Page:Traveling Libraries by Frank Avery Hutchins.djvu/7

Rh strikingly successful that it inspired imitation, first in his own State and then in other States. Where individuals were unable to take up this work, associations were formed to do for limited areas what state aid had done for commonwealths. Schools, women's clubs, and various philanthropic organizations found the means to provide libraries for special purposes. In May, 1899, there were about 2500 traveling libraries, containing about 115,000 volumes, scattered in thirty States. About 1100 of these were equipped and maintained by state aid. Two hundred and fifteen of the remainder, those in Wisconsin, were bought with money given by individuals or associations, but were generally purchased, arranged, and supervised by a State Library Commission. The remainder were purchased and managed by private individuals or asssociationsassociations [sic].

The ease with which the new plan of library extension may be adapted to meet various needs may be shown in a rapid summary of the work done by a few systems of traveling libraries. Some women in New Jersey have used them to lighten the long winter days and evenings of the brave men who belong to the life-saving service, and that State has now taken up the traveling library as a definite part of the work of its State Library; other women, in Salt Lake City, send them regularly to remote valleys in Utah; a number of state federations of women's clubs use them to furnish books for study to isolated clubs; Mrs. Eugene B. Heard of Middleton, Ga., is devoting herself to the supervision of an admirable system which reaches a large number of small villages on the Seaboard Air Line in five Southern States; an association in Washington, D. C., puts libraries on the canal-boats which ply on the Washington and Potomac Canal in the summer and "tie up" in small hamlets in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the winter; the colored graduates of Hampton Institute carry libraries to the schools for their own people at the base of the Cumberland Mountains, while to the "mountain whites"