A Proposal for the Establishment of District Public Libraries on an Economical Basis. 1 THERE is no doubt that the spread of Free Public Libraries in small places where the penny rate yields less than 500 per annum, has been greatly retarded by the impossibility of adequately paying for the services of a skilled librarian. This hindrance has been all the more operative from the slight encouragement to the legal union of neighbouring places for library purposes formerly existing. The Public Library Acts of 1892-3 have now opened the way for the union of separate parishes and of urban places in any given district. Will the new facilities be availed of to any extent ? The answer to this question will probably depend in part on the successful demonstration of the practicability of providing a separate library for each place in the district, with skilled advice and control in the management by the union in the hands of a common Board of Commissioners of the separate incomes of the places concerned. Hitherto few are the districts where two or three parishes have united under a common authority, but undoubtedly there are in Great Britain many groups of from six to a dozen parishes especially in mining and manufacturing districts comprised within a moderate area where it would be possible by legal union to organise a system of library administration under one skilled librarian acting under a single body of Commissioners a system, too, which would provide a separate library for each parish or township. Suppose such a group of ten parishes forming one library district, with an income from the penny rate quite adequate to allow a sum of ^200 for a librarian's salary, an average of ^"20 per parish. Such an officer could, on the plan herein unfolded, exercise proper supervision over the ten separate libraries con- sisting say of one thousand volumes each, do all the skilled work of catalogue making, and act as Clerk to the Commissioners. He would, of course, need women or boy assistants, one say for each parish, or for each group of two or three parishes, according to
Communicated to the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Library Association
Aberdeen, September, 1893.
