On the other hand the establishment, construction and opening of the 96th Street Branch were treated by the surrounding residents with supreme indifference. No one had asked to have a branch located at this point, which had been selected solely for reasons of topography and population. As the building went up, no one asked whether it was a school or a bank. Nobody came to the opening exercises. And yet when the library began to circulate books the community responded to such an extent that in a short time the branch was giving them out at the rate of 40,000 a month. Here the interest and pride of a community in the possession of a library building and its disposition to make use of the library are clearly shown to be two different things. In this case the two communities were parts of the same city, but separate towns often show the same phenomenon. Some of the most indifferent library towns, for instance, are the ones where superhuman efforts were put forth to secure a Carnegie building. A kind of standardization of which we can not have too little is that controlled by the man who takes himself as the standard--his own ideas, prejudices and habits. This kind of standardizer is not always aware of what he is doing. He believes that his methods are the best. They may be best for him and possibly for the particular environment in which he has been working. I am not sure that some of our most cherished library habits did not originate in this way--were not originally simply the personal whims of some able and forceful library administrator who was in a position, in the formative stage of library progress, to impress them on the fabric of our work. Fortunately for us, the men of this kind, in the early history of the library movement, were not only men of force but generally of common-sense as well. Possibly their habits and customs were as good as any others that we might have adopted. I am sure that they were better than some. But individual points of view may in some cases prove disastrous. I remember an English novel in which a local librarian personally interested in the history of the French Revolution, uses all the available funds of his institution for years to buy books on the subject, building up a fine collection, but making his library useless for its ordinary purposes. His successor, a man with other interests, threw out the whole collection. I have often wondered which of these two librarians one ought to condemn most. Both are examples of the injury that may be done by what we may call auto-standardization.