Search results

When the Library Association decided ten years ago that greatly extended facilities for full‐time training should form part of the programme of post‐war library development, few of the people concerned could have been expected to foresee what has now become one of the major problems in education for librarianship in Great Britain. It is indeed possible that it was not foreseen by anyone at all. Roy Stokes has reminded us in his article in the Library Association Record, January 1954, that there was not a single British librarian in 1945 with any experience in the management of a full‐time agency for professional training. Nor is there evidence of any consultation with similar agencies in those countries, the United States and Denmark for example, in which full‐time training had for long been recognised as the only adequate form of preparation for professional librarianship. It was in these rather strange circumstances that the nine new schools were founded between 1946 and 1950. In the eyes of the Library Association Council and the profession at large they were simply training agencies within the long‐established framework of the Association's examination and registration system; a system which had developed over a period of sixty years against a background of apprentice‐type training, with little intellectual content to the work, and a confused pattern of methods of preparation—private study, part‐time classes, summer schools, week‐end courses, correspondence tuition. This system had operated reasonably well, without claiming to be anything more than mere technical training, because the Association's exclusive control over both syllabus and examinations ensured reasonable standards of national certification. All candidates, whatever their background, practical experience or method of preparation, had to submit themselves to the one series of tests. That in the minds of many was all that mattered; and, despite the greatly changed circumstances brought about by the establishment of nine full‐time professional schools, there are still many who think it is all that matters today. Which brings us to what has been called “the historical dilemma of professional education”, the problem of relating full‐time training for a profession with what is expected of the products of it by those who examine them and those who employ them. In this connection let us also remember that at present hardly any of the examiners and only a small minority of the chief librarians concerned have themselves had any personal experience of full‐time professional training. Time is on the side of the schools here but there may still be many years of frustration and misunderstanding which will cause most distress to the most important person of all, the student who is on the road to professional qualification.

THE proposition that British library schools should examine their own students is not a new one. As long ago as 1954, Roy Stokes put the question bluntly to the profession. In those days his was a voice crying in the wilderness. The profession at large was not ready for such a development, and continued to adhere to its long held view that the Library Association should examine the products of the schools, while the schools confined themselves to teaching.

ON various occasions librarians have had cause to bemoan the representation of themselves in print. Instances have been quoted to show how low an estimate of our worth novelists have and we usually seize the opportunity to cry aloud, “And in any case, it is not true!” I can not claim that I manage to keep abreast of the tide of modern fiction, I have neither the time, the strength nor the inclination, but I have received one or two impressions as to our present adjudged value. I think that there are three headings under which we might consider the subject. Firstly, does it matter how we are portrayed in fiction? Secondly, are any of the strictures true? Thirdly, what, if anything, can be done to amend the present state of affairs?

A glance at any of the bibliographies of periodicals is a humbling occupation. The number of periodicals, already bewildering in its magnitude, seems to grow with each passing year and the world of librarianship and documentation seems to have taken its fair share in this proliferation. The most cheering aspect of it all is that the periodicals which have come into existence since 1945 have been recognized as some of the most important within the field and go some way towards raising the rather low standard of our professional literature.

In our Winter number we presented a symposium based on an article by Mr. J. C. Harrison which appeared in our Autumn, 1955, issue. Now we present further comments on the subject by Mr. Clough of Bristol, Mr. Hughes of Hampshire and Mr. Stokes of Loughborough.

NATURAL aptitude, training, experience: these are the three factors necessary for competence in any vocation. But having stated the ideal, what is the reality? Recruitment to libraries is quite as haphazard as it is to any other job. It is best when unemployment is rife. It is poorest when full employment is achieved. The assistant arrives more by accident than design. He is usually an amenable, adaptable creature, ready enough to learn and make the most of the estate to which he has been called. Thus it is that training becomes paramount, and education in librarianship the prime duty of the Library Association.

THE appointment of a Vice‐Chancellor for the University of Warwick was announced towards the end of 1962. The Registrar was next appointed and then the librarian, who arrived on the scene in July 1963. The building which is described in this article was envisaged in a programme handed to the architects, Messrs. Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall, early in December 1963.

THE occasional moving of stock in open‐shelf libraries creates a sense of novelty in the reader. We experienced this recently in entering a library familiar to us where we found the Literature section had been moved and reduced in order to make space for the increase in the Applied Arts class. Further the librarian declared that there was no excessive demand for much of modern poetry, but although the library has the poems of T. S. Eliot in several copies, none was on the shelves or at the moment available. One wonders if poetry that is “modern” has been read by the majority in the past half‐century; it is an art form, often lacking substance and therefore caviare to the ordinary reader. The poets of today with such exceptions as Walter de la Mare and Alfred Noyes, neither of whom is young, have not increased their chances by their deliberate or unconscious obscurity. Even the said‐to‐be most influential of the modern, T. S. Eliot, in such a work as Ash Wednesday, topical this month of course, is completely unintelligible, in spite of the almost divine music of some of its lines, to many quite intelligent and habitual readers. Our librarian declared that readers remain for Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and even for Longfellow, in short for the real classics. This conclusion is borne out by the examination of a day's borrowings a year ago at Manchester. “Modern poetry,” its Report tells us, “seems to be departing from the range of the general reader into some esoteric mystery of its own,” and while the older classics, Browning, Chaucer, Donne and Tennyson were borrowed to the extent of four copies each, other poets were less in demand. Altogether 21 works of individual poets and 16 anthologies went out that day. A small array but, if continued through the year, it meant 11,100 works which are not a negligible number.

A question of size THE Committee set up by the Minister of Education in 1957 to “consider the structure of the public library service in England and Wales, and to advise what changes, if any, should be made n the administrative arrangements, regard being had to the relation of public libraries to other libraries,” was the first such since the Kenyon Committee which reported in 1927. One of the most controversial aspects of the Roberts Committee's deliberations was the consideration of the minimum size (in terms of population) of an independent library system.