=88. Senior Assistant.=--The name senior assistant is bestowed upon assistants with a few years’ experience and training, including as a rule the possession of two or more certificates of the Library Association. They occupy a position somewhat analogous to that of non-commissioned officers, and act as reliefs to the librarians-in-charge. Often they are made responsible for some branch of the routine, as, for example, book-binding, defaulters, registration of borrowers, etc., and this is a good method, provided that any one assistant is not confined rigidly and for too long to one task. A sense of responsibility is a useful quality which can be fostered in this way. Usually senior assistants are promoted from the junior staff, but not always; and it is becoming a general condition of promotion to this grade that the candidate shall have taken some part of the Library Association course. Promotion should never be made unless the candidate has shown a disposition to qualify in some such manner. =89. Work Book.=--It is a good plan to use a work book or duty book, in which the daily duties of each assistant can be entered. By means of such a book it is easy to change the work about, in order to give every assistant an opportunity of doing everything in turn; and it is necessary because of the changes worked on the composition of the staff by the time-sheet. A good form of work book for a library where the staff is not departmental is shown in the ruling below, which can be adjusted to meet the conditions in large libraries. The names or numbers of the assistants are written or printed in the margin, and against these the particular duty, or set of duties, to be performed that day are written. This book is generally made up by the deputy-librarian and checked by the librarian. In small libraries the librarian can write up this record. Apart from its value as a simple means of distributing and fixing duties, it makes a capital record of visitors or callers, errors, absences of staff, progress of certain pieces of work, checks of various kinds, and may even be used as a staff time-book. The form given on page 92 (Fig. 7) is a guide to the work of a library and a check upon results. For convenience’ sake the assistants are numbered in order of seniority. =90.= The method of using this book is very simple. If there are ten assistants or under, one page only is used, each member of the staff receiving an appropriate number. If there are more than ten assistants two pages must be used, the numbers on the second page having the figure 1 prefixed to them, and the 10 being altered to 20. Thus page 2 will appear as 11, 12, 13, 14, etc. If there are more than twenty assistants a third page can be used, the existing numbers having 2 prefixed as before.