COMMTUNICATION AND READING 17

Clearly, people with a home collection are more “book
minded” (and better educated) and hence tend to use several
sources of books. Partial overlapping is again shown by a
study of the use of the public libraries and rental libraries in
the same community.** Over a period of a year, about 27 per-
cent of the clientele of the two agencies had used both for
their book borrowing, but 73 percent had used only one of
the two.* In short, the public library has its own distinctive
clientele, and at the same time it serves another group of peo-
ple who use other sources for books within the community as
well.

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION A test
of any medium of communication is the number of persons
who use it. The variety of subject matter covered by mass
communication media is infinite; the motives of those using
the media nearly so. Yet, not all people turn to formal media
when they need information on various topics. In fact, the -
majority of a national sample of the population indicated that
they would try other sources of information—usually friends
or experts—rather than any of the mass media if they needed
to know something about four selected subjects. The public
library was specifically mentioned as a source by only a small
minority of those questioned, and the following conclusion
was drawn:

The library appears to be lacking in salience to many people—it
wouldn’t occur to them to go there. Some say they have never
used a library (or not since they left school). Others say they
don’t know what or where the library is or wouldn’t know how

“Cole, 1948.
*The same study indicated that rental library users read more books than
public library users (averages of 8.4 and 7.2 per month, respectively). The 3
public library serves the “devourers” of books proportionately less than
does the rental library, which typically provides relatively more “lighter”
titles for quick reading. This difference may also be attributed to the
greater accessibility of rental libraries for some people and to their larger
holdings of recent (and perhaps risqué) titles.