The compensating assurance is that they are the promptings of an enthusiasm in itself meritorious; that they are experiments; that they may prove to be expedients merely temporary, and that later they may be dispensed with after they have served their purpose. They are to rouse the dormant, stir the stagnant: but there are also other agencies at work to rouse and to stir; and the time may well come when the operation of these in combination will have achieved the creation of a spirit in the community safe to act upon its own initiative. Apart from the portions of our programs devoted to the discussion of such methods and devices--which concern the direct action of a particular library upon its own constituents, is the portion--a large one--devoted to schemes of co-operation among our institutions as such in the interest of economy and therefore of efficiency--in their administration. These are necessarily technical, and their immediate interest is to the librarian rather than to the reader. But their ultimate benefit is to reach the reader,--particularly in freeing to his use a larger measure of the direct personal service of the administration, in interpreting the collections to his need. In proportion as they succeed in this they will achieve a reversion to that service held precious in the library of the older type,--which, lacking the modern apparatus, and with an imperfect collection, at least put the reader into direct contact with what it had, and gave him also the inspiring personal touch with an enthusiast already saturated with its contents: and which accordingly sent him forth with a grateful glow, too little, alas! evident in one relegated to the mere mechanism of modern library practice. The mechanism became inevitable: the increase of the collections, the increase of the constituency, the greater diversity of the need, and the demand that this should be met promptly, have required it. This isn't so apparent to the public, who think of the problem--of getting the right book to the individual reader--in only its simplest terms. But to us librarians it is not merely apparent but urgent. And accordingly we expend upon it a length and a zest of discussion that quite mystify the portions of our audiences outside of the craft. What impels us is that the mechanism is not merely elaborate: it is expensive. It is the more so in proportion as it is variant in form and involves a multiplication of expense by each library acting independently in its own behalf. Our effort, and the purpose of our discussions, is therefore to promote a standardization of the form and a co-operative centralization of the work itself, in which our libraries as a whole may secure a participating benefit.