This established, Dury proceeds to point out how the library should be made useful. His main idea is that a library should be a kind of factory, and it is astonishing how often he contrives to introduce the word "trade" into his proposals. Underlying this peculiar phraseology is the thought that so long as the library only exists for the advantage of those who may choose to resort to it, it is like a talent buried in a napkin; that to be really useful it must go to the public, and that the librarian must place himself in active communication with men of learning. It was hardly conceived in Dury's day that any but scholars could have occasion for libraries, but translating his proposals into the language of our time, it will appear that they contemplate such
an ideal of librarianship as is professed in America, and is realised with no small success in many of our leading free libraries. The first condition is a good catalogue:—
"That is," says Dury, "all the books and manuscripts according to the titles whereunto they belong, are to be ranked in an order most easy and obvious to be found, which I think is that of sciences and languages, when first all the books are divided into their subjectam materiam whereof they treat, and then every kind of matter subdivided into their several languages."
Evidently Dury was little troubled with the questions which have so exercised librarians since his time. "The subject-matter of which a book treats" is not always easy to ascertain. It might have puzzled Dury himself to decide whether his own tract should be catalogued along with books on libraries, or with the "Reformed School" to which it is professedly an appendix, and to which half its contents have a direct relation. The suggestion that books should be catalogued by languages was propounded before the British Museum Commission of 1849, and promptly dismissed as the fancy of an amateur. It would be curious to see Pope's Homer in one catalogue, Voss's in another, and the original in a third.
Dury next judiciously adds that room must be left in the library for the increase of books, an indispensable condition not always easy of fulfilment; and that "in the printed catalogue a reference is to be made to the place where the books
are to be found in their shelves or repositories." That is, the catalogue must have press-marks; in which suggestion Dury was two centuries ahead of many of the most important foreign libraries. It will be observed that he takes it for granted that the catalogue shall be printed, and in this he was ahead of almost all the libraries of his time, and until lately of the British Museum. In fact he could not be otherwise, for a printed catalogue is an essential condition of his dominant idea that the librarian should be a "factor" to "trade" with learned men and corporations for mutual profit. Hence he prescribes "a catalogue of additionals, which every year within the universities is to be published in writing within the library itself, and every three years to be put in print and made common to those that are abroad."
The full plan of communication is unfolded in the following passage:—
"When the stock is thus known and fitted to be exposed to the view of the learned world, then the way of trading with it, both at home and abroad, is to be laid to heart both for the increase of the stock and for the improvement of its use. For the increase of the stock both at home and abroad, correspondence should be held with those that are eminent in every science to trade with them for their profit, that what they want and we have, they may receive upon condition; that what they have and we want, they should impart in that faculty wherein their eminence doth lie. As for such as are at home eminent in any kind, because they
may come by native right to have use of the library treasure, they are to be traded with all in another way, viz., that the things which are gained from abroad, which as yet are not made common and put to public use, should be promised and imparted to them for the increase of their private stock of knowledge, to the end that what they have peculiar, may also be given in for a requital, so that the particularities of gifts at home and abroad are to meet as in a centre in the hand of the Library Keeper, and he is to trade with the one by the other, to cause them to multiply the public stock, whereof he is a treasurer and factor.
"Thus he should trade with those that are at home and abroad out of the university, and with those that are within the university, he should have acquaintance to know all that are of any parts, and how their view of learning doth lie, to supply helps unto them in their faculties from without and from within the nation, to put them upon the keeping of correspondence with men of their own strain, for the beating out of matters not yet elaborated in sciences; so that they may be as his assistants and subordinate factors in his trade and in their own for gaining of knowledge."