W

HEN business is booming, profit and loss is what interests us most; when the time comes for liquidation, we look to our assets and liabilities. The business men of this country are investing vast amounts in collections of books, in buildings to shelter them and their users, in equipment to make use easy, in salaries for librarians and assistants to care for all this plant and to aid the public to use it properly. If liquidation were to come here and now, would all this stand as an asset, and in what way?

I am afraid that if it depended on the average man of affairs to answer this question, it would be answered but vaguely, or not at all. Our private investments we watch strictly; our public ones we neglect until they are mismanaged so conspicuously that we can not well fail to take notice. Then we usually blame someone else. How many St. Louisans have inspected the new public library, to support which they put their hands somewhat deeply into their pockets every year? I do not mean, how many have seen the outside, or the public reading-rooms on the inside, though I know that many St. Louisans have not seen even these; but how many have examined the way in which we go to work, and the results, or perhaps the lack of result, thereby obtained our telephone reference system, our parcel post delivery, our work with the blind, our children's rooms, our writing room and stenographer service, our collections of usable maps, pictures and newspaper clippings, the aid given to practical designers in our Art Room, the work of our bindery and our Applied Science Room-a department whose special duty is to aid business men and all engaged in commercial and industrial work?

We are conducting an institution for which the public is paying, and the public's interest in it should be greater than that in any concern that is self-supporting or in receipt of an endowment.

If, however, the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet, perforce, must go to

the mountain, and hence we must attempt to tell some of the things that we are trying to do for St. Louis, and how far these would seem to constitute the library one of the city's assets.

And first the things that aid the citizen so directly that he would be willing to pay cash for such service in his offices. Thisthe most interesting feature of a modern library to business men-is the newest; and it is so very recent that hosts of them have not awakened to it.

It is new, because we are just experiencing a revolution in the content of books. Not so very long ago, a book was exclusively a library product. It contained essays or narrative, poetry, history or travel -something scholarly for quiet consumption. The bustle of the street had nothing to do with it. Books that could be used in business or industry were few, and these were even called contemptuously by one scholar Biblia abiblia-books that are no books-tables of figures, price lists, codes, schedules, dictionaries, trade catalogs. These have graduated from the no-book class and they all form a very important part of our modern library collections. We have here in St. Louis for instance the city directories of a large number of places and telephone directories of hosts of others, either separately or in combination. have nearly 4,000 trade catalogs and an enormous amount of more ephemeral, but not less useful trade literature. We collect and preserve everything that the railroads are issuing to tell the public of the regions through which they are running. Anything put forth by any commercial or industrial house is grist to our mill. We have more information about what American municipalities are doing in a business way and how they are doing it, than was available to the public all over the country ten years ago. We conduct a city bureau of information, or municipal reference branch, in the City Hall, that is in communication with hundreds of our cities and towns and

We

are

is in a position to tell in the shortest possible time about how questions of city administration and municipal business handled in all of them. There is no excuse today for passing an ordinance at the City Hall, embodying some experiment that has been tried in half-a-dozen other cities and proved to be an expensive failure.

A BUSINESS INFORMATION BUREAU.

This business, industrial and scientific body of information, growing daily in bulk and increasing in its usefulness as the square of its size, is at one end of the telephone wire and the other end is in the business man's office. Does he realize it? We know too well that many of our citizens do, for they are giving us much trouble; and that is what we are for. That is why we are taking their money through the tax-gathering agencies of the City Hall. But it would seem that there are many who enjoy paying cash and getting nothing in return. The volume of such information work as this done at the library, has, to be sure, trebled within the last few years, yet a large part of it may still be classified under the head of "foolish questions." It is not so much that we object to answering these, for we are public servants and at the public's disposal, but it grieves us to think that so many citizens regard the library chiefly in the light of a repository of information about trivialities, while the man who wants to know something useful writes laboriously to India or wires the Library of Congress when what he is looking for could have been found in fifteen minutes by telephoning to his own library, whose services he is paying for.

We have not the slightest objection to ascertaining for a gentleman who has made a bet on the subject, the precise age at which Louis XI had the measles, or to laboriously digging up the sculptors of Mesopotamia for a lady who is to read a paper before the Know All Club. But why should the man who wants the exports of cereals in 1913, or he who desires the names of concerns that make gas turbines, or why should the firm that must know the method of packing most desirable for sewing machines consigned to Sao Paulo, Brazil, search helplessly over the continent until they bethink themselves as a last resort to ask the Public Library?

I submit that the kind of service the library is equipped to render to St. Louis trade and industries and that it frequently is able to render, is physically and materially of the same character that business men receive from their own employes. It is as direct and it is far more certain, because the size and rapid increase of our

body of material makes it possible for to do the work for those in search of bus ness information, that a clearing house able to do for the city's banks.

LIBRARY-THE PEOPLE'S UNIVERSITY.

But there is a class of service less d rect, but even more valuable, than th tangible sort. It is of the same kind tha the public schools are doing, but its i fluence continues long after that of th school has faded into a memory. We ma say that the school, indispensable as it i and worth far more than every cent sper upon it by the most advanced municipality does little more than prepare the pupil fo the work of self-education that is to go o through his life. That process will go of as surely as life itself lasts. We can no stop it, but we can prepare for it an direct it. We can do our part toward mak ing it an education for efficiency instead of for slackness, for usefulness instead of for harm, for righteousness instead of for wickedness.

The school prepares and the school di rects; but our boys and girls leave its influence all too early. Here the library steps in. It works co-operatively with the schools during the whole of the pupil's school life. He is familiar with it, and it is natural that he should continue to use it after he has left school. If its influence is to be something more than passive, it

should necessarily act as a mentor in many ways quite unfamiliar to libraries of the earlier day. It is in acting upon its realization of this fact that the modern public library has taken a second step in its somewhat revolutionary advance beyond the old quiescent, scholarly library of the past. Not that it has ceased to be scholarly in being more alive to pres ent needs and conditions. The old idea that a scholar must accumulate dust and cob webs if he is to fulfill his mission has been left behind with other worn-out supersti tions. A library, then, is an educational as well as a business institution. He who considers education an asset will have to place something, at least, to our credit on this count. We offer to those who make use of our facilities the education that they feel they need-that the schools have awakened them to desire, that they realize they must have. We have no hard and fast curriculum. There is "must" or to inculcate a dislike of knowl edge by forcing it. We do not teach that all wisdom is in books. Read, think, and

no one

do those are our watchwords.

to say

Read that you may start at the point where your wisest predecessor stopped; think, that you may go on a little farther