LIBRARY PROGRESS IN AMERICA. 131 



A DECADE OF LIBRARY PROGRESS IN AMERICA. 



By WILLIAM WARNER BISHOP. 



AMOXG the many gatherings of specialists which were held in 

 connection with the Chicago Exposition in 1893 was an Inter- 

 national Congress of Librarians. The account of its sessions ap- 

 peared, in the usual belated manner of government publications, in 

 the Report of the Commissioner of Education some three years later. 

 The American Library Association has just held another similar 

 international congress for the St. Louis Fair. It seems a fitting time, 

 in view of this event, to set forth as well as may be in brief compass 

 the events which have made the ten years which have elapsed since the 

 World's Fair at Chicago a memorable decade in the history of Ameri- 

 can libraries. 



It was a saying of President Garfield's that American education 

 runs too much to bricks and mortar. A biting sting of truth lies in 

 these words, truth which applies but too well to the library world in 

 common with that of education. It is perhaps a national failing to 

 exalt the visible and tangible, and to ignore the subtle and unseen 

 work of culture and study. Undoubtedly the average man will turn 

 to the new buildings which have been reared in this decade for his 

 criterion of progress in library affairs. They form, it must be said, 

 a notable addition to the list of public buildings of merit in the 

 country. 



Perhaps it is not too much to say that the modern American library 

 is a new architectural type. Conditions peculiarly our own, many of 

 them the direct result of American innovations in planning library 

 work, have produced a kind of building which is in many respects 

 novel. The college gymnasium and the large library in the hands of 

 our architects have become almost as markedly American forms of 

 building as the sky-scraper and the grain elevator. The demands of 

 the librarian for natural light throughout the structure, for compact 

 storage and at the same time for instant accessibility of his books, for 

 protection from fire and damp, joined with the need of supplying 

 plenty of space for readers, for administration and for those who 

 throng the corridors and desks where books are given out and returned, 

 have resulted in some extremely interesting and beautiful buildings. 

 More and more architects are studying the needs of libraries, and mis- 

 takes once made and realized are seldom repeated. 



The small library also has furnished in the past decade numerous 



