Pioneers! O Pioneers!

THAT THIS YEAR sees the fiftieth anniversary of the Public Libraries Act of 1919 and the consequent birth of county libraries in England and Wales is a fact that has not gone unnoticed. At the Southport Public Libraries Conference the County Libraries Group of the Library Association invited Miss L. V. Paulin to deliver a paper entitled ‘County Libraries: Half a Century's Achievement’ and also arranged a jubilee dinner at which the principal guest and speaker was Miss A. S. Cooke, who was county librarian of Gloucestershire when the Act was passed. The Library World for May marked this event by the inclusion of a symposium of five relevant articles and in the Journal of Librarianship for July F. A. Keyse has written an excellent account of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust experiments of 1915 to 1919, which were to shape the administrative pattern of British county libraries.