Page:Rational Library Work with children and the preparation for it - Frances Jenkins Olcott.djvu/6

 the down-town districts are networks of alleys and courts, lined with unsanitary brick buildings and tumble down rear tenements, crowded with foreigners. Wages, as a rule, are excellent; work is easily procured, and it is not poverty only, but chiefly ignorance which is to blame for the present shiftless conditions. Jacob Riis recently made a tour of our tenement district, and in a public meeting said that he had never seen tenement conditions as bad as those in Pittsburgh.

The physical topography of Pittsburgh makes it especially difficult and expensive for us to reach all parts of the city. Often a high bluff or a deep ravine cuts a neighborhood in two, making necessary two deposits of books in the same district instead of one.

With such conditions to meet, we have organized our work for children as follows: A children's department was installed in 1898, which has developed gradually until during the past year there were 152 places in the city where children could draw books. The object of this department is to place good literature into the hands of every child in the city, and especially to carry the influence of good books into the homes of children of few opportunities and no advantages. When it is understood that there are more than 59,000 children enrolled in our public, private, and parochial schools, besides large numbers of children employed in factories or elsewhere, and that our collection of juvenile books numbers only 48,000 volumes, it will be seen what a huge task we have before us.

In order to accomplish our object of distributing books, the department is organized under the supervision of a chief of department into the following divisions: Administrative division, division of children's rooms, division of work with schools, division of work with home libraries and reading clubs. Each division has its own peculiar field of work. The administrative division is the unifying factor in the department. Through it the work with children is welded into a systematized organization. By it, children's books are examined, read, and selected, distributing agencies organized, collections kept up to date, assistants trained and placed, methods studied and introduced, material compiled for the use of the department—in fact, its aim is to help in every way possible the development of the whole work.

Next to the Administrative division comes the division of children's rooms, of which, strictly speaking, we have at present seven. Each room offers a distinctly different phase of cosmopolitan life, and is in charge of one or more trained children's librarians.

The ideal children's room has a double function. First, it is the place in which the children are being prepared to use the adult library, and we feel that if our rooms fail to develop intelligent, self-helpful readers, we have failed in our main object. Second, the ideal children's room should take the place of a child's private library, and it should, as far as possible, give the child a chance to browse among books of all classes and kinds, in a room beautifully proportioned and decorated, and presided over by a genial and sympathetic woman who has a genuine interest in the personalities and preferences of the boys and girls. The gracious influence of this room should differ widely from that of the school-room, with its rigid law and order, and it should not partake too much of "paternalism." All methods used should be in keeping with the dignity of the library building. It is most important that the technical side of the work of the room, such as the loan system, the cataloging and classification, should not differ essentially from the same work in the adult department, so that the children will not have to unlearn things when they leave the children's room. Technical methods may be simplified, but not changed, and above all, the closest relation should exist between the adult and juvenile departments. We desire also that all methods used to draw the children to the library building should be those which lead them to the best books.

It is impossible in so short a space to