Library economy writers: The contemporary scene

No attempt to survey the scene would be within miles of success which did not contemplate the almost revolutionary effect of the coming of the county library service. A few of its pioneers foresaw the possibilities of the service which took practical shape, after much private but necessarily limited experiment, with the publication of the Adams Report. With it has come a large amount of journalistic writing and some important books. The earliest book was Duncan Gray's County Library Systems, 1922, which was followed almost immediately by Robert D. Macleod's County Rural Libraries, 1923. They are pioneer books on the technique of the new job, and Macleod goes well into its social and educational problems and results as he, the first librarian to the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, saw them in the birth and infancy of the scheme. Both are distinctive men in quite different ways: Macleod is clearly a Scot and, if Burns is to be trusted, the other is or ought to have been!