Papers and Proceedings of the Tenth General Meeting of the American Library Association PDF Download

Author: UNKNOWN. AUTHOR
Publisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9781332026630
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Excerpt from Papers and Proceedings of the Tenth General Meeting of the American Library Association: Held at Saint Louis, May 8-11, 1889 Ladies and Gentlemen of the American Library Association: - In obedience to an unbroken precedent, I must open this convention with some general remarks. They shall be on Common Sense. Common Sense what is it? I hope no one will insist on a definition. Logicians order us to define our terms before engaging in discussion, but I find it much more convenient to leave this one a little vague, trusting to your knowledge of its general meaning and to your willingness to allow a certain latitude in its use. But if I must be explicit, I will say common sense is my sense; other peoples sense, when it differs from mine, is little better than nonsense. One definition I must protest against, however; I cannot agree with the man who declared that common sense is thus named because it is so common. We could not conduct the affairs of life if this were true. In our own field common sense is the very characteristic of American libraries. We must not blow our own trumpet too loudly. We must not overlook the magnificent accumulation of books in German and French libraries, the good fight made by our English brothers against prejudice and ignorance, the zeal and the complete organization of the Italians. Yet I believe that the same qualities that have made our nation (with certain glaring exceptions) the best of pioneers the same fitting of means to ends, the same suiting of the man and the thing to the environment, the same content with small beginnings, the same ingenuity to contrive and quickness to seize upon every improvement the same common sense, in short, have been shown in the spread of our libraries, as in the settlement of our country, to a degree not seen in older lands. Our libraries have been like our railroads. When we were poor and population was scanty, we built railways in the cheapest manner: two planks with a flat iron rail spiked along them, turning up every now and then to run through the bottom of the car, a tramway rather than a railroad. The English traveler, seeing it, wondered and sneered; but it was the only way in which we could build them, and so we opened up the country. Now that we have got riches from the territory then reached, we have carried our railway system far ahead of any; we run palace cars across the desert. So our libraries, begun modestly a century ago, by making the most of a little and by the use of mother wit, have, with the schools, opened up a great country of intellect, have extended themselves more than anywhere else on the globe, have become a necessity at least wherever the New Englandergoes and, the era of luxury having come, one finds them on the frontier, or what was lately the frontier, at Minneapolis, at Denver, with all the perfections of material and personnel that the Library Bureau and the Library School can furnish. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.