician, the artist, the designer. She never really becomes her own mistress, as one successful librarian expressed it. Even when she is head librarian she is ruled by the board of directors. Expressing it broadly, she has less chance to give expression to her individuality than girls in many professions, like the arts, the sciences and the law.
But taking the profession as a whole, it is the ideal one for the girl who is content with routine work, a comfortable salary and the ability to serve her fellow-men in a capacity which can never be termed mean, narrow or menial. She must always feel the uplift of the books among which she moves, and the call of those who need the help of her broader intelligence and equipment.
All these things the girl of sufficient education must consider, and then turn to the question of preparation.
The day of haphazard library work is past. The modern library, large or small, is systematized like the modern business establishment. The custom of giving a position to the mayor's niece when she comes back from a year at a city school, because she is the mayor's niece, and dresses well, and has nice white hands, has passed. The librarian, like the teacher, must pass an examination, and for this she must be as familiar with the high school branches and as closely in touch with the current events and literature as the candidate for a position in an up-to-date school.
Librarians throughout the country believe in a training-school. At a recent examination for applicants in connection with the public library system in New York City, only five per cent. of the girls who had been prepared at library schools failed.
There are two ways of preparing for these examinations. One is in the free training-schools for library workers maintained in many large cities in connection with their public library system. This generally represents giving anywhere from nine to twelve months' service to the library in return for training, after which the apprentice must pass the examination open to all applicants for the post of assistant librarian.
In New York City, for instance, the public library maintains a training-school, with sixty pupils, in connection with the Muhlenberg Branch Library in West Twenty-third Street. Two-fifths of the time the girls spend in studying various branches of library work along theoretical lines, and three-fifths they must give to actual service in the different branches, sometimes pasting labels or recovering books or doing typewriting—any service, in fact, asked of them. Each apprentice gives forty-two and one-half hours a week to library work and has precisely the same hours and routine as the paid assistant. At the end of the library year, in May, she takes her first examinations for the post of assistant librarian. If her first work is substituting, she receives from twenty to thirty dollars a month. With regular employment as a recognized assistant, her salary is raised to forty dollars. At the end of two years she takes another examination, which, if successfully passed, will raise her salary to fifty dollars a is month. A year later she takes her third and last examination, which will entitle her to the post of head librarian at a salary ranging from eighty to ninety dollars, according to the library in which she is placed.
Girls who desire to enter this training-school must be between eighteen and thirty-five years of age; they must have a four-year high-school education or its equivalent, and a reading knowledge of both French and German, while greatly to their advantage will be a speaking knowledge of German.
During the time spent in studying and working in this free training-school a girl must have sufficient money for her support.
In many of the smaller cities, and in not a few large ones, no such training-schools exist, simply because the library staff, being none too large and extremely busy, time and energy cannot be spared to train uncertain material. And invariably, when you enter such a training-school, you must agree to give the library first call on your services when your apprenticeship is completed. In other words, a girl from Memphis, Tennessee, could not expect to come to New York, receive training free in connection with a New York public library, and then return to Memphis to take a position. By every moral code she should give the city in which she is trained first opportunity to use her services, for strange as this may seem to out-of-town girls, it is in the large cities that the need of the trained librarian is felt most keenly, because of the rapid growth in population and in library patronage.
The girl who wishes to prepare for work in her own town, and who must go away from home to secure such training, should communicate with the endowed training-school for librarians nearest her home town. As a rule these schools are so heavily endowed that the tuition is nominal, ranging from fifty to one hundred dollars for the entire course.
For instance, at the Drexel Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which has been heavily endowed by the Drexel family, the tuition for the library course of eight months is only fifty dollars, with incidentals amounting to fifteen or twenty dollars more. At Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, which has graduated a, large number of very successful librarians, the course runs two school years, of nine months each; tuition for the first year, fifty dollars; for the second, twenty-five dollars; while thirty dollars will generally cover all charges for text-books, materials, etc.
In addition to this, a student must pay her own board and living expenses, for which she should allow ten dollars a week.
These figures are presented merely to give the would-be librarian a general idea of what her training will cost. No school, however heavily endowed, provides board and lodging, and as a rule heads of library schools prefer that students should not attempt to work their way through the course—that is, earn board and lodging while studying. Every particle of energy and every moment of time are required for the work. The hours run from nine to four, five days in the week, with an hour for lunch, and on Saturdays there are trips to other libraries, field work, etc.
There are many library schools, including Pratt and Drexel institutes, the New York State Library School at Albany, New York, Simmons College Library School, Boston, Massachusetts, and the school attached to the University of Illinois.
As a rule a high-school education of four years or its equivalent, with a reading knowledge of German and French, is sufficient preparation for the examination held at any of these training schools, though the New York State Library School demands some college work also.
If you have graduated several years previous to taking the examination, do not trust to your memory, but brush up, "cram" if you will, as you did in the old school days, for the examinations for entrance to these training-schools are by no means simple. Here, for instance, is a set of questions gleaned from a sample examination sheet, loaned by the Drexel Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:
1. Mention nationality and century and characterize briefly an important work by ten of the following: Le Sage, Marlowe, Tasso, Ibsen, Maurice, Hewlett, Balzac, Sir Francis Bacon, Montaigne, Sir Thomas Malory, Lessing, Walter Pater, Paine, Swinburne, Landor, James Bryce.
2. State briefly what you know about the literary work of the following: Sainte-Beuve, Turgenieff, Dante, Gabriel, Rosetti, Heine, Thomas De Quincy.
3. Write an account (about two pages) of the poets and poetry of England at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.
4, Name five important writers of ancient Greece, and specify in what department each is famous. Of ancient Rome.
5. Describe (only five lines each) the character of the following: "The Faerie Queene," "The Rubaiyat," "Idylls of the King."
6. What do you understand by the following: (a) the minnesingers; (b) the Cid; (c) the morality plays; (d) Beowulf; (e) the humanists.
7. Name five of the greatest American essayists; characterize briefly the literary work of each, and mention the title of their greatest works.
8. Name two famous allegories; three famous histories of the United States; five great world epics; two famous satires; five children's classics.
9. Write a criticism (about two pages) of one of the following: Thomas Carlyle, Victor Hugo, Robert Browning.
10. To what extent has periodical literature been a part of your reading? Mention ten periodicals with which you are most familiar, and characterize briefly one weekly and one monthly periodical.
Nor does this represent the complete examination. There were other tests in English and the languages, and none too much time was allowed for answering them, either.
The examinations for entrance on the opening of the fall term, in September or October, are generally held some time in June, and this gives the applicant time to brush up if she barely passes.
Once in the school, she finds that she has many branches to study, and much to learn besides cataloguing and exchanging books. A bare outline of one of the briefest courses is given herewith:
One year
First Term—Alphabeting; book numbers, cataloguing, dictionary form; classification, decimal; current periodicals; fiction, appraisal of; French, technical; library handwriting; practice in the library; reference work; survey of the library field; typewriting (optional).
Second Term—Accession work; binding and rebinding; book selection and book buying; cataloguing, classed form—maps, government documents; children's department, work of; classification, expansive; current periodicals; fiction, appraisal of; German; technical; loan system; order work; practice in the library; reference work; shelf listing; subject headings; survey of the library field; trade bibliography; typewriting (optional).
Third Term—Bibliography; field work; history of classical learning; history of libraries; indexing; library administration; library buildings; practice in the library; proof-reading; stock-taking; supplies and statistics.
I have asked a number of librarians whether they advised specialization either in preparation for examinations or in taking the librarian course after admission to the school.
For preparation, librarians, male or female, advised a broad, general education, a college education if possible, as unquestionably the college graduate or the girl with a degree is given the preference in an up-to-date library.
In regard to the work after graduation, each woman becomes a law unto herself, for she is bound to find her level or the special library work that appeals to her after she has studied and worked a short time. The woman who desires to become head librarian in a small city should not specialize, but interest herself in all branches of library work. On the other hand, the girl who leans toward charity, settlement or sociological work, should specialize on the work of the children's library. The student of languages will find her best field in the reference department.