Business and libraries;

              14 HASKINS & SELLS February
Business and Libraries
TH E R E was a time, now happily past,
when the juxtaposition of these two
words was not an accepted fact. To-day
business and libraries are in partnership.
The rapid and beneficent progress of busi­ness
education has developed a type of
business man whose mind is trained to the
processes of research and whose experience
has taught him the practical value—in­deed,
the imperative necessity—of exact
information.
These are troublous times for the
man of business who is not informed.
To-day's world is not the world of yester­day;
each day brings new problems.
National boundaries, from the business
point of view, no longer exist. We are
to-day forced to think in international
terms and speak a world-wide economic
language. At all times, and particularly
in a time of uncertainty and transition
such as the present, business needs knowl­edge,
exact, varied, and extensive.
To meet this necessity for adequate in­formation
there has arisen a large and
valuable body of business literature. Most
of it has been produced in the last twenty-five
years and bears witness to the tremen­dous
development of business and finance
throughout the last quarter century. A
survey of this literature takes the student
through the most minute processes of
production and organization, to the wider
problems of international finance. Much
of it is written, not from the purely
academic standpoint, which so often in the
past expressed the theories of the so-called
professional economist, but as the fruit of
long and ripe experience in the actual con­duct
of business.
Where there is literature there are
libraries. This body of information must
be housed, cared for, and used. The
word "use" carries an almost unlimited
application. To the executive the library
may serve as a pilot guiding him through
surrounding fogs or breakers ahead; to a
young man or woman climbing the suc­cessive
steps of a business career, it fur­nishes
the means of accomplishment; while
to still another it may afford the first
impetus toward a productive life.
But however applied and administered,
the business library is now established.
Financial institutions and manufacturing
corporations, as well as the professions,
have long since realized the necessity for a
large and active library.
Among these are the well-known libraries
of the National City Company, Guaranty