The utter inability of the public library service to cope with the requirements of industry and commerce was growing more manifest before the war. It was true then as now that no single library could satisfy the technical needs even of its own district, and that some system of mutual aid and central supply must be devised to supplement the finest local provision. With the violent awakening to the lack of organization of our resources which the war brought about, the problem came into clearer focus. The Library Association took the matter up with due seriousness in 1916, first inquiring into the best methods of developing the scientific and technical departments of public libraries, and then into the collateral problem of commercial libraries. The dual subject was before the important annual conference of 1917, and strong resolutions were passed in favour of establishing commercial libraries in the chief centres of trade, and technical libraries in all large manufacturing towns, in both cases as an integral part of the public library systems.[7] Since then, the Technical and Commercial Libraries Committee appointed by the Association has put together a mass of evidence on the subject, and has carried on a vigorous propaganda. Their views did not, however, meet with the full approval of the Adult Education Committee, who inclined to the representations of the Committee of the Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research that an independent series of technical libraries should be created in connexion with industries rather than with the existing libraries.[8] The weak point of the Library Association’s case had been a certain vagueness as to the methods by which, and the particular authority by whom, their admirable proposals should be carried into effect. Although they acknowledged that the work could not be done on a proper scale by the public libraries unassisted, or without some measure of co-operation, they hesitated to recommend that the public libraries should be organized into a reciprocating system for the purpose. They declined to say who, in their opinion, should set up and who should control the machinery of co-operation, or precisely what the “measures of co-operation” should be. This, of course, is the essential point of any scheme for concerted action, and the rival project of the Adult Education Committee, unfortunate as it must appear to any one experienced in the working of libraries and alive to the wastefulness of duplication, at any rate was free from this defect.