Page:Essays in librarianship and bibliography.djvu/205

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LIBRARIANSHIP IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
185

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."

Further instructions follow respecting the control to be exercised over the librarian, who is to give an account of his stewardship once a year to the doctors of the university, who are themselves, each in his own faculty, to suggest additional books proper to be added to the library. Dury seems to have no doubt that funds will always be forthcoming,