To a very great extent the club work in the Cleveland Public
Library owes its growth in size and efficiency to the time and
interest given to it by the volunteer club leaders, of whom,
during the year 1910, there were 60. Looking over the work of the
boys' clubs for the year, it is interesting to note the influence
of the leader's interests upon the boys. All but one of the boys'
clubs whose leaders are attorneys devoted their club meetings to
debating, mock trials and parliamentary drill. Among the clubs
under the leadership of students in Western Reserve University
(and these represent more than half of the total number of boys'
clubs) the predominant interest is in the discussion of current
events, the subjects for occasional debates being suggested by
these discussions. In two or three clubs too young for such
discussion, the leaders, who were especially interested in
civics, were able to interest the boys in the study of the work
of the various departments of our city government. In another
instance a leader, a business man, deeply interested in the
history of Cleveland and its industries has succeeded in holding
the interest of his club boys in this subject for three months,
though these were boys whose indifference to anything but "Wild
West" stories was proverbial in the branch library.
Clubs for boys and girls in the Cleveland Public Library are
under the direction of a club supervisor, who organizes the
clubs, secures the services of the volunteer leaders, and helps
them in preparing programs for the clubs. The work has been
conducted in this way for three years, and has become a vital
part of the work of the library as a whole.
LIBRARY READING CLUBS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
The successful development of reading clubs by the New York
Public Library is evidenced by the fact that at the time the
following paper was written, in 1912, there were reported
twenty-five boys' clubs and seventeen girls' clubs. The paper is
by Anna C. Tyler, and was read before the New York meeting of
school librarians in Brooklyn, N. Y., May 25, 1912.
Anna Cogswell Tyler was born in Detroit, Michigan, and was
graduated from the Hartford, Conn., High School in 1880. She
attended Mrs. Julie Goddard Piatt's boarding school in Utica, New
York, from 1880 to 1882, and Mademoiselle Taveney's school for
girls at Neuillysur- Seine near Paris from 1883 to 1885. She was
graduated from the Pratt Institute Library School, taking the
two-year course, 1904-1906. She was an assistant in the Pratt
Institute Free Library from 1906 to 1908. In 1908 she was made
assistant in charge of story-telling and library reading-clubs in
the New York Public Library.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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