Page:Library Administration, 1898.djvu/21

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LIBRARY ADMININSTRATION

Additionals," which latter shall be printed every three years for transmission abroad. As the Bodleian in Durie's time had privileges of copyright, provision is made for the treatment of "copyright books" by the ideal librarian. "I would have at the time of giving accounts the Librarie-keeper also bound to produce the Catalogue of all the books sent unto the Universitie's Librarie by the Stationars that printed them, to the end that everie one of the Doctors in their own Faculties should declare whether or no they should bee added, and where they should bee placed in the Catalogue of Additionals." These rejected books were to be kept, though not added to the catalogue.

The modern ideal of the librarian has been forcibly explained by one who was perhaps the greatest among them, in this country at least—we mean Henry Bradshaw. "A librarian is one who earns his living by attending to the wants of those for whose use the library under his charge exists; his primary duty being, in the widest possible sense of the phrase, to save the time of those who seek his services."[1] To achieve this end there is required a rare combination of three qualities—scholarship, character, and business capacity. The day is long past when universal erudition was possible, but the ideal librarian will be a man of catholic tastes and retentive memory, interested in all the developments of human knowledge, and able by his linguistic attainments to follow them

  1. Address to the Library Association of the United Kingdom, 1882.