Manual of Library Economy / Third and Memorial Edition

by James Duff Brown; W. C. Berwick Sayers

Or, they may be required to return them to the assistant; in any case it is better for readers not to return them to the shelves personally. Either of the methods recommended enables the staff to make records of the use of books. The consultations can be entered up in a rough-ruled and classified book kept for the purpose, and the staff can replace the books at once. It will be recognized that complete statistics are practically impossible in open access departments, because only books so left on the tables or taken to the tables can be counted; but much valuable work is done by readers in the shape of rapid consultations at the shelves with immediate replacing of the volumes consulted.

Whatever may be his general method, the wise librarian will never limit a reader to one or any number of books at a time. Sometimes a dozen—we have known fifty—books are required to settle a comparatively small point. They are forthcoming in a good reference library. Students of recognized regularity may even be released from overmuch form-filling; fifty forms for the fifty books we have named would be an interminable demand.

411. The Stock.

411. The Stock.—The building-up of a reference stock demands the highest skill and prevision in the librarian. The purpose which it is intended to serve must be clearly before his eyes, and this may, and does, differ with differing places. A library in a distinctly commercial and industrial area faces needs obviously different from one in a purely residential area. But in all libraries every kind of dictionary and encyclopædia, general and special, philological, technical, scientific and historical, is a prime requisite. On these the stock will be balanced with a view to procuring the best and latest statement of knowledge in every field. This end the too-often neglected bibliographical collection subserves. Every general and special bibliography from the British Museum catalogue to the small select catalogues issued by local libraries, every index, every special catalogue, indeed every catalogue within reason of other libraries which a librarian can procure, is a necessary tool in building up the collection and in tracking information when it is complete. There have been many select bibliographies, but there is still room for many more. The average bibliography of a subject is not selected; it aims at completeness, and seems to assume that its users are people who want to spend a lifetime on the subject. There are such, no doubt, but to the average reader it presents a formidable if not paralysing array of entries. What is needed, both from experts and from libraries, is a series of very brief lists which contain only the best books given in order of their value, comprehensiveness, historical character, and so on. Knowledge of bibliographies and the methods of using them is the chief part of the equipment of the reference librarian.

In this work there are two ideals, as was shown when the general question of book selection was under consideration: one the museum ideal, in which every kind of book of every age is collected; the other which limits the stock to books of proved or probable utility to the population served. The former is the business of the national libraries and those of the great centres of population, such as Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, etc., and to a certain extent those which are at great distance from such large centres; and special libraries within their own fields should be exhaustive. But this ideal is not for other libraries, except in so far as it applies to the local collection; that should contain everything of whatever value. Otherwise the live book is what is wanted. The ordinary reference library should therefore be revised periodically, obsolete and dead stock should be discarded, and no book should be included because it does not appeal to lending library readers or has been received as a gift for which there seems to be no other depository—these are emphatically books to be excluded. With these general provisions a brief survey of the principal requirements of the stock may have its uses.

Fig. 155.—The Picton Reading Room, the Central Reference Library of Liverpool.

I.	Quick-reference works of every type.
II.	Bibliographies, general and select, and catalogues of every type.
III.	The best editions of the classic authors in every language.
IV.	The most comprehensive compendiums and treatises on every subject.
V.	All material on the predominating local industry.
VI.	All books, pamphlets, and all other literary, pictorial and graphic matter relating to the locality. This will be dealt with more fully in considering the Local Collection.
VII.	Permanent files of at least The Times, and all local newspapers; and temporary files of other newspapers most in demand.
VIII.	Sets of periodicals, as indexed in the Library Association Index of Periodicals. This is a rather large business, and should be attempted only by libraries that can afford the cost. Others should elect to keep only those of such character as to add permanently to the book-strength of the library, and to use the Periodicals Loan Library, which is worked in conjunction with the Index of Periodicals, for other periodical material. All periodical indexes, whether general, as Poole’s, The Review of Reviews, The Athenæum, and The Wilson Company’s, or particular, as The Times, the indexes to The Quarterly, The Edinburgh, etc. The value of these in large libraries is obvious; it is not always so clearly recognized that they have even a greater value for smaller libraries as clues to accessible material which may not be in their stocks. In any case the Library Association index should be taken.
IX.	The publications of the major learned and scientific societies, as the Royal Society, the Royal Geographical, the Historical and similar societies. These present knowledge well in advance of that contained in books as a rule.
X.	Clippings from newspapers and periodicals which have definite facts, in addition to those contained in books, and on current happenings of moment, matters of “useful” character (the day to day changes in rationing rules, etc., during the war are a case in point) and similar material having an immediate, and real, if transient value.
XI.	Government publications, which in most libraries may be selected after a brief interval. Many of the reports of commissions, surveys, etc., have a high permanent value.