1931 - Annual Convention

              S E V E N T E E N T H A N N U A L C O N V E N T I ON 79
MODERN LIBRARY SERVICE FOR A L B E R TA
Mr. D. E . Cameron, Librarian, University of Alberta.
It is a very great pleasure to me to be permitted to address you this
m o r n i n g on the subject of modern library service for the Province of A l b e r t a,
and it is a pleasure to realize that the members of the Women's Institutes arc
already alive to the importance of this p r o b l em and anxious to know what
can be done in the way of securing for the people of our province a steady
supply of the best reading. We may a l l , I think, put our energy into a dis­cussion
of this sort with comolete confidence, for the effort to bring more
good reading to the hands of everyone rests on a very sound philosophy,
whose main tenets, I think, might be expressed thus:
A m o n g all the satisfactions that life may b r i n g to us, there is none more
important than the satisfaction of the mind; and in the satisfaction of the
mind there is no substitute for good books. People may a l l ow the reading of
good books to lapse into a place of lesser importance for a short time, but
it w i l l always come back to its own again, and w i l l never be seriously threat­ened
by any of the things that sometimes look like being substitutes, such as
radio, theatres and so on. I hope there is no one here who doubts that what
I have said about reading as one of the greatest satisfactions in life is true.
I am perfectly sure that everyone who knows the satisfaction of losing himself
i n a first- class book would hesitate very long before he would consent to trade
the happiness that brings for many of the other satisfactions that are often,
it may' be, more eagerly sought after by men and women.
In our day, the question of good reading is very largely tied up w i t h the
question of libraries, f o r the reason t h a t our interests are, or at least ought
to be, very wide, and the demands we make on books are, therefore, very
numerous, so that it would be r e a l l y impossible for anyone to gather around
h im as his private property the books that he ought to have within reach;
and that is a l l the more true when we remember that for every book that we
want to read thoroughly, there ought to be w i t h i n reach a dozen or two at
least from which we can pick just the t h i n g we want, getting in the mean­time
a very happy impression of the wealth of our resources and of the
u n l i m i t e d treasure that waits for those who w i l l seek it. Even the wealthiest
reader nowadays does not find his own resources enough, but wants to be
near the much greater resources of a good library.
W i t h i n the last generation there has been a very great awakening of
feeling that libraries are of very great importance to us. A good deal of
credit for this must go to A n d r e w Carnegie, who, remembering perhaps the
poverty of his own youth, resolved that if he could help it no boy would go
without access to good books. He devoted a very generous share of his vast
fortune to the task of s t i m u l a t i n g the provision of l i b r a r y service, and as a
result of his munificence a host of m u n i c i p a l libraries sprang into existence.
To countless thousands of people the creation of these libraries was _ an
unspeakable boon, and it was generally felt that if o n l y it could be possible
to erect libraries of this sort everywhere, the problem of providing a steady
flow of good reading would be s a t i s f a c t o r i l y solved.
The trouble, however, is that the more books people have and the more
they learn to use them, the more they find that they need, so that the pro­vision
of many l i b r a r i e s a generation ago has rather taught us how vast our
needs are, than settled the question of how to supply them. I have no doubt
at all that Carnegie felt that he was helping us to a final solution of our
troubles, and I fancy he would be agreeably surprised a n d delighted to k n ow
that the main result of his great benefactions has been to show us that the
l i b r a r y needs of a r e a l l y good, well- educated community are very much wider