LIBRARY SCHEME

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 200, 21 May 1936, Page 5

LIBRARY SCHEME

Facilities For Rural Readers NATIONAL SERVICE Recommendations to the Government The extension of library facilities to the rural districts of New Zealand was discussed by the chief librarian of the General Assembly Library, Dr. G. H. Scholefield, in a report presented in the House of Representatives yesterday. Dr. Scholefield recently returned from abroad after visiting parliamentary and national libraries in Australia, South Africa, Great Britain and several European countries. Canada and the United States. His tour was the outcome of an invitation from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and one of the aspects of library work he was commissioned by the last Government to study was the improvement of rural library services in the Dominion. Dr. Scholefield said the following cardinal principles might be accepted as governing the efforts of modern library reformers: (1) All libraries, whether municipal or county, reference or borrowing, should be completely free to users; (2) all the non-fiction book stocks of the Dominion should be available, within reasonable limits, for the use of all serious readers; (3) residents of rural districts, however remote, were entitled to as efficient a lending service as those in the towns, within practicable limits. District Libraries. The dominating factors in deciding upon the size and boundaries of a library district, he said, should be: (1) The existence of a strong library with a trained librarian which would act as the bureau or administrative centre for the district; (2) geographical entity, community of interest and facility of communication between this centre and the limits of the area to be served. The lending stock of the district libraries should be a good collection, of general literature, with a carefully controlled ingredient of fiction; in fact, all the classes of books that should be found in a good municipal library. The national service which the more advanced countries to-day aimed at, and which it was highly desirable New Zealand should develop, provided for the more serious reader, the large class of men and women who desired something other than fiction. For this class of people the district would organise an interlending service through which the whole of the resources of existing libraries in the district would be made accessible to serious readers who could not obtain what they required in their own locality. Amendment io Law Required. “The development of a sound national library service in New Zealand calls first, and foremost for an early amendment of the library law,” Dr. Scholefield continued. “In. the. first instance, to enable municipalities to free their libraries of the necessity of charging a subscription in order to make the libraries really free, the present limitation of-the power of rating for libraries must be removed. At the same time the law should be amended to extent, to counties, the power of raising library rates and to empower both boroughs and counties to cooperate in library service, forming such mutual associations as may seem most advantageous. “This will make it possible to serve the outlying parts of library districts either through a district bureau which would be housed in the most central municipal library or through the municipal library itself assuming the duty as part of its regular activities. It is very desirable that any amendment of the Act should leave it open to a particular district to adopt the special

form of co-operation that appears most suitable to its conditions.” Central Bureau. In New Zealand there was no reason why the General Assembly Library should not undertake the duty of the central lending library in the district scheme. The main purpose of the central bureau, or what was called in England a national central library, was to act as a clearing-house between the district bureaus, to put districts in touch with each other’s resources and requirements, and eventually to fulfil individual readers’ demands which the districts had not been able to meet out of their own or another district’s resources.

A task which New Zealand might require to be entrusted to the central lending library was the supply of literature for Maori reading. The average Maori, completing his primary education, ceased to read at all, unless lie happened to find employment and to live entirely among the pakeha. Referring to the economy in book buying that would follow the adoption of ’such a scheme, Dr. .Scholefield said that one of th& tragedies of the old style of small libraries wa,s the waste of money on the purchase of good books which were scarcely ever used.

The report was presented by Mr. W. J. Lyon (Government, Waitemata) on behalf of tlie Speaker, Hon. W. E. Barnard.