RURAL LIBRARIES.

Taranaki Daily News, 13 September 1935, Page 4

RURAL LIBRARIES.

The British message recording the remarkable increase in issues made by public libraries since the establishment of the Central London Library has a clear lesson to the libraries of New Zealand. Briefly, the message states that the book stocks of the London libraries and rural districts have doubled in the last 10 years, increasing from 3,000,000 to 6,000,000, while the issues have more than doubled from 23,000,000 in 1924 to 57,000,000 last year. It is obvious that the linking up of the Central London Library with the counties has been largely responsible for this striking increase, and if our own libraries are to fulfil their proper function a similar scheme should be adopted in New Zealand. The MunnBarr survey of New Zealand libraries, financed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, has recommended that the whole of the libraries in the Dominion should be linked up with the central institution in Wellington. It is recommended that the main library in each provincial centre should undertake the duty of providing books to any community in its area. Further, a stocktaking of all the books in the libraries of the Dominion should be compiled and sent to the central library. The result of such a catalogue would be that the reference books of the whole Dominion would be known and available to any library reader in New Zealand. The ideal is that dwellers in even the remoter parts of New Zealand would have the same library advantages as regards books of references as the urban population. The Munn-Barr report has estimated the cost of such a rural group of 50,000 at about £3500 a year, and it should not be beyond the finances of any area surrounding a good central library to inaugurate the plan which has been so markedly successful in England.