This Is Where You Go To Ask

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 273, 15 September 1944, Page 14

This Is Where You Go To Ask

Information, Not Propaganda F you go into a library and wander about the shelves for a while, dipping into anything that happens to catch your eye, you will come out with a feeling that your knowledge of things in general is absurdly inadequate. And that is part of the idea of a library. But if you go into a new library which has

just been opened in Wellington, you will come out with a feeling that your knowledge of things in America is absurdly inadequate. And that, again, is part of the idea. The U.S. Office of War Information (whose New Zealand representative, Sydney Greenbie, we interviewed two weeks ago) has now opened its US. Information Lib-

rary in Woodward Street, and a very valuable collection of reference books (1000 volumes at present), and American periodicals (numbering over 200) are now accessible to Government departments, newspapers, professors, teachers and students; in short, to anyone who wants to. find out something about the United States and who is willing to go and ask for it. The librarian has already been introduced to our readers- Miss Mary Parsons, whom we interviewed soon after she arrived last January. If you want to hurt her feelings, go into the library with the impression that it is a propaganda enterprise. Her point of view, which is no doubt the point of

view of her colleagues in London, Sydney, Melbourne and Johannesburg, is that it isn’t propaganda if someone comes in and asks for a piece of information and is supplied with the existing sources of that information. On the other hand, everything has been done to make it a pleasure’ to go in. The architect who designed the shelves and chairs and lighting and colour scheme knew how to delight the eye without being extravagant, and how to. make a pleasing design grow out of a plan which makes everything convenient for the

stall and clear the visitor. "Going Up .. ." There are four stories each of one room. The first room (seen in our photograph) holds all the books. The next one up is the "reading room" — there are_ tables and chairs here, and you can take your book. upstairs to read it. Round the walls of this room

are the periodicals, 200 of them, some in huge piles (if back numbers have been available), some lying only two or three deep as yet. The next floor is the staff’s working room, and then on the top floor there is a room for general purposes. At present it has a photographic exhibition on the walls. As to the scope of the library, it is enough to say that its shelves contain the answers to most of the questions you are likely to ask about America. If your inquiry stumps Miss Parsons, she will usually be able to send for the in- ~ formation for you. There are books in every fieldreference books for specialists, general | (continued on next page)

‘‘7~ROM these books you will learn to know America as we Americans know her-her frailties as well as her strength; her successes and her failures; her hopes, her aspirations; and her disappointments; her efforts in the fields of art, science and government-in brief, an intimate, real America without her face lifted and without makeup." That was said by the Hon. K. S. Patton, American Minister in New Zealand, at the opening of the U.S. Information Library in Wellington, described on this page. And what applies to books applies also to radio. So here we give a brief account of what is being done in both these fields,

(continued from previous page) reading for the ordinary person, multivolume encyclopedias, atlases and directories. The latest Who’s Who in America will be on the shelves by the time this is in print, and a big atlas is on the way here. The Dictionary of American biography will tell you all the personal stories of Americans of the past, and the Dictionary of American History will tell you all their national stories. From A to Zee In drawers, which the staff call the vertical files, you will find pamphlets, government reports, Mr. Roosevelt’s speeches, radio scripts, little slips of paper of all kinds-in other words anything that is too flimsy to stand up without support. Reading across the drawer labels at random you'll find something like this: Abrasives to Agriculture . . . Community to Crops... Finland to Forums 7 . Four Freedoms to Health .. . Netherlands to Paraguay .. . Social Security to Tools . . . World War II. to Yugoslavia. Upstairs in the reading room you may see the best periodical literature in your own field of interest, and almost everybody else’s, too- but purely technical journals are not held to be the responsibility of this library. Architecture, Commerce, Agriculture, Music, the Theatre, Education, Photography, Popular Science-so many subjects ‘are there or implied in cover titles that it is hard to imagine that anything has been omitted. Then there are two of ‘America’s greatest dailies-the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, already piling up high on the shelves. To say nothing of that journal of the entertainment and radio world, Variety, whose jargon is the nearest thing in English etymology to a foreign language. But then, if there’s anything in any of these books about America that you don’t understand, there are always the several dictionaries of American usage on the ground * floor which will explain the words to you, and perhaps Miss Parsons understands them, too,