Evening Post SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 1938. IDEAL OF THE LIBRARY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 50, 27 August 1938, Page 8

Evening Post SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 1938. IDEAL OF THE LIBRARY

It is not often that the ceremony of laying the foundation-stone of a new building may be said to mark also the foundation of a new development in the function for which the building was designed; yet this is true of such a ceremony in Wellington this week. When the Mayor performed the time-honoured duty, which falls to representative personages on such occasions, of tapping the selected stone in the new City Library building, now rising from its foundations, and declared it well and truly laid, he pronounced, in effect, a doom on the old public library system, which has served its day in New Zealand, and proclaimed the advent of a new and wider development. The' chairman of the library committee (Councillor Gaudin) put it very well, at the preliminary gathering, when he said: The modern conception of education is that it is continuous throughout life and the modern library provides excellent material for this continuous process. . . . All the avenues of study are there for those who will avail ! themselves of them. In this work the librarian plays a very important part, for in the large collection of books the selection of the best ones is often a problem to the reader and student, and it is here that the services of the librarian are of the greatest value. He is not now, as of old, merely a "keeper of books." The work of the librarian today is not the custody of a collection of books, but the dissemination of knowledge. If, as Mr. H. G. Wells, among others, has often urged, a library is the true university, and if, as Benjamin Disraeli declared in the House of Commons, over sixty years ago, a university should be "a place of light, of liberty, and of learning," then, for the honour and dignity of such a purpose, it is fitting that the library, which is to be the people's university, should be housed in keeping with its noble aim. This is the justification of the new building, the necessity, for which was recognised by the vote of citizens in realising their responsibilities for the cultural life of the city. Tributes to books have been paid since the very earliest times. Cicero, in his famous letters to his friend Atticus ; is constantly found singing the praises of his library, into which he loved to retire from the heat and burden of political life, just as Lord Baldwin has retired in our own times. Later came the establishment of public libraries in Rome and throughout the Roman Empire, as testified by the presence of library buildings among the ruins of many ancient towns. In this respect, as in so many others, the Romans were the pioneers of public service. With the passing of the Roman Empire libraries were lost and with them much of classical learning. The modern free public library is really less than a century old, dating back in England to a Parliamentary inquiry in 1849, which led to the first Public Libraries Act of 1850. In reviewing the growth of the modern library, "The Times," a few years ago, gave an amusing summary of the opinions expressed during the 1849 inquiry by eminent witnesses and members of Parliament: One member, it says (a University representative), was afraid that the institution of libraries would lead to the creation of lecture-rooms, which might • give rise to an unhealthy agitation; another, that a ratepayer might be beguiled into reading the "Daily News" (a radical paper); another (who avowed that he did not like reading at all) supposed that Parliament would next be thinking of supplying the working classes with quoits, peg-tops, and footballs. Time has shown the vanity of such fears and forebodings. Public libraries soon spread throughout Britain, but it was not until about ten years ago that anything like a general library service was established. As late as 1926 the existing libraries were a congeries of unrelated units. The organisation, says "The Times," was entirely local. Each municipality and each county was a law to itself. There was no organised co-operation. Each library authority considered that it was responsible only for its own area, and that its service should be confined to its own ratepayers. The result was that the quality of the service available for the individual student depended on the area in which he lived. A ratepayer of Manchester, Liverpool, or Birmingham had at his disposal all the resources of a first-class municipal library. An inhabitant of Little Pedlington had the use of such books as Little Pedlington could afford to buy and of the quality which commended itself to the town council of th-n borough. New

Zealanders will recognise how closely the description would fit the conditions prevailing in this country even to the present day. An almost miraculous change in the system in Britain dates back to the report of a Departmental Committee in 1927. It is not always, says "The Times," that the reports of Royal or Departmental Commissions lead to results commensurate with the labour bestowed on their production; and if in this case the recommendations of the committee have been almost completely realised, the credit is mainly due to that fairy godmother of the library service of the country, the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. Through the influence and liberal financial support of the Carnegie Trustees, the Departmental Committee's report has become the gospel of a revolutionised public library service. It is to the same beneficent influence that perpetuates the memory of the. late Andrew Carnegie, the true father of the modern public library and its service, that New Zealand will owe the change which is being brought about in our library system and of which, the new City Library is, in a sense, the earnest. It was therefore specially appropriate that Councillor Gaudin, as chairman of the library committee, should, on the occasion of the foundation-stone ceremony, remember Carnegie in the words: I would like also to pay a tribute to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which has done so much in the development of library work. Their action made possible the production of the Munn-Barr report, which has revolutionised library practice in New Zealand. Then he told the story of how the poor lad, Andrew Carnegie, never forgot the man who made available to the youth of the town in which he lived a small library of a few hundred books on Saturday afternoon, a godsend to the lads hungry for learning, who, perhaps, found in those books not only mental satisfaction, but a kindling of ambition that, in the case of Carnegie, for one, led to fortune. If, as is likely enough, it was this memory of his benefactor that influenced Carnegie in making so splendid a distribution of his wealth for the fostering of libraries, the new Wellington City Library, and the national service of which it is a part, may well trace its original creation to this distant, humble source, for there could be no better monument to its memory than a library as a home of culture.