The Library World Volume 61 Issue 10 Available to Purchase

THE STAFFING SITUATION IF after the absence of a year or two we return to a familiar library, we are apt to find that most of the librarians known to us have gone, or so many of them that the familiarity seems to have departed. Indeed the turn‐over in the visible staffs is so great as to suggest that library service, fascinating as some think it to be, we amongst them, is not sufficiently so to hold its beginnners. The impression that this applies only to libraries should not be adopted until we know that most other occupations are not afflicted with the same transience in their servants. We have to assure ourselves that this is not a national condition that is itself transient, in which every professional, industrial, and commercial concern is fighting for a share in the limited supply of young workers and is offering wages or salaries against the others in a boom time which may pass. Are we able to tell juniors that the “never‐had‐it‐so‐good” age is unlikely to endure and that library service will and they should stay in it? If we could, would the immediate cash of the outside world prevail and the credit of the future be foregone?