LIBRARY QUESTIONS.
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��mapped out c overs three years of lec- tures, and contains among others, these subjects: general history; encyclopedia of science, with special regard to the best way of defining the limits of each science; history of literary productions, printing, and the book trade ; some knowledge of the fine' arts; and instruc- tion in library economy. In this coun- try even, with the tact of doing without it, special training is fast becoming a ne- cessity. A college education is only a starting point, and a subordinate place in a libiary has a tendency to give only a knowledge of part of the routine du- ties, and to produce skilled, rather than educated labor. The student who has passed through his three years' course and graduated from a school of theol- ogy, law or medicine, has probably done less work than would be required to make him reasonably proficient in li- brary management. While so many technical and professional schools like civil engineering are maintained through- out the country, it seems reasonable to suppose that there could be supported one school for making teachers for book uses. The course of such a school might extend through two years, part of the time being given to lectures and recitation, and each person attending be- ing required to be a student for the rest of the year in some library. Such a plan would reduce the expeuse, aid libraries in much of their work, and give a class of men educated and practical, who would be familiar, not with a particular library, but with libraries. And this in- troduces a second reason why there has been no more progress in library science — it is because every man has worked for himself, and has -made little use of the improvements introduced by others. So in the beginning there is the loss of time in working out plans which are no advance on existing ones, instead of adopting settled ones as a starting place for improvements. Systems of classifi- cation illustrate this. Further on there is a loss when in every library is being done that which might be multiplied at a small cost by printing. And in the end there is the greatest loss in those
��things most essential for the use of read- ers, but, from their expense, out of the reach of most libraries. Many of these difficulties may be met by co-operation. Reference has already been made to cat- aloguing; this is costing, without print- ing, from fifteen to fifty cents a volnme, and may cost even more. As has been proposed this work might be. done at some central library, and the cards printed and furnished at a small cost; or, as again suggested, the publisher might print slips with each book. Most libraries — particularly .college libraries where most of the reading is done tow- ards an object or around a subject — can- not use more than half their value with- out an index catalogue; a co-operative system of cataloguing will give it at the expense of a make-shift. Again a large part of the thought most useful to schol- ars and many others, has been expressed through the reviews. It is hopelessly locked up without an index; but there is none covering the last twenty-five years, and no library alone can hope to fill the blank. This work, which is a revision of Poole's index, is in a fair way to be completed, either by Ameri- can co-operation or by the English index society. Then there would be a gain to users as well as to managers, if there ex- isted a uniform system for libraries. There should be hardly more difference in the manner of managing these than in the modes of teaching, and a book user should be almost as much at home in one library as in another, meeting new books as new faces, but feeling the general atmosphere unchanged. Some have gone so far as to hope for a uni- versal system of classification, which would give to every book at the time of its publication, an unchanging number, designating its place in every library. For the greatest utility this would need to be accompanied by general cata- logues, or bibliographies, so that those books in a given library could be desig- nated by marks, and users would know what books to look for elsewhere.
The plan of a fixed number is partially met by the " Amherst system," which makes use of a decimal classification in
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