FOREWORD X1

unique service not provided adequately by any other public
or private agency. He warns, too, that the existing studies have
hardly begun to penetrate the mysteries of the various qualities
of material people use and the actual purposes for which they
are used or the specific influences different kinds of library
activities have in the community.

Indeed, a secondary, but significant, service to the library
profession which the Berelson analysis makes is the revelation
of the tentative character of research results in this one field
of library use. His study forms a temporary platform from
which research workers can see the short distance they have
ascended. It provides, also, a vantage point from which the
lines of further ascent can be seen more clearly. One measure
of the study’s influence will be the rapidity with which the
present study is made obsolescent by the accumulation of
further reliable evidence. But allowing for the incompleteness
of the evidence presently available, the Berelson report seems
to us to provide a reliable bench mark from which present
thinking about the American public library can proceed.

From the analysis, we know that the public library’s clien-
tele “is a self-selected minority with special characteristics,”
comprising, not a chance distribution of people, but rather a
larger-than-chance representation of the “younger, better-
schooled, culturally-alert members of the community.”

The study also reveals that other agencies of mass com-
munication reach far larger groups and reach them more
frequently and regularly, with a wealth of words and images
designed to inform, to persuade, and to entertain. The public
library cannot match this quantitative distribution without a
drastic revolution in its operations. The direct question raised
by the data is whether the public hbrary can profitably enter
into any such competition, or whether it mlght better develop

_its own umque strength, servmg as only one unit—but an im-

portant one—in the community’s constellation of agencies of