are source books?

4. What source books on this period of history are in the library?

5. What do you think will be the best references for questions on
the artistic, industrial, political, social, economic, and
military phases of the history you are about to study?

6. What encyclopedias and works of general reference are in your
library?

The preparation of answers to such questions as these will present to
the student some of the difficulties inevitable to his future library
work and will send him to class prepared to ask intelligent questions.
It will enable the teacher accurately to gauge how much his students
already know about a library and its uses.

The value and advantage of library work should be carefully explained to
the class. It is a great error to allow pupils to think of their
library work as drudgery, assigned solely to keep them busy or to make
the course difficult. There are too few boys to-day with a genuine love
of books, partly no doubt due to the fact that a reference library has
become for them, not a rich mine of interesting matter, but a
hydra-headed interrogation point. A great good has been done the student
who has been taught the pleasure of using books. Nor is such a thing
impossible. Nothing gives greater satisfaction to the normal high school
boy than to find an error in the text, the teacher's statements, or the
map. He takes pleasure in confuting the statistics or judgments quoted
in class, by others of opposite trend, encountered in his reading. He
enjoys asking keen questions. If the student is told that the library
work is for the purpose of cultivating his powers of investigation and
adding to the matter in the text many interesting details; if the
library requirements are reasonable and wisely directed; if he is given
an opportunity to _use_ the information he has gathered from his
reading, his interest in books will steadily increase.

The teacher should explain the value of remembering accurately the
titles and the authors of books used for reference. The silly habit of
referring to an authority as "the book bound in green" or "the large
book by what's his name" is easily prevented if taken in time.

The teacher should discover by assignments made in class what degree of
proficiency in the use of an index is already possessed by his pupils.
There are few classes where the use of an index is thoroughly
understood. Time should be taken