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UNTIL 1952 Queen's University was fortunate to have one main library building. With the establishment of the Institute of Clinical Science in the hospital area 1½ miles from the main university site, the formation of a separate medical library near the hospitals was considered essential.

“If ever I can afford to buy books”—. In this familiar strain the minister of the little parish of Stitchel wrote in his diary for 8 April, 1775. To the end of his life George Ridpath never was able to achieve his heart's desire—not on £80 a year. Yet this Scots parson (as it turned out) was infinitely more fortunate than most of his colleagues. For in 1751, only three miles away at Kelso, was organized the first non‐profit subscription library in Scotland. Nine years after Ridpath was presented to his living in 1742 the new era opened to him, when twenty gentlemen pledged £10 each to establish the new institution. From that moment until his death in 1772 his life was intimately dependent upon that library. How many books Ridpath borrowed during the first four years of this library's long history we can only guess: we must wait for the beginning of his diary in 1755 to follow the extraordinary chronicle, one of the most impressive reading records ever assembled.

TODAY the northernmost community library in Britain is the County Library of the Shetlands, with its headquarters at Lerwick, the county town, which was preceded by a series of vigorous organizations for more than a century. But for over a hundred years the Publick Bibliotheck at Kirkwall was not only the oldest but the farthest north in all Britain. The founder was William Baikie, member of a leading family and proprietor of the estate of Holland in the island of Stronsay in the Orkneys. Born about 1638, he probably attended the very old Grammar School in Kirkwall, he was a student at the University of Edinburgh in 1656 and proceeded m.a. in the next year. A relative, Rev. Thomas Baikie, minister first of the ‘second charge’ of Kirkwall and a zealous student, apparently influenced the young man toward a life in the church, but the opportunities near home were few. Orcadians were loath to move to the mainland, and besides William's inherited properties were substantial. So he spent his life as a respected heritor and collector of books.

A brilliant scholar, the librarian at one of England's most venerated cathedral libraries, once confessed to me that he had at times been his own charwoman and scrubbed the ancient floors. Such extension of accomplishment may seem somewhat incongruous. Yet is it so foreign to our own experience? What librarian has not dusted and mended and plated the good, bad, and indifferent among his voluminous possessions? Which of us has not left important duties to reveal the sequence of the alphabet to bewildered patrons struggling with the encyclopaedia or handbook of manufactures?

NO ONE WOULD BE SURPRISED by the assertion that John Bunyan made a deep impression among the devout Welsh for a century or more after his unique career. The standard evidence for such a statement is of course the number of editions of the author, and for Bunyan a special compilation of all his works printed in Wales alone between 1677 and 1931 shows the impressive total of 188 titles (no fewer than 58 of Pilgrim's Progress) in various languages. For a land with only a little over a half million inhabitants and with only two cities with over five thousand population in 1800, this is a record hard to equal, demonstrating an extraordinary devotion to a single author. Yet beyond such eloquent numerical summary another particular witness emerges from an unsuspected quarter. In the 1767 Welsh translation of The Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded is dutifully included the ‘Names of the Subscribers’ underwriting the publication. This particular list is so unusual as to merit perpetuation in its entirety:

Of all industrial activities in these islands that of mining is perhaps the oldest. The extraction of the mineral wealth of the country — tin, iron, copper, gold, coal and so on — has been carried out since Roman times in most parts of the UK. The scale on which this was done in different periods and locations varied considerably. Coal mining, for example, as soon as it advanced beyond a quite primitive stage, involved fairly large units of exploitation with several hundred people employed, while tin mining in Cornwall was carried out often by fairly small family units of between thirty to forty individuals, lead mining falling mid‐way between these mo extremes and employing between 50 and 200 men usually. The principal lead mining areas in Great Britain were: [1] Durham and Northumberland (the North Pennine field) [2] the North and West Ridings of Yorkshire [3] the Derbyshire Peak [4] Flintshire [5] Cardiganshire and south west Montgomery and [6] the Lanarkshire and Dumfriesshire borders. Of these the Scottish field was the smallest, contributing about 5% of the total British output. Commonly a major problem facing those trying to exploit these mineral resources was the isolated location of many of the mineral areas. Employers had to attract workers to the mining location. To do this they found it necessary to resort either to the forcible pressing of paupers and felons, thereby instituting a form of serfdom to bind the worker to the mine for life and, effectively, to bind his children after him, or to providing conditions and amenities which would prove attractive to free workers.

THE training model to be discussed is based on an integrated set of manual and mechanised indexing systems, all handling the same body of information from a limited subject field. By extending the scope of the model's operations to include prior and subsequent activities like the selection and abstracting of the documents to be indexed, and the preparation and dissemination of material through the use of the indexes, the model may be used for a wide range of documentation training, principally at three levels: demonstration by the lecturer to the students; use by the students in the retrieval and dissemination of information; and development by the students through the selection and abstracting of documents, the indexing and storage of information and ultimately the use of feedback from the dissemination stage to improve the systems.

MANY of the parish and community libraries of Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were subscription libraries, as this was the best way for people of limited means to amass and maintain reasonable collections, but it was not always so. When William Ewart and his colleagues met to consider the problem of public libraries in 1849, they interviewed John Imray, a civil engineer who had seen several parochial and village libraries in the north of Aberdeenshire. The cross‐examination by Ewart began as follows:

Reviews Leadhills Library, Britain’s first subscription library and also the first subscription library in Britain to have a working‐class base. It originated the ideology of mutual improvement as applied to libraries in Scotland, which has clear links with the social philosophy of the period and formed an organizational model for others to follow. Its book selection policy was both progressive and independent and much of its early stock still survives in situ in a building which has probably been occupied since the late eighteenth century. It functioned actively as a library from 1741 until the mid‐1960s and is still available for use today. The surviving stock, catalogued in 1985, totals about 2,500 volumes.