“Movie-made children and radio-made opinions, streamlined cars and streamlined minds impel the library skipper to chart a new course, as the changing mode of living and thinking is reflected in the library and is affecting its type of service.”
These were the opening lines of the 1937 annual report prepared by Irma Horak Erath, the Branch Librarian at the St. George Branch. The words resonate with today’s information professionals who follow in the tradition of their predecessors by adjusting their services to changing social patterns.
BTW, the nautical metaphor came naturally to Erath since the St. George Branch on Staten Island had a Sea Room and catered to a population living on an island in the NY harbor.
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