This is a subject on which most executive officers can speak feelingly. Such officers are troubled with two kinds of lieutenants--those who keep them in ignorance of what is going on and those who insist on putting them in continual possession of trivial details--more omission and duplication, you see. One special kind of time-waster is the assistant who comes to her chief with a request. Foreseeing refusal she has primed herself with all sorts of arguments and is ready to smash all opposition in a logical presentation of the subject calculated to occupy thirty minutes or so. But the request, as stated, appeals to her chief as reasonable, and he grants it at once without hearing the argument. Do you think the petitioner is going to waste all that valuable logic? Not she! She stands her ground and pours it all out, the whole half hour of it; and when the victim has granted a second time what he had already granted without argument, she retires flushed with triumph at her success. And while this duplicator was duplicating, the other sinner, the “omittor”, was performing some innocent and valuable administrative act without her chief’s knowledge, causing him to give wrong information to a caller and convict himself of ignorance of what is going on in his own institution. Time-wasting, of course, is by no means confined to the library staff. Much of every one’s time, in a library, is consumed in fruitless conversations with the public--the answering of trivial questions, the search for data that can do no one any good, efforts to appease the wrath of someone who ought never to have been angry at all, attempts to explain things verbally when adequate explanations in print are at hand. All these things consume valuable time and thereby force the omission of public services that would otherwise be performed. Some of them are unavoidable. We must always change up a little time to the account of courtesy, the avoidance of brusqueness, the maintenance in the community of that tradition of library helpfulness that is perhaps the library’s chief asset. This we can not afford to lose. But without sacrificing it, can we not eliminate some of the bores, cut down our useless services for the sake of performing a few more useful ones, and increase the amount of library energy usefully employed without enlarging the total sum expended? This is one of our most vital problems, did we but realize it. We have gone far enough, perhaps, to realize that our two sins are indeed cardinal and fundamental. The authors of the Prayer Book were right. We have done those things that we ought not to have done and we have left undone those things that we ought to have done; and we are all miserable sinners. If I had nerve enough to add a new society to the thousand and one that carry on their multifarious activities about us, I should found a League to Suppress Duplications and Supply Omissions. A MESSAGE TO BEGINNERS