College Libraries.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18430, 10 July 1925, Page 8

College Libraries.

We are afraid tliat very little can ber said to modify the opinion of the University Commission about the condition of. onr College libraries. Go far as Canterbury College is concerned the responsibility rests partly with the Government but largely "ivitk the Board, which rejected a proposal a few months ago to spend more money on books, less because it had no money to spare than because the Canterbury Public Library "had no superior in " New Zealand." As long as the Board harbours opinions of that bind the complaints of the Professors will fall on deaf ears; and the trouble is, of course, that the central Government has even less liberal ideas about the adequacy of libraries than have the members of the Board. But it is just as well to remember that the presence of books is one thing and the daily use of them another. One of the Commissioners finds, a difficulty in understanding why money should be available for costly laboratories and scientific equipment and not for books, but that is no more mysterious than the fact that the average man has pounds to spare for tobacco, pictures and petrol and' not even shillings for a library ticket. And so far as the students are concerned it may be asked how many in any country are voracious readers of books while actually attending lectures and taking notes. However magnificent our libraries were they would be used freely only by the teachers, plus, perhaps, a small driblet of very eager and very intelligent research students. Outside the books prescribed as texts, the amount of voluntary reading done by students is very • small, if not entirely negligible. About the boldest claim we have seen made for College libraries was published the other day by the Librarian of Princeton as a counter-blast to a statement by the Professor of English Literature that students did no voluntary reading at all; and it boiled down td this—that he could truthfully say that 10 per cent, of the undergraduates were " hard readers." He could not, however, say that they were hard readers of the best books, or even of good books, his records showing that even in fiction it was riot Scott or Thackeray or Dickens or George Eliot who was being read, and not even Kipling and Stevenson,,' but Galsworthy, Hergesheimer, Sinclair Lewis and Edna Ferber. What the records reveal at Canterbury Colle<y Ave do not know; but we should be surprised .to discover that the "hard readers" are more numerous than they are at Princeton, and that they are reading the classics in those cases in which they are free to choose between the famous dead and the distinguished, or notorious, living.