RURAL LIBRARIES

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 74, 21 December 1937, Page 10

RURAL LIBRARIES

Establishment Of New Service

DIRECTOR APPOINTED

Literature For Country

Readers

An announcement that Mr. G. T. Alley, Christchurch, had been appointed National Director of Rural Libraries under the Government’s new scheme to assist country libraries, was made by the Minister of Education, Hon. P. Fraser, in an interview yesterday. Other appointments have yet to be made to the subsidiary positions which are involved in the

scheme, including the positions of field librarians, and full details have yet to be announced by the Minister, However, the scheme follows closely on the lines of a statement issued by the Government earlier in the year about its proposals for the "extension and improvement of library facilities generally, but particularly in the country centres where libraries are virtually non-existent. This new service will be known as part of the proposed national library service, for which a sum of nujney was placed on the estimates. The present proposal will provide for those people who at the moment have no adequate library service. The Government plans to give these people a loan service of books in place of money grants provided, under the old scheme of library assistance. Instead of allocating a small subsidy as in the past, the assistance will take the form of regular loan supplies of books to country libraries from central sources, which will be attached to the General Assembly library in Wellington. The two basic features of the new scheme will be skilled assistance to small libraries by a special staff and these loan services of books carefully chosen. Ultimately the Government hopes to introduce a national library scheme along the linos of those operating in other countries, notably in Great Britain and Denmark, and this new development is regartled as one of the first important steps toward that end.