1. THE BIBLIOGRAPHIC SYSTEM OF CLASSIFICATION (abridged)

I have approached my task of addressing you to‐day with more than conventional diffidence. As an association of specialist librarians, you bring to the consideration of my paper a formidable array of subject specialization. The subject of my paper, too, is a scheme of classification for libraries and all scholarly uses, which bases its principal claim to consideration on the superior quality of its scholarship. Perhaps now you begin to perceive the nature of my dilemma. I am no scholar: I am a plain and very undistinguished worker in a public library: I wouldn't know the difference between the nomenclature of the physician and that of the gardener. In short, there seems no reason why I should be here at all, beyond the very inadequate one that I have conducted an intermittent correspondence over some twenty years with the author of the scheme, Henry Evelyn Bliss, of New York, and tried to assist him with some of the minor details of the scheme. But please realize that in the primary matter of justifying the scheme I am a broken reed: you must judge the scheme from your own study of the schedules, not from my advocacy, which must necessarily be hopelessly inadequate and unfair to one of the great pioneer thinkers of our age.