FURTHER RESEARCH NEEDED 119

among the shelves, reading a book in the library, finding an
item of information in the reference room—is another matter.
A member of the community may make constant and impor-
tant use of the public library in this way and never be calcu-
lated as part of the library clientele or service. At present no
one knows the magnitude of this unrecorded use of the public
library in cities of different sizes. A recent survey in the cen-
tral library of Los Angeles showed that about 23 percent of
the people entering the library building did not use it as a li-
brary, but rather as a meeting place or as a short cut for the
use of public telephones, and so forth. Another 42 percent
secured materials which in part would not normally appear in
the library’s records of service.® All in all, the public library
does perform a certain amount of service for which it has little
testimony to offer. Analysis of such unrecorded use of the
public library would fill in the picture of library use pre-
sented in this report from the available literature.

RESEARCH ON LIBRARY ADMINISTRATION

Distance and Use.—The nearer people are to a public li-
brary, the more they use it. Several studies reported here have
demonstrated this seemingly obvious generalization, but the
simple fact alone does not tell the whole story of the relation-
ship between distance and library use. None of the studies of
this subject takes into account the social composition of the
population at different distances from the library. We know
that proximity promotes library use—indeed, this is one basic
factor in the library extension movement. We know, also, that
schooling promotes library use. If, therefore, the people in a
community are both well-schooled and well-served in terms
of distance, they will make a good deal of use of the public li-
brary; if poorly schooled and poorly served, little use will be
made of the library. But suppose a community group is well-

*Gscheidle, 1948.