Page:Traveling Libraries by Frank Avery Hutchins.djvu/9

Rh outline may incite careful study in a score of villages before its brief life is ended, when the meagre local opportunities would discourage students.

As to the first and most important result to be secured through traveling libraries, experience seems to prove that those managed by state commissions lead more surely and quickly to the establishment of public libraries than those managed by associations. In New York a large number of public libraries have sprung up in communities which were first supplied by traveling libraries. In Wisconsin the smaller libraries have brought about the founding of twenty local libraries in small villages during the past two years.

State commissions have succeeded better than private associations in establishing permanent libraries because they work largely to that end and can offer more effective assistance in organizing new libraries. They put their traveling libraries more generally in the villages, while the sympathy of the women's clubs is more often aroused by the needs of the women and children on the farms. The commissions have at their command the library experience of the world, their books are better adapted to their purposes, their loan systems are more practical and business-like, they do more to communicate the "library spirit" to the librarians and managers of the little libraries, and they can better care for the books when returned to the central station. In a word, they make the management of traveling libraries a business. The systems of traveling libraries supported by associations have done work of this kind when the details of their management have been intrusted to librarians.

A description of a method used in Wisconsin to secure the founding of public libraries may be of interest here. It is not described because it is more successful than methods used elsewhere, but because the facts are better known to the writer. In January, 1898, only three villages in Wisconsin of less than 1500 inhabitants had free libraries