the accident of size makes little or no difference in
library economy; but in the administration of affairs, in the machinery
of running, the director of a municipal library has many and
accumulating cares, of which his less burdened rural brother need never
feel the weight. Prof. John Fiske, some years ago, at the time when he
was assistant librarian of Harvard University, very graphically
described a portion of the perplexing duties which fall to the lot of
even a university librarian, striving to correct the erroneous but too
prevalent notion that such a position is a sinecure. He confined himself
to an enumeration and description of the duties which are essentially
professional, the multiplicity of details of the ordering, classifying,
and cataloging of books. In this direction there is a difference only in
amount between the greater and the less. But, in addition to all that
Prof. Fiske described, a city librarian must needs oversee as well the
thousand and one minutiae which go to make up the sum of a day's work in
a circulating library. He must provide for the accurate identification
and registration of his borrowers,--no light task when they number tens
of thousands of the floating population of a western city, which has
more active duties for her police than the following up of delinquent
patrons of the public library. He must see to it that the thousands of
books which flow over his counters are unerringly charged, and that
tardy borrowers are warned of their remissness. These are but a few of
the numberless details, many of which are trivial in the extreme, but
which all go toward the making up of such a day's work as "none but he
that feels it knows." As a machine increases in complications a
constantly greater percentage of power is consumed in overcoming
friction. This attention to the routine of daily work, which forms much
of the severest, because least satisfying, work which a librarian does,
may be compared to the friction of machinery; and just in the proportion
that the power of his mind and the strength of his body are taxed in
this direction, by just so much are they reduced for other duties, the
importance of which is specially prominent in the minds not only of the
profession, but of the public as well,--an actual knowledge of the books
which the library buys, and the exertion of an active personal influence
in raising the standard of literature which is drawn from the library.

It is precisely in