Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Library Association: Held at Ottawa, Canada, June 26-July 2, 1912
Science
Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Library Association: Held at Ottawa, Canada, June 26-July 2, 1912
American Library Association; Library science -- Congresses
(2) By sending pupils to the nearest library for all aid outside
the text-book and by handing over to the nearest librarian all
responsibility for teaching the use of books. Librarians often advocate
this method. It is only an application of the specialization which
is so common in high schools and by which each subject has its own
teacher who may or may not try to correlate his own work with that
of his colleagues. The librarian, who at least ought to know about
books, is the logical person to plan courses and to give formal
instruction and in any school which can possibly have a librarian
who devotes her entire time to the library this is the proper course
to follow. It happens, however, that many schools which greatly need
such a course have no one but the regular teachers to administer the
library and to teach its use. In such an emergency no school faculty
is complete without at least one teacher who can show the pupils--and
her fellow-teachers, if need be--something of the best methods of using
books. Moreover, teachers need to know how to use the books connected
with their own courses even if they need do little or nothing in the
way of general library work.
(3) A third general method remains: systematic training in regularly
scheduled classes in the high school and a systematic course in the
normal school for the future teachers of elementary and of high
schools. This is the plan generally adopted for other subjects and
the failure of the schools to provide in their curricula a place
for library training can reasonably be attributed only to the fact
that librarians have failed to impress on teachers the necessity
for such instruction. There are several reasons for the failure.
One of the fundamental principles of successful advertising is that
the prospective customer must be convinced that the value of the
advertised article exceeds its cost. Perhaps we librarians have not
always recognized the value of this principle in our own campaigns.
We use our library jargon and speak learnedly of "library methods,"
and "the library world" as though our work were based on some occult
secret (which it is not) and as though we who carry it on were a
peculiar people (which we sometimes are), and we plan elaborate courses
in "library economy" which would strike terror to the heart of any
teacher, were any teacher interested enough to look at them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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