CHILDREN'S LIBRARIES. In a con crete sense, special collections of books in tended for juvenile readers and usually kept in separate rooms of general public libraries. From a broader point of view, however, children's libraries may be defined as an edu cational agency seeking to acquaint the young with the world's best literature and to culti vate an abiding love for good reading. Their work, therefore, supplements and transcends that of the public schools which exercise but a limited influence on the child's outside reading.
History and Active library work with children is a comparatively recent development — not more than 35 years old, at the utmost. Owing, however, to the laxity with which the term children's library has been used, there is considerable uncertainty as to just where and when the institution originated. Sporadic and usually abortive efforts in this direction appear to have been made as early as 1:•:5, when a children's library was opened in New York by a public school principal (Emily S. Hanaway). A more successful experiment was made, also in New York, the following year, when a separat library for children was opened as a branch of the Aguilar Free Li brary. But these forerunners of the children's library movement do not appear to have been generally imitated before 1890, when a chil dren's reading room was opened at the Brook line (Mass.) Public Library. Soon thereafter special provisions for children in public libra ries were made at Buffalo, Cleveland, Pitts burgh, Philadelphia, New York, Lowell, Medford, Brooklyn, Pawtucket, New Haven and elsewhere. By 1896 Milwaukee, Denver, Detroit, Omaha, Seattle and San Francisco the movement spreading more rapidly in the West — all had their children's departments. To the Minneapolis Public Library, however, seems to belong the honor of first recognizing the full importance of the children's library movement by making adequate provisions for library work with children in 1893. By 1897 the movement had assumed such proportions that the American Library Association made the sub ject of children's libraries a special topic for discussion at its annual conference at Philadel phia that year. This gave so much additional impetus to the movement that children's depart ments or children's rooms soon became a component part of every progressive public library in the United States. The best of these carry on systematic work with children and have all the delightful adjuncts of -children's rooms. In some instances even — in such cities
as Brooklyn (N. Y.), Cleveland and Griffin (Ga.)— children's libraries are housed in entire ly separate buildings, which naturally afford many exceptional opportunities. This indicates how juvenile readers have come to their own in our public libraries since the day of "children's corners," designed quite as much to keep chil dren out of the way of adult readers as for their own good. In most of the larger cities of the Uinted States children's libraries are now completely organized and fully supervised. In such cities the central library serves as a model for the various branches, all of which are administered and conducted in accordance with the general principles formulated by the supervisor.
Some idea of the general growth and popu larity of children's libraries may be had by a glance at a few actual figures. In 1914 there were over 1,500,000 volumes intended specially for juvenile readers in but 51 of the larger libraries in the country, which shelved some 300,000 new volumes in 1913 alone. By a very conservative estimate half a million children held library cards the same year, drawing more than eleven million books for home use in the few libraries above mentioned. Of course such large library centres as those of Pittsburgh (Pa.) and New York, where children's libra ries constitute an entirely separate system, pre sent figures even more impressive. In 1915 the various children's library branches of Pitts burgh had 119,678 volumes and a circulation of 702,139. During the same year the combined circulation of all the children's branches of Greater New York exceeded seven and a-half million volumes (7,63,462, to be exact), while the number of children using the 44 branches of three of its boroughs (the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx and Richmond) was 1,608,753. The great popularity of children's story hours, an important and seemingly in dispensable phase of library work with chil dren, may be judged from the fact that 119,678 children attended them in 1915 in Pittsburgh alone. In New York, exclusive of the bor oughs of Brooklyn and Queens, 2,489 story hour groups gathered during the same period in the various branch libraries and the Central Children's Room. At the latter, on one special occasion, the number of auditors was 270.