The Library World Volume 18 Issue 7

Abstract

In wishing our readers the good things they desire and hope the New Year will bring, we cannot help recalling again the unusual character of the days in which the year opens. For all men it is a testing time; to many one of straitened means, trial and loss. Circumstances are changed, and dear ones are absent, and our hearts look forward with a sense of heightened responsibility but of undiminished confidence in our Cause and Country. As librarians we must not complain too loudly, even though realising that much of the difficulty that is being introduced into the efficient carrying on of a National Library arises from the mental constitution of the ordinary British man of business, who (whatever may be his own practice) often does honestly think that reading is a concession to idleness and that books are luxuries which may be easily dispensed with. We must endeavour to take a broad view of the position. National financial circumstances make retrenchment of some kind necessary in every department of public service, and the least we can do is to show a disposition to save money wherever it is possible to do so, even at the expense of those activities which have strengthened and widened the sphere of the public library in the last decade.

Citation

(1916), "The Library World Volume 18 Issue 7", New Library World, Vol. 18 No. 7, pp. 192-224. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb008998