FIRST SESSION

(Tonka Bay Pavilion, Monday, June 22, 1908, 8.30 p. m.)

THE

HE first general session of the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the American Library Association was called to order by the president Arthur E. Bostwick.

The PRESIDENT: It gives me great pleasure to announce that this first general session of the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the American Library Association is open. We are gathered here from all parts of the country, and there are many of us who have come thousands of miles in order to be in attendance at this meeting. That is no uncommon thing; but I am sure that some of you, on this stormy night, have thought that journey from the Tonka Bay Hotel to this auditorium longer than the whole trip from New York or San Francisco, or perhaps from Florida or Alabama. That is one of the discomforts, however, that is always attendant upon a meeting place that is somewhat distant from the headquarters hotel, and we will trust that we shall be sufficiently quiet here in our seclusion by the shores of the lake to make up for any discomfort that you may have in walking through the rain from the hotel.

The first thing on the program this evening is the president's address and the president has chosen as his subject

THE LIBRARIAN AS A CENSOR "Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them.” It is in this last way that the librarian has become a censor of literature. Originally the custodian of volumes placed in his care by others, he has ended by becoming in these latter days, much else, including a selector and a dis

tributor, his duties in the former capacity being greatly influenced and modified by the expansion of his field in the latter. As the library's audience becomes larger, as its educational functions spread and are brought to bear on more and more of the young and immature, the duty of sifting its material becomes more imperative. I am not referring now to the necessity of selection imposed upon us by lack of funds. A man with five dollars to spend can buy only five dollars' worth from a stock worth a hundred and it is unfair to say that he has "rejected" the unbought 95 dollars' worth. Such a selection scarcely involves censorship and we may cheerfully agree with those who say that from this point of view the librarian is not called upon to be a censor at all. But there is another point of view. A man we will say is black-balled at a club because of some unsavory incident in his life. Is it fair to class him simply with the fifty million people who still remain outside of the club? He would, we will say, have been elected but for the incident that was the definite cause of his rejection. So there are books that would have been welcome on our library shelves but for some one objectionable feature, whose appearance on examination ensures their exclusion-some glaring misstatement, some immoral tendency, some offensive matter or manner. These are distinctly rejected candidates. And when the library authority whether librarian, book-committee, or paid expert, points out the objectionable feature that bars out an otherwise acceptable book, the function exercised is surely censorship.

May any general laws be laid down on this subject?

Let us admit at the outset that there is