Shadows Before: Musings on Library Training

A LIBRARIAN not very long ago made the pertinent suggestion that public libraries were run upside‐down. In brief, his point was that a library assistant's life was something like that of a monk or a nun, in that as he passed successive grades in his qualifications, so he became more and more remote from the outer world, until he eventually was finally and completely immured behind a door marked private, there to commune in silence with the Times Literary Supplement and the 13th edition of Dewey. The idea was, of course,—and it had ingenuity and great truth,—that in fact the more knowledge and experience he accumulated, the more he was required to be at the vital point of contact between the public and their reading matter.