LIBRARIES ABROAD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 115, 18 May 1933, Page 14

LIBRARIES ABROAD.

AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES. "SIMPLY MARVELLOUS." After a year's absence from New Zealand, during which time he visited most of the big universities in United States, Canada and England, principally to see and investigate their library organisation, Mr. H. G. Miller, librarian at Victoria University College, and a former Rhodes scholar, returned to Wellington with Mrs. Miller by the Remuera. Mr. Miller, who travelled on a Carnegie fellowship, said on his return that he was greatly impressed with all he had seen, and he could only say of the libraries of the American universities that they were simply marvellous.

Mr. Miller spent seven months in the United States, but four of these seven were devoted to studying methods and j organisation at the State University of Michigan, one of the universities of the Middle West. The university was situated some 40 miles from the city of Detroit, and in normal times there were 10,000 students there. The university was maintained by an annual grant from the Legislature, and fees were comparatively low. The university was exceedingly large, and had affiliated to it a very fine medical school. There was also a magnificent law school, which was built from a private endowment, twelve million dollars having been left by a man named Cook. This law school had a separate library attached to it, and it "was interesting to note that this library alone "Wis about as big as the whole of .Victoria College itself. Hot Simply Book Stores. University libraries in America, Mr. Miller said, -were not simply places in which books were stored. Each of them was a great book stock, comprising about seven to eight hundred thousand volumes (Yale had four million), around which provision was made for research students in carrels or cubicles. In addition to that, there were smaller lecture rooms, or seminars, for small groups of advanced students. I Americans were very keen about education, but, of course, it was one thing having an interest in education and another to be educated. He was not exceedingly impressed with the work that the American universities were doing. The work was not nearly as good as one would expect with the wonderful equipment and great staffs. The general standard of undergraduate was very low, especially in the Middle West.

The English librarian was regarded as a sort of keeper of books, but the American librarian was a sort of salesman who was there to assist finding books, to tell what was in the books, and to look up facts when called upon. There were two persons engaged all the time in the Michigan library in answering questions. In England. Although the English libraries had got the books, their buildings were very much behind those in America. The British Museum, with the best library in the world, was a scandal. Its equipment and staff were niggardly. It had a trained staff of 25, while in America he saw public libraries with a staff of 1000. There was, on the other hand, a great deal of library activity in the north of England. Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester had just recently completed splendid big new reference libraries, while Leeds University had built an enormous library with a capacity of a million books. Both Oxford and Cambridge; with American, money, were building enormous new libraries, the Bodleian being designed to hold five million volumes.