Notes
* "The librarian of a branch in a mill district reported, 'Parents are too busy and too tired to come to the library, and they send their requests by their children.' She also stated that with the hearty encouragement of the chief engineer of one of the large steel works a collection of 170 books chosen by the technology librarian was placed in the office of the company. One-third of the books were on blast-furnaces and locomotive engineering. The plan was tried for eight months but it failed to attract the men. Conditions at the mill, overtime work, and the fact that the men were not readers, or that they distrusted the motives of the company, were some of the reasons given. In the same district two deposit stations, opened for mill men and street railway men, were not used by adults. Overwork and adjacent pool rooms were opposing factors too great to overcome."
"The Public Library: A Social Leaven in Pittsburgh; with Special Reference to Its Work for Children" by Frances Jenkins Olcott in The Pittsburgh District: Civic Frontage (The Pittsburgh Survey) 1914.* "The home library carries the process of distribution a step farther; it places a small case of books in a child's home. At a stated time each week ten or twelve children of the neighborhood meet in the home and a visitor from the library gives out the books, reads aloud or tells stories, and in various ways makes the 'library hour' pass pleasantly and with profit to the children. This method was originated by Charles W. Birtwell, when secretary of the Boston Children's Aid Society. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh has since 1898 conducted home libraries in neighborhoods so remote that children could not make use of the public reading rooms. The parents of some of the children speak or read no English, and a great variety of nationalities is represented among these home library groups: English, Scotch, Irish, Welsh, German, Swedish, Dutch, French, Italian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Polish, other Slav races, and Negro. The friendly visitors are either members of the library staff, students in the Training School for Children's Librarians, or young people who volunteer their services."
"The Public Library: A Social Leaven in Pittsburgh; with Special Reference to Its Work for Children" by Frances Jenkins Olcott in The Pittsburgh District: Civic Frontage (The Pittsburgh Survey) 1914.