The Albatross Inheritance: Local Studies Libraries

1. Introduction Victorian librarians saw the public library as a place where citizens could find material relating to their contemporary community — its health, finance, welfare and educational organisations; it would also be a depository for items relating to its past. By 1901 the Cambridge Free Library had taken so much care in this regard that “the historian of the future will find here all that he will need and that is as it should be”. But priorities changed within the library service. Within 50 years 60 per cent of that material had been dispersed and the remainder moved out of public view where it lay largely unused and unremembered. It had no place in the post‐war priorities of the public library service which had turned instead to “current information”, lists of societies, tourist information and the development of a general reference service concentrating on areas of comprehensiveness such as bus and train timetables from across the country. Today, community information and computer databases are the current information priorities, and although the unique, comprehensive local collection has been revived, invigorated and republicised, it remains an oddity, non‐conforming to the pre‐ordained management structure, an “albatross inheritance”.