Another proposal of the Adult Education Committee lies open to more severe criticism. This was a project for assisting industries and technical students and research workers by setting up a great chain of industrial libraries forming “a technical library system for each industry,” independently of the municipal library system. Side by side with the latter, not yet, and perhaps not even then, organized as a reciprocating system, there would be erected a complex and highly expensive series of special collections, open, apparently, to members of the particular industries alone. “In the case of general libraries the unit of organization and administration is the local authority, in the case of the technical library system it should be the industry.”[42] The amount of costly and unnecessary duplication, both of contents and of machinery, in such a cumbrous scheme dumbfounds the experienced librarian, especially when he reflects that all the libraries in the kingdom could be put on a scientific basis, and all the wants of both the general public and the special industries amply satisfied, at much less the price. Such a scheme must obviously have been framed by persons having but a rudimentary idea of the library arts, or they would have thought out a much more practical and economical plan. The extravagant cost and the impracticability of the proposal have been exposed in a special Memorandum by the Library Association, representing the trained librarians of the country, who, strange to say, were not consulted before the scheme was evolved. The gist of their criticism is contained in the following paragraphs:--