It goes without saying that every provincial reference library worthy of the name has a local collection of some importance. Most county towns collect county literature, and other large places have their regional collections. Regional surveys are largely carried on now by schools and local organizations, often with the library and its local collections as their central depository, and at all events helping and helped by the library. Some public libraries have been made depositories for the local records, and there is a strong case for conferring or imposing this duty upon them by law. A librarian, properly trained in palæography and the treatment of archives, is the right sort of custodian; a well-appointed library is the right place for the safe preservation, calendaring, and public use of documents. The historian, social student, biographer, and genealogist would always know then where to go for local information not to be found in London. There are many other abiblia which Charles Lamb himself would approve that are rightly supplied in generous measure by a good reference library: modern maps, both of our own country and of the world, those of the neighbourhood within a wide radius, including large-scale Ordnance maps, accompanied by older maps of historical importance; prints and drawings in well-organized series, and lantern-slides for illustrating library lectures, or even to be issued on loan. The systematic collections of lantern-slides at the Croydon Public Library will be mentioned again later on. In this enterprising library numerous other things are collected and made accessible for general use; for example, illustrations, cut out and preserved, not because of their individual merit as prints, but because of the value they acquire in organized sets illustrating definite subjects. They are mounted in uniform style and classified in vertical files; thus they are available for reference purposes, and may be borrowed by teachers to illustrate lessons in class. Croydon has about 12,000 such illustrations, and the stock is constantly growing. Photographs of lace, woodwork, astronomical phenomena, and other subjects are collected on similar lines, and lent in sets to artists, craftsmen, and students. The vertical file in which the Manchester commercial library stores its press clippings and other items of information will be mentioned later; it is an object-lesson in the preservation, classification, and indexing of material which was erstwhile discarded as soon as it had served the moment’s use, a lesson in the value created out of the well-nigh valueless by mere organization; and teachers and business organizers have not failed to bring their pupils and their staffs to study what sheer method can accomplish. [Illustration: GUILDHALL LIBRARY.]