REORGANIZATION OF LIBRARIES

Abstract

There can be few libraries where the need for reorganization has not at some time been felt, and it is therefore a subject of very wide interest. The previous paper dealt with the planning of special library buildings, with their equipment, and administration—the present paper will deal with reorganization as applied to the stock of a library, and with the more usual aspects of that type of reorganization, namely recataloguing and reclassification. As would be expected, a fair amount has been written about the problem. Unfortunately, it is a matter in which so much depends on local conditions, on the scale of the operations, on what has gone before and what is to follow, and on the resources available, that it is difficult to give comprehensive practical advice. Most of the literature is therefore confined to generalities, and many of these, though arrived at by investigation of reorganization in a large number of libraries, might equally well have been reached by the use of common sense. This particular attribute has always had a very high value in special librarianship, and if, at the end, you are able to dismiss this paper as ‘just common sense’, then I shall feel that it has been a most useful contribution to the problem!

Citation

ASHWORTH, W. (1950), "REORGANIZATION OF LIBRARIES", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 2 No. 4, pp. 201-215. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb049376