Henry J. Carr, librarian of the Scranton public library; Miss Edith E. Clarke of Syracuse University, and Herbert O. Brigham, state librarian of Rhode Island, were appointed a special committee to prepare a suitable resolution of thanks to Mr. Wallace for his excellent paper and to draft suitable resolutions to be submitted to the Council for its approval, urging that the recommendations in Mr. Wallace's paper relative to publication and distribution of documents be approved by the American Library Association, this committee to report at an adjourned meeting of the session to be held at 12:15 p. m. on Friday.
The second paper of the evening, prepared by Mr. FRANCIS A. CRANDALL of Washington, D. C., on certain phases of the public document question, in his absence was read by Charles F. D. Belden, state librarian of Massachusetts.
Mr. Crandall's paper (in part) here follows:
PROPOSING AN EXECUTIVE GAZETTE
The committee on department methods, known to the public as the Keep commission, was the agency through which, about seven years ago, President Roosevelt hoped to reorganize and energize the government service in Washington.
The Keep commission organized for helpers twelve so-called assistant committees, their total membership being about seventy, all supposed to be experts in the several branches of inquiry assigned to them.
On one of these assistant committees, the one on "The organization of editorial work and an official gazette," the writer had the honor to serve.
We held more than one hundred meetings, and examined as witnesses almost if not quite every man and woman who had any official relation with the work of preparing manuscripts for printing. We learned after a while that the President wanted an official gazette, and expected us to devise the means of creating it. I think that nearly all the members from the start deemed the scheme impracticable and chimerical. It became clear that it would be a costly enterprise, and we could not find any department that had the money for it.
Soon after this Mr. Keep left Washington, and the Keep commission, though nominally still living, dwindled rapidly, and brought forth little if any more fruit.