Page:Rational Library Work with children and the preparation for it - Frances Jenkins Olcott.djvu/9

 children from two points of view, that it is the means by which we prepare the children to use the adult library, and that the ideal children's room should take the place of the child's private library. We therefore divide our lecture course into two distinct parts. First technical training along the lines of adult library work, such as ordering, accessioning, classifying, shelf-listing, cataloging, the study of library organization, history of libraries, history of printing and bookbinding, business methods, such as making out of reports, statistics, blanks, and schedules. These subjects, treated entirely from the standpoint of the adult library, are carried through the two years' work, thus giving the student a solid basis for library work. Side by side with this, special methods of work with children are taught, including the study of children's literature, planning and equipment of children's rooms, rules and regulations for children's rooms, methods of introducing children to books, making of children’s catalogs and lists, and a study of educational principles and social conditions and betterment. Throughout the course a comparative study is made of the methods used by different libraries.

Lectures are given by members of the library staff on those subjects in which they are daily engaged, and the regular library lecturers are supplemented by visiting librarians and other educators.

Although we have a very full program of lectures, and students are required to do much reading and close study, still we do not lay our stress on class-room work, but on the daily practice work of the student. Each student is required to work from eighteen to twenty hours a week in the children's department, under supervision, thus coming in actual contact with the children. This laboratory work is divided between the division of children’s rooms, the division of work with schools, and the division of work with home libraries and reading clubs. The student also has work in the deposit stations and in the summer playground libraries. She has opportunity to work with all classes of children, both as individuals and en masse, and in this way she gets her knowledge of children, of their tastes and habits, and she gets her training in discipline, in story telling, and in the practical application of the principles taught her in class. We lay more stress on the student's ability to do practical work than on her examination papers. It is necessary for the student to pass the examinations, but practical work and daily class work stand first.

In closing, I should like to add that we endeavor to impress on our students from the beginning that our first duty as children's librarians is to interpret literature, and that methods must necessarily be adjustable to the character of the library, and that a rational method of organizing library work with children in any city or town should be based on a close study of the needs of the community.

This branch of educational work is young and is growing rapidly, has tremendous possibilities, and is open to all sorts of dangers in the way of sentimentalism or fads, and in order to avoid these we must keep before us continually our dignity as custodians of literature, our obligation to the citizens of our community who have entrusted us with the task of interpreting literature to their children. Let our motto be, good books to all children, and "the right book to the right child at the right time." Just as necessity has produced children's rooms, so necessity will in time show us the right lines along which to proceed in order to produce a sufficiently sane body of doctrine to form a science—or pedagogy—of library work with children.