PUBLIC LIBRARY.

Evening Star, Issue 22325, 29 April 1936, Page 8

PUBLIC LIBRARY.

We are not enamoured of the Labour Council’s new finance policy, but since the money will be spent we can feel satisfaction that a small proportion of it—£B,ooo —is to go to the improvement of the Public Library. Half this sum will be devoted to alterations of the building and the other half to the purchase of more books. A poll was taken more than seven years ago on a proposal to raise a loan of £15,000 for extending and remodelling the library, and the proposal was rejected by the ratepayers, but it was one that very reasonably might have been carried. The free library is something more than a public amenity; it is an aid to education in no small degree, and the benefits which are obtained from it of both kinds have had always the minimum cost for the ratepayers. Long before the poll was taken the necessity for enlarging it had been urged from time to time. It was never built to provide for a Greater Dunedin, and if St. Hilda had to participate in its services, or if another institution, involving a small annual subscription, did not exist, its inadequacy to requirements would be ridiculous. Structurally it conies near to being that under existing circumstances. There is no proper room for storing, much less displaying books in the cramped lending department, and no proper room for librarians. The remodelling now proposed will be a vast improvement, if it falls short of earlier ideas of extension. It will provide further for a certain addition to building work at a time when the Post Office approaches completion. We are glad to see also that in the plans which are now advanced for a more generous distribution of contents, as well as for the strengthening of non-fiction, the suggestions of the Munn-Barr report are being followed. That report, made on the whole library system of New Zealand, was a very wise one. It is well that municipal authorities, so far as their power extends, should be concerned to make practical use of its recommendations. The last Government had a scheme, which was based on the report, for extending library benefits, by an inter-library lending scheme helped by public funds, to all parts of the country where they are least in evidence. We have no doubt that the idea will be as attractive to the Labour Government, which is not likely to err in giving things of the mind less than their due importance.