It is not absolutely necessary, of course, to operate this scheme from a department store, neither is greater distance an absolute bar to frequent deliveries. I believe that this kind of long-distance service is well worth the attention of librarians. And, in general, I believe that a realization that all long-distance service has its good points may do good by inducing us to dwell on those points and to try to make them of more influence in our work. CONFLICTS OF JURISDICTION IN LIBRARY SYSTEMS[14] At bottom, a departmental system in a large institution is simply an outcome of the fact that its head requires aid in administration. At first, perhaps, he can actually do everything with his own hand; next he requires helpers, but he can oversee them all; finally, he must have overseers, who are the only ones with whom he deals directly and for whom he naturally classifies the work and divides it among them accordingly. This is not merely a symbolical or fanciful account of such a development. There are plenty of heads of institutions, educational, commercial and industrial, who have personally seen every stage of it--who are now administering a complicated system of departments where they once did everything themselves. In particular, there are now librarians, at the head of great libraries, who began library work by performing, or at least overseeing directly, the elementary acts of which library operation may be taken to consist, and who have watched such a simple system of superintendence develop year by year into something complex. Such a development, as I have said, is naturally based on some kind of classification. If one could sit down and, foreseeing the growth of his institution for years to come, settle upon the way in which that growth should be cared for, his classification might possibly be more logical and workable than most classifications now are. The best of them are wofully imperfect, as no one knows better than we librarians. And when division into classes proceeds _pari passu_ with growth, we are necessarily bothered with that troublesome thing--cross-classification. As our institution grows, one direction of growth and a corresponding set of conditions and needs comes into the foreground after another, and our basis of classification is apt to change accordingly.