LIBRARY SCIENCE LITERATURE: SOME PROBLEMS OF INFORMATION ABOUT INFORMATION Available to Purchase

When I received your Honorary Secretary's invitation to speak at this conference I was naturally very flattered—because nobody had ever asked me to speak at a library conference before—and the choice of subject suited me, since it has been my concern over the last seven years of my professional career and since I was already about to prepare a contribution to another work on much the same topic. So I accepted the invitation with eagerness. But that was several months ago, and in the interim I have been getting progressively more uneasy. The other assignment I mentioned—a survey of the last five years' production in library science literature for our new reference work BLIS—had been completed, not without a struggle, and far from thinking afterwards that I could incorporate the same material into this talk, I was led further into doubt about what I should say, doubt about why I was being asked here at all, and what my qualifications were for saying anything at all to anyone. I thought back over the conferences I had attended as an all‐too‐silent observer these last seven years and asked myself what common characteristic the speakers had that I could now lay a claim to. They seemed, many of them, to be full‐time research workers, or recipients of grants, people with a lot of ideas about the future of the profession, library school lecturers, educationists with a discerning or a patronizing interest in libraries, political figures dragooned into giving their set speeches to, for a change, library audiences, and quite simply, people talking about their day‐to‐day work. Only the last category was open to me, and you will be pleased to hear that I do not intend to talk about my work at the Library Association, except incidentally.