RESEARCH AND THE PUBLIC LIBRARY COMMUNITY

Abstract

“How I hate these attempts to measure the immeasurable,” wrote the young and abrasive chief of Rugby in 1938, reviewing the current output of transatlantic professional writing and encountering yet another reader survey. No doubt almost every older chief librarian in Britain would have shared his distaste, possibly an even higher proportion of academic library curators. For four centuries libraries in the West had represented to the educated classes a manifest good, needing no explicit rationale. That belief did not commit those who entertained it to any very strenuous or expensive steps to maintain such institutions. The contemporary output of the presses was small, most of it dismissed automatically as irrelevant to scholars. For their part, librarians by 1938 continued to prefer the company of publishers or poetasters to that of cost accountants.

Citation

JONES, G. (1986), "RESEARCH AND THE PUBLIC LIBRARY COMMUNITY", Library Review, Vol. 35 No. 1, pp. 52-55. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb012808