The Library World Volume 50 Issue 11

OUR custom of giving a report on the Library Association conference may be observed in a reduced manner this year, because we have already dealt, by anticipation, with many of its subjects and the actual meetings did not produce any Startling variation from the expected. So far as the general conduct of affairs was concerned, no conference has been handled better in what is now a long, successful sequence. The local secretariat functioned so efficiently that it was almost unobserved and unheard as first‐class machinery always is. The President's work, both in his address and handling of meetings, was masterly. The papers were a good average; some were too long, one occupying a whole hour; some were intended to be revolutionary and went off in verbal crackers; a few showed the curious modern faith that what a man does not do himself is “an outmoded technique”—a faith he could not hold if his experience were sufficient. But, on the whole, in all its variations, it was a worth‐while meeting and there was something good in every paper. We must insist, however, that the Council should vet the papers and the speakers' ability to read them adequately. To ask him to address a meeting of fourteen hundred people, the majority of them expert in the subject of the address, is a very high compliment for the Association to pay to a librarian, or, indeed, anyone else, and elementary text‐book material is unsuitable for so august an occasion. No doubt Scarborough provided the Council with some lessons in this direction.