The Library World Volume 58 Issue 10

IT has been asserted on occasion, but on uncertain authority, that most librarians do not read the Library Association Record and that those who did will now be satisfied with the more volatile Liaison which enables them to get their “news” about ten days earlier than the Record can supply it. If this is not the libel on our colleagues that we hope it is, there is little likelihood of their reading any librarianship publication and so our advocacy here of the immense interest of the 1956 Annual Report of the L.A. will impress them not at all. Nevertheless, we do commend it to their earnest scrutiny; first, because it is well written and, as a piece of composition, interesting, and second because it continues to be the account of a complexity of industry and active change which would have amazed and delighted, perhaps bewildered, the previous generation of librarians. This is stressed in the general paragraphs. A brief tribute to Past President Edward Sydney, which all sensible people will endorse, shows that a successful president now undertakes not only many works, visits, speeches and ceremonies at home but is visitor and speaker at conferences in such places as Paris, Trieste, the Gold Coast—to which, in Mr. Sydney's case but a year or so earlier, would be added his work in India and elsewhere. A good record.