Manual of Library Economy: Third and Memorial EditionBrown, James Duff
Science
Manual of Library Economy: Third and Memorial Edition
Brown, James Duff
Libraries -- Great Britain -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.; Library science -- Great Britain -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
educational work of the Association has been the securing of a grant
from the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust for the establishment of a School
of Librarianship at University College, London, which it is expected
will commence on 1st October 1919. This will primarily be a day school
with courses of study founded on the syllabus of the Association, which
has been carefully revised and extended to meet the new circumstances.
It is ridiculous to prophesy, but if this School is a success it is
probable that it will revolutionize the whole character of library
service in this country.
V. There have been various definitions of the purpose of libraries and
librarians, few of them entirely adequate. We shall not attempt another
dogmatically, but we may suggest that that purpose is to provide a
representative and systematically arranged collection of literature from
the daily newspaper to the elaborate treatise and encyclopædic work of
reference. The methods of doing this, and of exploiting in the public
interest the collection when made, are the subject-matter of this
manual. Until this primary purpose of a library is fulfilled any
attempts at those added activities which are advocated by some
librarians to-day are likely to be mistaken, or at least ill-advised.
The Library Association has not issued a comprehensive manifesto
covering this matter, and might very well do so, if care were taken, as
no doubt it would be, to give considerable elasticity to the
definitions. At the Annual Meeting in 1917, however, it did adopt a
series of resolutions of great importance, which, as the almost
unanimous pronouncement of the profession, must find a place here. In
the light of the rough definition given, their inadequacy as a
comprehensive statement of library work is obvious enough, but they have
great value as showing the trend of that work in the effort to meet the
remarkable intellectual, industrial and other conditions created by the
European War; and this seems to us a justification for treating each of
the resolutions at greater length in the following pages:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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