FRESEIVTED BY
THE AUTHOR
'J
N!
in
z
7/
,/y/-/
r\
(goote as £oote for Cljtforen
I [Read at the Library Section of the State Teachers' Asso-
'ciation, Denver, Colo., Jan. 1, 1908, by Miss Charlotte
A. Baker, Assistant Librarian of the State Agricultural
College.]
This is a practical age when we value things
largely according to their usefulness and serv-
iceableness. Books of a certain class are val-
. ued, not because we have an affection for them,
not because we expect to read them from cover
to cover, but because they are useful. Like
tools, they are instruments of use or of service.
x. Also like tools, some people use them with a
natural aptitude, while others have to be taught
their name and use.
The Other day I saw four machines in a field.
When I asked what they were, I was told that
* they were steam and meter plows. If I ever use
one of those plows I shall have to be taught how
to make it go. Some of us who work in public
places realize how many people lack the me-
'chanical book sense, and if they are ever to
acquire it, must be taught how to make it go.
I have had clerks in drug stores offer to use
a directory for me, showing that they are in
* the habit of giving help to people who could not
manage a practical application of the alphabet.
We are frequently asked questions in a
library that people could answer for themselves.
Because we are asked such questions, we know
1 that there are many others who are too busy
to come to the library who are going without
little facts that they want. These facts in
many cases are in their own home kit of tools.
In one week I had three questions asked me
* by three different classes of people—a child, a
student, and a business man, who is a graduate
of one of our large universities.
The child wanted to know the date of the in-
vention of the cotton gin. We found it by re-
ferring to the index of her geography."
The student wanted a list of the important
men in the world's history, with their dates, and
a line telling what each did. I had some trouble
in suiting him, but he finally decided that the
biographical list in the back of the dictionary
was just the thing. He told me that they had a
dictionary, the Britannica, and some other kind
of encyclopedia at home, but he never could find
anything in them. He was not a country boy.
He came from a large city.
The university man wanted to know when
Pliny was born. He had been three days in
trying to see me. I referred him to the back
of the dictionary in his own office.
One hates to suggest that our school children
should be taught, anything more, since they half
grasp too many thing's now, but it does seem as
if it might be a saving of time in the end, if they
learned to use the common book tools such as
their text-books and the dictionary- I suggest
'these because I have recently visited a school
that had no other resources.
By examining our seventh grade text-books,
I find a preface, introduction, contents, appen-
dix, alphabetical list of authors, and index. Very
few people know or care what the difference is
between a preface and an introduction. I am
not sure that I know myself, but if I look them
over carefully, I find I learn the author's point
of view and often how to use the book quickly.
In the case of reference books it always pays to
take the time to read the preface.
Half the students who come to us from the
secondary schools do not seem to take in that
the contents is generally in the front of a book,
r.
and arranged according to the paging, and the
index is usually in the back and arranged alpha-
betically. When they find a reference followed
by Roman numerals and then figures, they are
confused, and have to be told that it means vol-
ume and then page.
But to go back to our text-books and the
little girl who was in trouble over the cotton-
gin, because she did not know how to use her
geography as a tool. Her geography had four
references to cotton in its index, her history
two, the Academic Dictionary at the teacher's
desk two more, and four histories which could
be borrowed from a higher grade together had
sixteen. If the children in that room could have
looked up cotton a dozen times in the indexes
of their various text-books, they would have
known where to look for an index, and could
afford to forget the date of the cotton-gin.
Under the word railroad one of the refer-
ences led to the middle of a paragraph on com-
merce. Five people out of ten do not want to
read a reference unless it is under the word
they have in their own mind, or you put their
finger on the exact spot.
Every Fall we have students coming into the
library to see the catalogs of the schools they
have attended previously. They want to get
credit for a subject, and our Dean refuses to
consider credits unless they can tell the author
of the text they have used. They have forgot-
ten the author of the text-book in question, and
hope to find it listed in the catalog of their old
school. With our private libraries, Sunday
school libraries, and the gift books that children
receive from time to time, the smallest school
can teach where to look for an author^ and the^ 0.
1 • •••••• !• »t
• • • *:• ;Y •
3 '..' •••• • •
importance of the author's name as a means of
identification.
I asked a little girl the other day, "What is
the name of the man who wrote your reader?"
She replied, "I don't know." Then her mother
said, "What's the name of your reader?" and
she quickly told us, "Baldwin's."
After children have been taught to use their
text-books, they want to learn to use an alpha-
betical list. The quickest way to learn their
alphabet is practice in the rapid use of a dic-
tionary. This can be taught in three ways:
with the dictionary, with advertisements, or
with both. I prefer the latter method.
If you have seventh or eighth grade children,
you can give them a little information about the
rank of our big dictionaries: the Murray or
Oxford, the Century, and the Standard.
The Oxford dictionary, which is founded
mainly on material collected by the Philolog-
ical Society since 1857, is now in the last third
of the alphabet. It contains all English words
known to have been used during the past 700
years, giving their pronunciation, etymology,
history, as well as numerous illustrative ex-
amples from all periods.
A note to the Century Company and to Funk
& Wagnalls will bring circulars describing the
other two. I have sixteen good advertisements
that have been sent to me by the publishers of
the Standard and of Webster's. These cost me
time for two letters and four cents.
If children have individual dictionaries there
is nothing like a dictionary drill to teach the
location of single letters. Drill them in finding
the different letters until they can turn readily
to J C or X, as the case may be. When they
.have learned to find individual letters easily,
F
then let them look for particular words. It is
a good plan to have a child read aloud, and see
if he understands the different abbreviations in
the body of the definition. For instance, some-
times A. means adjective, and sometimes it
does not. In this same connection the capital
letter R confused me completely the other day,
and puzzled the people whom I asked.
After one has worked a time with the dic-
tionary itself, it gives variety to use advertise-
ments like the two I have in my hand. I prefer
these because the cover of the Webster adver-
tisement looks like their dictionary in minia-
ture, while the Standard pamphlet is a reduced
facsimile of their two-volume edition.
If you use Webster's in your school you can
get as many ^.". **• .. ... ^merits as you
care to ask for, and each child may have his
own during the recitation period. As they read
aloud you can call attention to the differences
in arrangement between Webster and the Stand-
ard. Webster puts the etymology after each
word, while the Standard places it after the
definitions. Webster writes the initial letter of
each word with a capital, but the Standard uses
capitals only for proper nouns and the words
derived from them. These distinctions are
only a few of the many little differences. This
same little booklet of Webster's also gives an
opportunity to show a little of what is in the
appendix.
Finally, a list of questions will help wonder-
fully in teaching how to use the different sec-
tions of the modern dictionary.
What is the nationality of Jack the Giant
killer?
What can you find out about Cinderella,
Aladdin, Tom Sawyer, and Mark Twain?
Who was the Quaker poet?
Where do we get the expression "Almighty
Dollar"?
, At this time of year it is interesting to look
at pictures of snow crystals. These are in the
dictionary.
Our large dictionaries now give synonyms,
anonyms, homonyms, prepositions to be used
after a word, the compounds and all kinds of
helps to exact English. Generally our school
children do not know of these helps.
Before leaving the subject of dictionaries, I
want to call attention to their keys. It is worth
while to spend some time teaching a child that
somewhere in a book is a key which tells what
its different abbreviations mean, and have him
practice using -J ^T '>-"- :^ heard of the
little girl who wanted another, book by Anon,
and the boy who thought Ibid's stories were
corkers.
But suppose you have no individual diction-
aries, and only a small dictionary at the teach-
er's desk. After you have done all you can
with advertisements, use a shopping catalog.
I lived in a community once where every
family had a Montgomery Ward catalog. The
index is in-the middle, so it is always intact as
long as there is anything left of the book. Its
long alphabetical list can be used for rapid drill.
I have spent hours over this fascinating vol-
ume. When you live forty miles from a chiffon-
ier, and want to buy one, and can't spell it, this
catalog is a God-send. It is full of pictures.
But let us pass from tools for children to a
few for teachers.
There is a little magazine that we often use
.in.the library which I think teachers might like
•!*••••. * •
to buy. It is called "What's in the Magazines."
It costs 50 cents a year, and is published by the
Dial Co., Chicago.
The main advantage of this booklet is that
it reaches one a few days before the beginning
of the month that it indexes; that is, the August
copy came the last of July. This gives one an
opportunity to buy an occasional copy of a peri-
odical while it is on the news stands.
It indexes both the leading monthlies and
weeklies with a simple arrangement. Among
its other features it has special sections both
for poems, and the best work of our current il-
lustrators.
In a school where there is no library, one
could make a list of the magazines that could
be borrowed from the children, and add largely
to one's resources, if the teacher had this peri-
odical guide.
Some one has said, "A certain part of knowl-
edge is, after all, being able to find out a certain
thing at a certain time." If we can teach our
school children to use the common book tools
easily and intelligently, they will be able to find
some of the certain things at the certain time.
CHARLOTTE A. BAKER.
\
Imprint: Carson-Harper, Denver
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3 9015 03062 1133

"*
r>r^fe^fM^i<%s
^^^w^^^^^^ •*%-**•
* i -$ *& v^ - -; ^ ?.v
^^'^^V^w^
- * - % ^ ^%^^%4v^^>t JS^ftr-^
: rlJrt^^^^;^^
••-SRSS'^*.
«#&*£ ^»efe *-fS*«M&»^-