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. . [Reprinted from THE LIBRARY Journal, June, 1911]
THE RELATION OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY TO TECHNICAL EDUCATION”
27 4:31, & KA
By Samuel H. Banck, Public Library, Grand Rapids, Mich.
YoUR secretary, in extending his invitation,
asked me to say something about what the
Public Library of Grand Rapids is trying
to do in the interests of technical education.
As he was informed at the time, the actual
results achieved do not justify any great ex-
pectations. I can only say that the institu-
tion I have the honor to represent has made
a serious effort in attacking the problem of
getting books on technical subjects into the
hands of, and used by, the people engaged in
industrial pursuits. I shall in this paper
refer to technical education in its narrower
sense as applying to the industrial arts, and
I shall assume that the development of one's
own powers and the increasing of one's effi-
ciency is possible through the knowledge and
experience of others, as these may be gained
through the printed page. In short, that
books are a most important aid to all educa-
tion, whether technical or not.
It is somewhat embarrassing to tell of the
things that have not panned out as you had
wished; nevertheless, in the interest of ad-
vancing an understanding of an important
subject, a study and an analysis of difficulties
may be only a little less instructive than a
recital of achievement.
First of all let me give you some idea of
the community with which we deal. The city
of Grand Rapids, in the census of 1910, con-
tained 112,571 persons. Of this number about
one-third were born in Holland, or are of
Holland descent of the first, second or third
generations; one-third are persons born in
other foreign countries, chiefly, German, Ital-
ian, Polish, Scandinavian, Lithuanian, Greek,
Syrian and Armenian, or their descendants
of the first or second generation; and the
balance, less than forty per cent., are Amer-
ican — that is, the descendants of persons
who came to America more than half a cen-
tury ago. Our first great problem, therefore,
is that which comes from dealing with a
large number of people who do not read the
* Read before the Ontario Library Association,
April, 1911. -
English language, or who are of the first
generation of English readers, and more or
less familiar with, and influenced by, the na-
tive tongue of their parents.
The city of Grand Rapids is a new town.
Only this winter the man died who built the
first permanent home within the present city
limits. Its corporate history as a city is only
sixty years. Starting as a fur-trading center
established by French Canadians, it later de-
veloped into a lumbering and milling center,
and directly following the saw-mill days the
manufacture of furniture began. The manu-
facture of furniture is widely known as the
leading industry of the city, and it is esti-
mated that about forty per cent. of the pop-
ulation is directly dependent upon it. There
are about forty furniture factories, most of
them specializing on one or two lines, or on
the furniture of a particular period. The
allied industries, of which printing and en-
graving is the most important, are the manu-
facture of brass, woodworking and other ma-
chinery of various kinds, tools, etc. There
has also been developed in the last decade a
very large textile industry.
In the early days the making of cheap fur-
niture prevailed, because the city was near
the source of a cheap lumber supply. With
the disappearance of the Michigan forests,
however, the character of the industry
changed by the emphasis being placed on
high grade furniture, so that now much of
the lumber is brought thousands of miles, a
great deal of it coming from Liverpool, as a
distributing center for the fine woods from
Asia, Africa, Central and South America.
In order to overcome the handicap of freight
charges the manufacturers soon recognized
that they must devote their attention to de-
veloping the artistic side of the industry, and
this was done by the importation of men
trained and skilled in the art of design. The
present and future prosperity of the industry
in Grand Rapids depends largely on the ar-
tistic skill of the furniture designer, just as
it does in Darmstadt for Germany.

The Grand Rapids Public Library was es-
tablished in 1871, and until 1903 it was man-
aged by a committee of ‘the Board of Edu-
cation as an essential part of the public
school system. In 1903 an act of the state leg-
islature placed the management of the library
in the hands of a commission of five citizens
elected at large, one each year, with the su-
perintendent of schools ex-officio, making six
in all.
body only, for the title to all the property
is still vested in the Board of Education.
While the Library was under the manage-
ment of the Board of Education, on one or
two occasions there were members on that
board who were much interested in technical
education, and at the instance of one of these
there was printed and widely distributed in
1896 a special catalogue of the industrial
books in the Library.
One of the first acts of the new board, cre-
ated in 1903, was to adopt a plan for the de-
velopment of the Library, which would soon
move into the Ryerson Public Library build-
ing, at that time, and perhaps even yet, with
one or two possible exceptions, the largest
and most costly public library building in
any city of the size of Grand Rapids in
America. There were seven items in this
program:
1. Development of a special historical col-
lection relating to Michigan.
2. Patents and inventions.
3. Furniture and industrial art library.
4. Courses of free lectures.
5. Work for the blind.
6. Sunshine work.
7. School of design.
Within a few years the first six items of
this plan were in operation. The seventh,
however, the school of design, is still in the
future. It was the belief of the President
of the Commmission, who outlined this plan,
that the school of design should naturally
grow out of a great industrial art library,
and that a library of books of this kind
should be the center some day of a great
school of furniture design.
The three items in this program that re-
late particularly to the subject under consid-
eration to-night, I shall now take up.
This commission is an administrative.
PATENTS AND INVENTIONS
This is merely a collection, so far as we
could build it, of all the publications of the
United States Patent Office, with particular
emphasis on the series of specifications and
drawings of United States patents, along
with general works on this subject. They
are used almost entirely by inventors, and of
course there are relatively few persons in
the community engaged on work of this
kind. Nevertheless, it is not unusual for a
man to come daily for a week or more to
work on some problem in this series of:
books. There are more than 1300 volumes in
this collection. * - -
FURNITURE AND INDUSTRIAL ART
Although a beginning had been made eight
years before, the first great purchase for
this collection was all the books on furniture
and its allied arts (of which architecture is
the chief), in the exhibition of the French
booktrade at the St. Louis Exposition, in
1904. I need hardly remind you that works
of this character are usually expensive, a
single volume often costing from $20 to $40.
Since then additional books on these sub-
jects have been purchased as fast as our
funds would permit, the total amount ex-
pended in the last six years being about
$3000. While the books for the practical
man, such as works on glue, varnish, finish-
ing, wood and woodworking, etc., have not
been neglected, most of these works are
really not books for the average worker in
the factory, but rather the fundamental books
for the designer or the wood carver. There
has been some criticism that the Library
should spend public funds to such an extent
for books which are used by relatively few
readers, the claim being that the manufac-
turers ought to buy their own books on this
subject. We believe, however, that it is a
legitimate function of a public library to
build up a collection of books on an indus-
try from which 40 per cent. of the population
gets its living even though it requires a con-
siderable degree of training and skill to
enable persons to use some of them. As a
matter of fact these special books are used
not only by manufacturers and designers in
working out new problems and in develop-
%
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/1 - 7 --to
ing new designs, but they are also used quite
extensively by a small number of ambitious
young men who work in the factories, but
who hope to develop themselves by training
and study into designers. I know of a num-
ber of instances of young men who have
worked themselves up into fine positions by
the aid of these books. They are also used
by training classes in furniture design main-
tained by the Y. M. C. A., and by students
of a private school on that subject in the
city. I might add here that the principal of
this school believes that not more than one
young man in a hundred in the factories has
the mental and moral qualities that will see
him through the discipline that is necessary
to develop a furniture designer. -
Twice a year, during the months of July
and January, the Library gives exhibitions
of new things it has added on this subject,
the books being displayed on tables, and some
of the loose plates hung on the walls. The
public generally is invited to these exhibi-
tions and special notice of them is sent to
those interested, mailing lists being kept up
to date for this purpose. From one to two
thousand persons usually visit these book and
plate exhibits in the course of the month,
many of them being young men from the
factories. We believe that seeing these things
will stimulate interest and we know that the
exhibits help to spread a knowledge of the
fact that such things are in the Library. In
this same room other technical books and
plates are shown for a month at a time at
intervals during the year, with an occasional
informal talk by some specialist, to which
all persons known to be interested are spe-
cially invited. *
I should have said before this that the
Library in the purchase of these books is
aided by a committee of three furniture de-
signers appointed by the President of the
Library Board. These men, while they ap-
preciate the hard-headed, practical business
side of manufacturing, also have, at the
same time, every one of them, the training,
the feeling and the instincts of the artist.
realizing that the production of furniture is
really a fine art.
Most of the expensive, large books on fur-
niture that the Library has purchased are,
therefore, for the specialist, or for the young
man or student who hopes to become one;
and I may say here that it is the ambition
of the Library to make its collection in this
department both the largest and the best
in America. It has already become somewhat
widely known. Recently a case came to my
attention of a designer from a furniture fac-
tory in another city who spent a month in
Grand Rapids using our furniture books, and
who finally carried off with him between five
and six hundred sketches which he had made
from them. Only last week a gentleman came
from Germany to see it.
While the Library has, thus far, had in
mind mostly the specialist, it has not been
unmindful of the man at the bench or the
machine, who works by the hour or by the
day. The ambitious shop men are gradually
developing the ability to use the books for
the specialist referred to, but it was to in-
crease the use of a class of books less diffi-
cult and more general that the Library has
been purchasing and endeavoring to create an
interest in such books as those published in
the March bulletin under the heading “Books
for the woodworker.” These deal with par-
ticular phases of woodworking, and with the
practical problems that have to do with the
staining and varnishing of wood in the fin-
ishing room, as well as the more elementary
works, such as are used for manual training
in the schools.
The books on furniture are classified under
“Fine arts,” and most of them are in the
Reference department. Of books on furni-
ture alone, we have over 300 volumes, ex-
clusive of duplicates. The books on wood-
working, etc., are classified under “Useful
arts,” and are under this subject in the Cir-
culating department of the Library, 2877 vol-
umes. Last year the circulation (home use)
of useful art books was 4636. This circula-
tion was really produced by about 2000 vol-
umes, for over 600 volumes did not go out
once during the year.
In developing an interest in technical books
I believe that a most effective means for the
beginner is through the use of current peri-
odicals. This feature of our work has been
highly developed, and we have on file in our
reading rooms of the Ryerson building and
six branch libraries more than 800 different
titles of current periodicals, and we pay in
periodical subscriptions nearly $2000 a year.
Of some of these we take 18 copies and of
some of the technical ones as many as seven
copies. The average number of readers in
all our reading rooms is nearly Iooo a day,
and a very considerable proportion of this
is due to the current periodicals. You may
be interested to know how many periodicals
(not including duplicates) we take on the
subjects that might be regarded as more or
less technical: r
TITLES
Agriculture, including gardening, etc. . . . . . . . I5 .
Architecture and building. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I9
Domestic economy and cookery. . . . . . . . . . . . . I 2
Electricity. . . . . . . . . tº e e º e e º e & © e º e s e a © e e s e e I I
Engineering and machinery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3I
Furniture and wood work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Mechanical trades. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I6
Our effort has been to have represented
in our periodical collection something on
every profession, every business, and every
trade and industry in the city. This is not
quite true, in the case of several industries,
for there was objection when it was sug-
gested that we add a periodical or two rep-
resenting the liquor trade and the tobacco
trade. The January number of the Library's
monthly bulletin always contains, the list of
periodicals for the year. It is issued in an
edition of 4000 copies which are widely dis-
tributed to the persons supposed to be inter-
ested. In addition to this the monthly bul-
letin is used for printing occasional lists on
special subjects, which are also widely dis-
tributed to those likely to be interested. We
think that all these things help in getting
the books before the people, and I may say
right here that the greatest problem in this
whole question of technical education through
4.
where people who come to the Iibrary will
see them; the next thing is to have things
doing at the library that will bring into it
the uninitiated; but the most important
thing is for the library to have on its staff
persons who know both the books and the
the Library is not so much the problem of
getting the books—important as that is—
but the problem of bringing the right man
and the right book together.
A town is not safe because it has a sewer
in every street, if the residents fail to con-
nect their houses with it. Likewise a library
with the best collection of technical books in
the world will do nothing for the education
of the people if the people and the books are
not brought together.
The easiest thing to do to bring the man
and the book together is first to place your
technical books, or a selection of them,
Huxley one of the marks of genius.
men, have a knowledge of the processes of
manufacture, and what the men in the fac-
tories really need. And here is where so
many of our libraries fail—we do not have
people equipped to give the service that is
required. I have horrible recollections of
some awful mistakes made by library work-
ers who simply did not know the one hun-
dredth part as much about a subject as the
man they were endeavoring to “instruct.”
And yet their attitude' and manner was that
of superiority; and this naturally is likely to
be resented and to make the average working
man feel that the library is not for him.
Many public libraries (and I regret to say
that Grand Rapids is not one of them) are
overcoming this difficulty by employing li-
brarians who have had a special technical
education for this branch of library work.
COURSES OF FREE LECTURES
The Library gives from sixty to seventy
free lectures in the winter, both at the Ry-
erson building, and at the various branch
libraries. Few of these, however, are on
technical subjects, not because we would not
like to give them, or because people would
not be interested if they were properly pre-
sented, but because we have found it almost
impossible, with the funds available, to get
speakers who can present such subjects in a
satisfactory way. The first, most important
thing in conducting a series of free popular
lectures is to get a speaker who does not talk
over the heads of his hearers; and in this
respect some of our lecturers have failed.
Usually the men who have the practical tech-
nical knowledge have not developed the abil-
ity to talk before an audience—the mere
thought of such a thing gives most of them
panic. There is a great field and a great
demand for men who can present a technical
subject so that the average man will be in-
terested and understand. To do this success-
fully is really a great art and in a man like
A
difficulty of this kind, however, ought not to
educational institutions.
exist in a city like Toronto, with its great
You have the men
with the technical knowledge, the men with
the ability to speak, but I think you will
find that most of these men will require
training (if they have it not already) to pre-
sent their subjects satisfactorily to the aver-
age audience of intelligent workingmen.
All our Library lectures are conducted as
roads to books, and on the back of the an-
nouncement slips for each lecture there
is printed a selected list of books in the Li-
brary relating to the lecture. It should be
said, however, that some subjects will bring
many persons to hear the lecture, but will
develop, few or no readers, while other lec-
ture subjects will develop a great many read-
ers. Of course much of this depends on
the speaker and his method of presentation.
We also find that there is a difference in
this respect in different parts of the city with
reference to the same lecture. A study of
Holbrook's American Lyceum of 75 years
ago will be profitable in showing the limita-
tions of the lecture as a means of educa-
tion.
During the last few years the Library has
experimented with outlining courses of home
reading for those who request them. This
work has not been pushed, because we have
not the time or equipment to develop it or
take care of it properly; nevertheless, it has
enabled us to feel our way, and to find out
some things and get a better knowledge of
the problem. I am inclined to think that
the mere laying out of a course of reading,
without following it up personally, is not
likely to amount to much, except in a few
individual cases. The social element is lack-
ing and most persons need the stimulus
which comes from friendly, personal relation,
especially when the very act of reading is so
difficult for so many. I think in most read-
ing lists we make the mistake of naming too
many books. The best plan, it seems to me,
is to have a talk with your man and then
recommend only two or three books. After
he has read those he can find his way much
better than any librarian can tell him.
. For a number of years the Library has
been getting from the principals of the
grade schools the names and addresses of the
boys and girls who leave school permanently
to go to work. These have been followed up
with a little leaflet entitled “Don’t be a
quitter.” The “Quitter” leaflet tells the
story of a friend of mine who has worked
his way up to a most important position in
an electrical public service corporation
through his study of the books and periodi-
cals in a public library, endeavors to impress
upon these young people the fact that they
can continue their education through the Li-
brary while they are at work, and emphasizes
the fact that one can gain the knowledge and
experience of others from books, thus mak-
ing oneself more efficient, and therefore able
to earn more money. The circular closes
with an invitation to call on the librarian
to talk over their own problems. Enough
of these call to give one some personal in-
sight into the difficulties under which they
labor in endeavoring to make themselves
more valuable both to themselves and to
their employers.
The thing that has impressed me most in
these interviews is the fact that so many of
the boys and girls are going out from our
schools with a very limited reading power. I
mean by this that their school work has
not given them the ability to get ideas readily
from the printed page. This is a most seri-
ous handicap, and it is one of the most
difficult things that the Library has to deal
with in endeavoring to increase the use of its
technical books. Personally, I feel that the
schools have failed in their most important
work when they turn out any boy or girl
at the age of fourteen or more who cannot
get ideas readily from the printed page. For
this reason library work with children has a
most important bearing on this whole sub-
ject, and therefore the library cannot begin
too early to get hold of the boys and girls
in school. That this phase of library work
is worth while for its influence on the school
work alone I discussed in another paper
within the past year, but that is another
story and does not belong here. - -
A word about technical books. ' Too many
of them are written from the point of view
of the needs of the higher technical school,
often by college professors, who do not un-
derstand the problem of the worker whose
formal education stopped at the eighth grade
or before. Some of our correspondence
schools understand this problem better, and
that is why so often their books are the
best for a large class of readers. The writ-
ers of technical books can learn much from
the experience of the correspondence schools.
In Grand Rapids we have a system of
travelling libraries some of which go into
factories. Most employers do not care to
assume the responsibility for the books while
in their charge. We have been most suc-
cessful when this work is handled by the
Y. M. C. A. or the Y. W. C. A. in the fac-
tory.
You might gather from the foregoing that
the Public Library of Grand Rapids has done
a good deal in the way of encouraging tech-
nical education. Let me now show by fig-
ures how little we really have done, except
that we have helped occasionally the excep-
tional man. According to the report of the
State Labor Department for 191o (including
women and girls, 3765) there were employed
in the factories of Grand Rapids 24,793 peo-
ple. Of this number nearly 7oo were em-
ployed in office work, so that those engaged
in the industrial work is a little over 24,000,
or over 2000 more persons than are enrolled
as cardholders in the Library. The number
of people in the city eligible to become card-
holders is over 80,000. Of our cardholders
half are children, say, 11,000, and half of
the remaining ones are women, so that there
are only about 5500 male adults who are
cardholders. Of these a large proportion are
business and professional men. Therefore of
the nearly 21,000 men and boys over 16
years old who are workers in the factories,
only about 2000, or Io per cent, are card-
holders. Of course some of these use the
Library occasionally through cards held by
their wives or children, and especially the
reading rooms, where cards are not required.
Among the so-called learned professions the
Library has enrolled as cardholders about
75 per cent.
How many people the correspondence
schools are reaching in our city I do not
know, but I understand from the local repre-
sentative of one of them that his office en-
rolled over 2000 students in the last eight
years in the city of Grand Rapids alone. The
average tuition fee in this school are a little
over $70, so that this one school has taken
from the city in eight years about $150,000.
At the present time this school has between
150 and 160 students enrolled from Grand
Rapids and between 8oo and Iooo in West-
ern Michigan. In one of the smaller cities
of Michigan where the public library has thus
far been able to do little in the purchase of
technical books, there are more persons en-
rolled in this school than in Grand Rapids.
If this school had the same proportional
enrollment in Grand Rapids as in the smaller
city the workingmen of the Furniture City
would be paying this one school on such an
enrollment over $32,000 instead of less than
$11,000 as at present. This is in no sense
a disparagement of the school, for I feel
sure that nearly every man is getting the full
worth of his money. About two-thirds of the
men who enroll in this school complete the
course, the company maintaining a force of
three or four men in Grand Rapids to give
the men who get stuck the personal attention
they need. A gentleman who conducts an-
other of these schools tells me that he always
figures on 75 per cent. of those who enroll
dropping out before they complete the course.
This school has no offices around the country
to give the men personal attention. If it
were possible to get all the facts for the
city of Grand Rapids I feel sure that the
workers to-day are paying out of their own
pockets for technical education every year
more than the city pays for the maintenance
of its public library. When workingmen will
spend their hard earned dollars in this way
it is a demonstration of their intense interest
in technical education. The general public,
however, has not yet waked up to this
fact.
In the United States during the last few
years we have been hearing a good deal
about conservation. We have been a grossly
extravagant people, and are beginning to feel
the pinch from wasting our natural resources.
Conservation, however, means not only the
preserving of unused natural resources, but
also the developing to a better or a more
economic purpose the resources that are now
being used. -
The greatest natural resources of any
country is its men and women, and this fact
we have not yet fully realized. This means
not only that we must conserve the life and
health of the people, but also that we must
develop to a greater degree the efficiency of
the people. For a community to have its
men and women pursue their daily work
under conditions which exhaust their physical
and mental vitality long before they are
sixty years old is nothing less than crime,
for it is a crime to scrap human beings. For
a community to have thousands of men and
women, because of lack of knowledge, train-
ing and skill, to have a productive capacity
of less than half of that of other people in
the same community is no less a criminal
waste of its resources. There is no more
important economic, and social problem for
any city to attack than that of increasing the
productive capacities of the masses of its
people — a problem that is made more diffi-
cult because there is tied up with it the
whole question of the distribution of the pro-
ducts of labor. -
Earlier in this paper I stated that there
were nearly 25,000 persons employed in the
factories of Grand Rapids. What would it
mean to that city if the productive power of
these people could be increased by so much
as only 25 cents a day, say within the next
three years? I think you will agree with
me that it would not be an impossible thing
to increase the average productive power of
the whole community by that amount, for
hundreds of individuals will increase their
productive capacity several times that much
within the next three years. For Grand
Rapids it would mean that there would be
added from this one source nearly $2,000,000
a year, or more than the total amount of
money raised for all purposes by taxation.
If raising the general level of intelligence
can be made to mean more than the wiping
out of all taxes for state, county and muni-
cipal purposes, we begin to realize what un-
developed possibilities there are around and
about us.
Perhaps I can bring out this point better
by another illustration. The city of Scran-
ton, Pa., is built on one of the richest
deposits of anthracite coal in the world. The
coal deposit under the public library property
of that city is valued at $10oo for the mining
rights alone. If a similar deposit to the one
under that library were under the whole
city of Grand Rapids.the value of this natural
resource would be over thirty million dol-
lars. Such a deposit would be immensely
prized by any city, and yet in the unde-
veloped productive power of our own people
at the low average of only 25 cents a day,
we have a natural resource many times
greater than the rich coal deposit of Scran-
ton, for that can be and will be exhausted,
while the increased power of our people may
be made to produce many times thirty mil-
lions of dollars in the lifetime of a single
man, and so continues generation after gen-
eration.
Our states and cities are spending mil-
lions of dollars on schools, colleges and uni-
versities, in order to develop the exceptional
man. The developing of the exceptional man
is important, but we have too long neglected
the average man. The time demands that
more attention should be paid to raising
the average level. It is not possible for all
men to become designers, superintendents,
managers, captains of industry, etc., but it is
possible for all men to increase their effi-
ciency, their productive power, in the work
which they may be doing by the use of books
in our libraries; and I plead for this in-
creased efficiency not only for the sake of the
community, but especially for the sake of
the individual average man.
But more important than the social and
the economic value of increased efficiency
is the spiritual significance of bringing a
wider intelligence into the grinding routine
of much of our modern factory machine
specialization. It is drudgery that kills the
soul, but drudgery is rarely in the work, but
rather in the attitude of mind toward the
work, because so many of us cannot see it
whole. Only the larger knowledge, the sense
of team work, the relations of one's part to
the whole, can idealize our everyday tasks, so
that we may find in them a means of self-ex-
pression, joy in the work, and thus realizing
one's self; and this I conceive to be the
great end of all technical education. The
library in the very nature of its work relates
itself to the whole of life; and it can do no
more important thing for society than to
bring this larger vision into the minds and
hearts of the people, for this, more than a
mere increase in wages or production will
make for happiness.
I can only urge the Ontario Library As-
sociation to continue its study and efforts
to solve this problem along the lines it has
mapped out. But in all this work through
the Library let us never get the idea that
the mere increasing of the industrial effi-
ciency of the worker is the entire solution
of the problem. We must recognize that
back of our industries, and more important
than our industries, are men; and that it is
not great factories, commerce, money and all
that, that brings happiness to the individual
or greatness to the state. Therefore, as li-
brarians let us administer our books so that
they shall make all men more skilful in deal-
ing with things, but at the same time, let
us ever, always and forever, remember that
it's the quality of men's minds, and hearts
and souls, and not the abundance or , the
magnitude of the things they create, that
make a city great and life on earth worth
while.