Library Work with Children [19]
from parent or teacher should, of course, be required.
7. A child in school cannot read more than one story book a week without neglecting his work. If he needs another book in connection with his studies he should take it on a school teacher's, or nonfiction card.
8. It is best, if a child has only one book a week, for his card to be of a different color from others, that it may be more easily distinguished at the charging desk.
9. It has been proved by actual experiment that children will read books which are good in a literary sense if they are interesting. New libraries have the advantage over old ones, that they are not obliged to struggle against a demand for the boys' series that were supplied in large quantities fifteen or twenty years ago.
10. As soon as children learn that in a library there are books and people to help them on any subject, from the care of a sick rabbit to a costume for the Landing of the Pilgrims, they begin to ask advice about their reading. It is a good thing if some of the library assistants are elder sisters in large families who have tumbled about among books, and if some of the questions asked of applicants for library positions relate to what they would give boys or girls to read. If an assistant in a large library shows a special fitness for work with children, it is best to give it into her charge. If all the assistants like it, let them have their share of it.
11. The question of a children's reading room depends on the size of the room for older readers, and how much it is used by them in the afternoons. Conditions vary so much in libraries that it is impossible for one to make a rule for another in this case.
HOW LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN HAS GROWN IN HARTFORD AND CONNECTICUT
The Library Journal for February, 1914, says: "One of the pleasantest features of 'Library week' at Lake George in 1913 was the welcome given to Miss Hewins, that typical New England woman, whose sympathy with children and child life has made this relation of her public library work a type and model for all who have to do with children.... Miss Hewins's paper was really a delightful bit of literary autobiography, and she has now happily acceded to a request from the Journal to fill out the outlines into a more complete record."
Not long ago I went into the public library of a university town in England and established confidence by saying, "I see that Chivers does your binding," whereupon the librarian invited me inside the railing. A boy ten or twelve years old was standing in a Napoleonic attitude, with his feet very far apart, before the fiction shelves, where the books were alphabetized under authors, but with apparently nothing to show him whether a story was a problem-novel or a tale for children. My thoughts went back many years to the days when I first became the librarian of a subscription library in Hartford, where novels and children's stories were roughly arranged under the first letter of the title, and not by authors. There was a printed catalog, but without anything to indicate in what series or where in order of the series a story-book belonged, and it was impossible when a child had read one to find out what the next was except from the last page of the book itself or the advertisements in the back and they had often been torn out for convenient reference.
My technical equipment was some volunteer work in a town library, a little experience in buying for a Sunday-school library, and about a year in the Boston Athenaeum. The preparation that I had had for meeting children and young people in the library was, besides some years of teaching, a working knowledge of the books that had been read and re-read in a large family for twenty-five years, from Miss Edgeworth and Jacob Abbott, an old copy of "Aesop's fables," Andersen, Grimm, Hawthorne, "The Arabian nights," Mayne Reid's earlier innocent even if unscientific stories, down through "Tom Brown," "Alice in Wonderland," Our Young Folks, the Riverside Magazine, "Little women," to Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, George
7. A child in school cannot read more than one story book a week without neglecting his work. If he needs another book in connection with his studies he should take it on a school teacher's, or nonfiction card.
8. It is best, if a child has only one book a week, for his card to be of a different color from others, that it may be more easily distinguished at the charging desk.
9. It has been proved by actual experiment that children will read books which are good in a literary sense if they are interesting. New libraries have the advantage over old ones, that they are not obliged to struggle against a demand for the boys' series that were supplied in large quantities fifteen or twenty years ago.
10. As soon as children learn that in a library there are books and people to help them on any subject, from the care of a sick rabbit to a costume for the Landing of the Pilgrims, they begin to ask advice about their reading. It is a good thing if some of the library assistants are elder sisters in large families who have tumbled about among books, and if some of the questions asked of applicants for library positions relate to what they would give boys or girls to read. If an assistant in a large library shows a special fitness for work with children, it is best to give it into her charge. If all the assistants like it, let them have their share of it.
11. The question of a children's reading room depends on the size of the room for older readers, and how much it is used by them in the afternoons. Conditions vary so much in libraries that it is impossible for one to make a rule for another in this case.
HOW LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN HAS GROWN IN HARTFORD AND CONNECTICUT
The Library Journal for February, 1914, says: "One of the pleasantest features of 'Library week' at Lake George in 1913 was the welcome given to Miss Hewins, that typical New England woman, whose sympathy with children and child life has made this relation of her public library work a type and model for all who have to do with children.... Miss Hewins's paper was really a delightful bit of literary autobiography, and she has now happily acceded to a request from the Journal to fill out the outlines into a more complete record."
Not long ago I went into the public library of a university town in England and established confidence by saying, "I see that Chivers does your binding," whereupon the librarian invited me inside the railing. A boy ten or twelve years old was standing in a Napoleonic attitude, with his feet very far apart, before the fiction shelves, where the books were alphabetized under authors, but with apparently nothing to show him whether a story was a problem-novel or a tale for children. My thoughts went back many years to the days when I first became the librarian of a subscription library in Hartford, where novels and children's stories were roughly arranged under the first letter of the title, and not by authors. There was a printed catalog, but without anything to indicate in what series or where in order of the series a story-book belonged, and it was impossible when a child had read one to find out what the next was except from the last page of the book itself or the advertisements in the back and they had often been torn out for convenient reference.
My technical equipment was some volunteer work in a town library, a little experience in buying for a Sunday-school library, and about a year in the Boston Athenaeum. The preparation that I had had for meeting children and young people in the library was, besides some years of teaching, a working knowledge of the books that had been read and re-read in a large family for twenty-five years, from Miss Edgeworth and Jacob Abbott, an old copy of "Aesop's fables," Andersen, Grimm, Hawthorne, "The Arabian nights," Mayne Reid's earlier innocent even if unscientific stories, down through "Tom Brown," "Alice in Wonderland," Our Young Folks, the Riverside Magazine, "Little women," to Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, George