Abstract
Some of the papers read at the week-end conference of the London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association held at Eastbourne in October 1946, which have now been issued as a separate reprint (Library Association, 68 Holloway Road, London, N.7. 5s.), although addressed primarily to the public librarian, are of interest to those in charge of scientific or technical libraries and to those using such libraries for research or for other purposes. This applies particularly to the papers in the symposium on special materials in libraries, to which Dr. E. C. Willatts, of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, contributes some notes on the cataloguing, classification and handling generally of maps, plans and aerial photographs, and Miss D. Tayler, formerly of the Ministry of Information, on the like treatment of pictorial material. Mrs. L. Moholy surveys the various processes of documentary reproduction, including the photostat process and micro-copying techniques, and urges once more the establishment of central offices of documentary reproduction; while two papers by Miss Marie T. Slocombe and Miss Valentine Britten, both of the British Broadcasting Corporation, dealing with sound recordings and describing the B.B.C.'s Recorded Programmes Library and the formation and administration of a gramophone library, respectively, should interest a more limited number of scientific workers. An excellent paper on “Library Co-operation and Publicity”, by C. A. Elliott, of the Bermondsey Public Libraries, makes many sound points which could well be laid to heart by the works librarian or the librarian serving a research organisation in industry or elsewhere. The two-fold responsibility is the same: to provide an adequate service and to make it accessible. As in the public library, there is the task of organising an efficient service to meet known needs, of removing all unnecessary hindrances and barriers between the reader and the source of information, and of making known, continuously and effectively, the existence of the service so that it is fully used.
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Libraries and their Use. Nature 160, 292–293 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/160292e0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/160292e0