The library school is commonly regarded as, and is, in a sense, a product of the last century. Library schools are, therefore, still a new thing. It may not seem so to you who had not been born when some of us were lecturing at that first American library school up at Columbia University, but it is the fact that the teachers of that school are still living and teaching, and there were no schools of library economy strictly speaking when they began. The well fledged library school as an avowed school and independent unit is a product of this generation.

Nevertheless library schools too have had their beginnings. In the immediate past schools or university courses of palaeography or archival science have been practically library schools. In European countries, where the handling of documents and manuscripts have been so much the more difficult share of the problem that library economy and all the rest has been counted negligible and has in fact been neglected, these were real library schools, in that they were chiefly or wholly intended for and used by those who were intending to be librarians. They taught in fact the things which were most expected of the librarians, just as the modern schools, in teaching almost exclusively business and administrative methods, teach the things which the moderns expect of their librarians. They were and are, therefore, very one-sided library schools, lopsided on the science side, and yet perhaps not more lopsided than our own schools are on the side of library economy.

But the beginnings of library schools may be found farther back still in the schools of the Scriptoria of the middle ages, where librarians made as well as kept their books, and in the temple schools of Greece and Egypt, where men were trained to all sorts of professions, including the keeping of books. Such schools are alleged in Babylonia as early as 3200 B.C., and more primitive still must be counted the schools for the training in memorizing of ancient India. That some analogies to this training in the keeping of books existed in the collections of mnemonic books is not merely inferred in general but found in the alleged training of keepers of quipus in the use and publication of these records. The same is possibly true in some of the initiation ceremonies of primitive tribes where the young men are presumably taught the use of message sticks, secret languages, and the like. It may fairly be said that these are remote in nature as well as in time, and yet they are as truly the predecessors of the library schools of to-day, as these of to-day are of the library schools of to-morrow, which are likely to differ very considerably from those of to-day.

It does not take much of a prophet to foresee a radical development in some of our American library schools within a very few years. When for example, the Columbia Library school was starting, manuscripts were so few in this country that their science and economy was a negligible element in instruction—and as for archives, we had plenty of documents but the very name archive, with what it connotes, was foreign and almost unknown in America. Now there are many well recognized archives and some of our collections of ancient manuscripts are numbered by the thousands. Many of you will probably live to see more than one library school equipped with full departments for instruction in palaeography and archival science, with special curricula for each distinguished from the general course in library economy. Possibly by that time there will also be departments of cartography, engraving and numismatics, each with its corps of instructors. In these respects it was something of a pity that the library school went out of the university, but on the whole it may be doubted if it would have ever had the great expansion or ever have done the great work that it has done for popular education if it had stayed in the university. In several very fundamental respects certainly this New York Public Library is a far better environment for developing a university of librarianship than any university of general studies.