Search results

The composition of the Editorial Board has recently undergone a fairly fundamental change as a consequence of the resignation, for a variety of reasons, of four of its members. Mr B. C. Brookes, a long‐serving member of the Board, and until recently its Chairman, Mr J. W. Jolliffe, Mr W. R. Maidment, and Dr R. C. Young all leave us at a time when the Journal enjoys a healthy circulation which can only be a reflection of the esteem in which the readership holds the publication and is sufficient tribute in itself to the valuable contribution which these members have made. We are all very grateful for their help.

ON the face of it the Report of the Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London might seem to be of no concern to authorities outside the area, but it is certain that all concerned with local government have their eyes firmly glued on the eventual fate of the Report. For what happens in Greater London could well be a pointer for local government reform in the rest of the country. Librarians are among the many people who have an intense interest in this, despite the fact that only one of the Report's 1,011 paragraphs dealt with libraries.

When I joined the Library Association in 1935 Lionel Roy McColvin was its Honorary Secretary. He was also Chief Librarian of Hampstead, a post I was myself to occupy some twenty‐five years later. During that quarter century, McColvin was the dominant figure in British public librarianship and became a world leader in our profession but, for nearly half the period, I knew little of him. The names that mattered to me in the late 1930s were those of tutors, examiners and the authors of textbooks and then, for six years, the important people were the generals, admirals and air chief marshals. After the war I had not had time to learn much about McColvin before I met him in 1947, when I was interviewed for a job in the City of Westminster Libraries.

BOOKS on management were comparatively rare before the war: the subject scarcely existed in its own right. Libraries themselves were administered, rather than managed, and the best‐known manual, careful of professional pride, proclaimed its subject to be “library economy”.

The purpose of this note, which follows Mr. Maidment's article in the April issue is to describe how a group of industrial libraries adapted to their own situation the program originally written to provide a union catalogue at all the branch libraries of the London Borough of Barnet, and later adopted by Camden.

In 1888 the London County Council was established as the primary local authority for the area now known as Inner London. Twelve years later the parishes within the county were organised into 28 Metropolitan Boroughs which, together with the unchanged City of London, formed the second tier of local government. Twenty of the new boroughs inherited library powers because one or more of their constituent parishes had adopted the Public Libraries Acts before 1900. The eight boroughs which started without public libraries were Bethnal Green, Deptford, Greenwich, Hackney, Islington, Paddington, St. Marylebone and St. Pancras. Five of these adopted the Acts within a few years. Bethnal Green, Paddington and St. Marylebone on the other hand held out against the trend. Even the generosity of library benefactors could be rejected by diehards: Paddington refused a Carnegie grant of £15,000 to establish a service.

It is not unfair to say that the arts in association with public libraries have been hampered in Britain (1) by financial restrictions (2) by legal restrictions and (3) by the deliberate choice of librarians and library authorities.

Mr L.J.Anthony, FLA, has been appointed to a new post of Assistant Director (Services) on the staff of Aslib and takes up his appointment at the beginning of October. Mrs Sauvee has kindly agreed to remain at work until he takes over. Mr Anthony is well known to the membership as the Librarian and Head of Documentation Services of the Culham Laboratory of the UK Atomic Energy Authority and as the former Deputy Librarian at Harwell; members of longer standing will remember him as Assistant Director at Aslib in 1954–55, when the consultancy service and first research activities were being established, and previously as Information Officer at British Telecom‐munications Research Ltd.

As our correspondent on another page suggests, the economic crisis may have reactions upon libraries. The most obvious one he mentions is the increased difficulty we shall experience in obtaining American books. Not all libraries, public or private, make any special collection of books published in the United States, although there has been an increasing tendency to buy more as the relations of the two countries have grown closer through their common struggle; in fact, we know libraries which have spent many hundreds of pounds in the course of the past year or two on the select lists of books which have been made for us by American librarians. It is most unfortunate that the manipulation of dollar currency should have brought about a situation in which even the exchange of ideas between the countries becomes more difficult. One suggestion might be made and that is that our American colleagues should continue to sift the literature of this time of famine for us, so that further select lists may be available in better days.

The technical problems involved in automation are probably less difficult than the management and organisational adjustments. From the librarian's point of view the equipment needed is likely to be designed and perfected by a few pioneers and advice in choosing between systems will be available. The assimilation of new processes into the routine of a large library, however, must be a librarian's task, since only he can decide the relative importance of the various aspects to the ultimate function of the library. Unfortunately, most librarians have been conditioned by their experience of manual methods of working and will find it extremely difficult to differentiate clearly between the essential objective and the time‐hallowed means of achieving it.