administrative support for his various expenses during the year and, as
a scholar working with other scholars within his university instead of
as a mere factotum, the librarian is to receive an adequate salary
(perhaps the only one of Dury's reforms that must wait until the
millennium).
The question remains to what extent Dury's duties as the deputy
librarian of the King's Library allowed him to implement the reforms he
advocated on paper. The probable answer is, not very much. The
librarian's duties and responsibilities described by Dury are those of
an academic, university librarian, interacting with the faculty and
participating fully in the intellectual life of a scholarly community.
The role of the librarian of the King's Library would have been that of
keeper of a static and isolated collection, and Dury is particularly
critical of a merely custodial role: "... their emploiment," he writes
of the typical librarian of his day, is "of little or no use further,
then to look to the Books committed to their custodie, that they may not
bee lost; or embezeled by those that use them: and this is all" (p. 16).
The King's Library was unquestionably magnificent; Charles's father and
brother Henry had been particularly zealous in building it up, acquiring
such collections as that of Isaac Casaubon. And Charles had been the
recipient in 1628 of perhaps its greatest single treasure, the Codex
Alexandrinus, a fifth-century manuscript of the Bible in Greek,
certainly an item that would have interested Dury. The library had, in
fact, great scholarly potential, but its continued existence was
apparently an embarrassment to the Commonwealth, and the Puritan
government merely wanted an overseer. So, by the determination of
others, the post of deputy keeper of the King's Library was little but a
sinecure for Dury, leaving him free to pursue his many other interests
but powerless to implement the reforms he advocated in his pamphlet
within the only library over which he ever had direct control. Though he
retained the post until the Restoration, he left the library itself
early in 1654, never to return.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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