The Library World Volume 44 Issue 4

Abstract

IF the two definitions which were enunciated at various intervals by the Library Association are ever to be translated into complete practice, they will carry libraries far beyond any of their present achievements. It is the necessary preliminary that the leaders should make some Statement of the problem, and it is the business of every librarian, but particularly the young ones, to show how they want libraries to work in their time. At Marylebone only one young librarian spoke, and he wanted first the return to their normal duties of those librarians who are food‐controlling and otherwise doing war work, to the detriment, he supposed, of the library service. There is something in this argument, although, if these men had refused to accept their temporary tasks, it is probable that their libraries would Still have been taken for food and other offices, and they would have been marked as non‐co‐operators. We have to remember that great as is the part we sustain in this war in the maintenance of morale, in information service, in education and in the providing of anodynes and escapes from the awful actualities of the day, we rest our all on the book, and in the war‐mind that is a luxury rather than a necessity.

Citation

(1941), "The Library World Volume 44 Issue 4", New Library World, Vol. 44 No. 4, pp. 57-72. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb009246