NOTES ON Mr. KEENEY'S ARTICLE

THE problem of providing adequately for the accommodation of graduate students and others engaged upon research work has long exercised the minds of British university librarians. Mr. Keeney has very clearly shown us, in his article, the solution which has been found to the problem at Michigan. Wisely, from his point of view, Mr. Keeney has not attempted to generalize but has confined himself to methods of which he has personal experience. British university libraries, more perhaps than those of the United States, differ very considerably in many ways; not least, perhaps, in the variety of the attempts which they have made to deal with this problem. Hence I feel considerable diffidence in essaying a more or less general statement on British methods or on the applicability of the methods of Michigan to Britain. Probably, at the outset at least, I had better confine myself to the two university libraries of which I have considerable practical knowledge, St. Andrews in Scotland and Birmingham in England. Situate in different countries, both British, one old, one young, both progressive, one (St. Andrews) containing 100,000 or so more volumes than the other, both using the Library of Congress Classification Scheme,—here we have two libraries with certain affinities but in many respects poles apart. It may be useful to look at their solutions, or attempts to solve this problem, in the light of what Mr. Keeney has written. Later it may be possible to glance at other British university libraries.