VOL. 7.

C: A. CUTTER, General Editor. F: LEYPOLDT, Managing Editor.

Communications for the JOURNAL, exchanges, and editors' copies, should be addressed C: A. CUTTER, Boston Athenæum, Boston, Mass.

European matter may be sent to the care of H: R. TEDDER, Athenæum Club, Pall Mall, S. W., London.

Remittances and orders for subscriptions and advertisements should be addressed to THE LIBRARY JOURNAL, 13 & 15 Park Row (P. O. Box 943), New York. Remittances should be made by draft on New York, P. O. order, or registered letter.

The Editors are not responsible for the views expressed in contributed articles or communications, nor for the style of spelling, capitalization, etc., in articles whose authors request adherence to their own style.

Subscribers are entitled to advertise books wanted, or duplicates for sale or exchange, at the nominal rate of 5 cents per line (regular rate 15 cents); also to advertise for situations or assistance to the extent of five lines free of charge.

A CUTTING from the London Telegraph of Sept. 9 was sent to us lately, containing an account of the Cambridge meeting of the Library Association. On the opposite side of the slip, as it happened, was an account of the Mint, in which comparison was made of the coinage of "the olden time, when money was made by cutting out a piece of metal somewhat of the form of the intended coin, and imparting the device to it by the blow of a sledgehammer" with the marvellous accuracy and quickness of the mechanism now in use at the Mint. Turning the slip we find that "the reader at the British Museum has to search through huge volumes of a written index for the volumes he requires, then a variety of particulars about the books, their authorship, date, and place have to be written on a form and handed to an attendant, who in course of time produces the volumes." For a single book this is not taking much trouble, but when one wants twenty or thirty works the process wastes too much precious time. Compare it with the operation at any of our town libraries, where the reader merely writes half a dozen figures on the slip of paper which he hands to the attendant. It is

No. II.

true, the notation of a town library would not suit and could not be made to suit the British Museum, but at least one library in America has in use a system of notation adequate for the British Museum, not merely as it is now, but as it will be when it shall have all of the 18,000,000 volumes which its new method-printing titleswill allow it to record within the space now occupied by the catalog of only a million and a half. In the same library the charging slips are written, not by the reader, but by the attendant, and, when written, serve for sixty times of issue.

English scholars have complained for more than a generation of the unnecessary work imposed upon them; their representations have met with no attention, and this intellectual mint still continues to strike its coins with the sledgehammer and with lead holders. But upon the mint where MONEY is made every resource of inventive art has been lavished. Expensive machines have been constructed to do the work in the most efficient and expeditious way, and then have been discarded because something still more expeditious had been discovered.

Let us not be in a hurry to hold up our hands in astonishment. England is our Mother Country, and we are in such matters chips of the old block. Perhaps it may be allowed to a Frenchman to talk of the conservatism of John Bull, and of the nation of shopkeepers which carries all that relates to the making of money to the highest pitch of perfection, and lets thoughtcoiners get along as well as they can with an apparatus comparable only with the sledge-hammer and the piece of folded lead; a nation which when a means of greatly facilitating the library work by printing the catalog is found, doles out the funds so slowly that it will take forty years to do what might just as well be finished before the end of this century. But have we seen at home nothing like this preference of the

Have we never

material to the intellectual? known a board of trustees to spend so much on the buildings of a college that there was nothing left with which to found professorships? Have we never seen an enormous sum sunk by the desire of the donor in erecting an imposing structure to hold books, and no money given to buy the books to put in it? Have we never seen great interest taken in the architectural proportions of the building, and hardly a thought bestowed on its capacity to hold or to preserve the books which it was noninally destined to house ? Have we never found it easier to get appropriations for buying books, material, palpable, visible books, than for the arrangement and cataloging which doubles their usefulness? And

the catalog having been granted, do we never find a greater desire to have something finished and in hand than to have that something carefully planned and thoroughly executed?

Let that city that is without blame herein cast the first stone.

a smaller circle of readers. The cause must lie in our character, for we believe that each program committee has, like the English, accepted every paper that was presented to it. It is true that the reports in the Cincinnati Conference, which Mr. Tedder justly praises, were the result of a well-considered plan of the Executive Board of the Association; but with that exception all the papers have been rather offered than asked for, and at any rate the subjects have been chosen by the authors, and therefore have been a good indication of the direction which the thoughts of American librarians take. The Library journal, too, has had the same experience. In nearly seven years only two papers of an antiquarian character, if we recollect right, have been written for it-Mr. Whitney's on the Diana enamorada of Montemayor (Lib. jnl., 3 : 158) and Mr. Axon's on Sir J. Chesshyre's Library at Halton (4 35). That there are here a certain number of writers and readers interested in these things is shown by the literary success of Philes's Philobiblion and Sabin's Bookseller. That the circle of readers is small is shown by the financial failure of both of those periodicals.

THE PROPOSED NEW NATIONAL LIBRARY.

On the 11th of December next, by special appointment, the bill providing for a new fireproof building in Washington for the National Library comes up for discussion in the House.

In considering the merits of the proposed building there comes up an exceedingly important question, and one which as yet has received little public discussion-viz., What is to be placed in it? Mr. Spofford thinks that it should contain all the special collections of books belonging to the government in Washington, including such as the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, of the Army, of the Patent-office, the Bureau of Geology, the Naval Observatory, etc., etc.-allowing each department or bureau to retain only a few books necessary for its immediate work. The arguments in favor of this view may be stated as follows: (1) The National Library of the United States should be as complete as possible in all its departments. It starts at a disadvantage with other great national collections by reason of its youth, for it requires time as well as money to form a great library. By sweeping in all these special collections it will at once be greatly enlarged, and seem something like the big Library which such a big country should possess. (2) If the National Library is to be made complete in all departments, to allow the special libraries to go on would be uneconomical, since it would necessitate the purchase by the government of two or more copies of each work. (3) For such a great and popular institution as the National Library is intended to be, there will never be any difficulty in obtaining any amount of appropriations desired, whereas the smaller special libraries will have a constant struggle to obtain the funds necessary to keep them complete. (4) It is desirable that the whole of the National Collection of books should be under the management of a skilled librarian like Mr. Spofford, to secure uniformity, economy, proper cataloguing, etc.

At first sight these seem strong reasons for merging all the special collections in the great National Library that is to be. But there is another side to this question. To illustrate this, let us take the Library of the SurgeonGeneral's Office, U. S. A. This Library, which has been formed during the last seventeen years, is now the largest and the best practical working collection of its kind in the world. Its present value and prosperity are largely due to the deep interest which the physicians of this country have taken in making it as complete as possible, and this interest has been aroused and kept up because they have felt that it was their special library, under the direction of a skilled physician, who knows what they want and supplies it. Is this interest likely to continue if this collection is merged in the general one? Certainly not. Are not the prosperity, popularity, and practical value of this library under its present management the best possible reasons for continuing it under that management?

None of the great national libraries of Europe, with all their advantages of age, ample funds, and skilled librarians, have a collection of medical books equal to this, and none of them are used by physicians to any extent. Physicians

in London do not go to the British Museum for books-they use the libraries of the College of Surgeons and the Medico-Chirurgical Society. In Paris they go to the library of the Faculty of Medicine, or of the Academy of Medicine, not to the National Library.

Now take each of the reasons above advanced for merging the special libraries, and see what may be said on the other side.

(1) The fact that the National Library should be large and complete does not involve the keeping it all under one management, or in the same building. Nor is the convenience to a very few inquirers of having all the special libraries under one roof so great as to counterbalance the inconvenience to a much greater number of visitors who wish to see them in connection with the museums, laboratories, etc., pertaining to the same division of science to which they belong. By all means let the books in the Surgeon-General's Library be counted as belonging to the National Library and helping to swell its numbers; but to do this it is not in the least necessary to destroy its identity.

(2) The duplicate question is easily settled. The main branch of the National Library has no need to purchase the special professional and technical works which belong to the special collections. For some years the Library of Congress has purchased no medical books, and no inconvenience whatever has resulted. It is true that the Surgeon-General's Library has been compelled to purchase a few American medical books not presented by their authors, while the Library of Congress has received two copies of these same books by copyright; but the remedy for this is simply to place one of the copyright copies of all medical books in the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office.

(3) It will be quite as easy to obtain funds for a well-managed and popular special library as it is for the National Library; and it is far easier for the special libraries to keep constantly complete their collection of that vast body of ephemeral literature pertaining to each branch, which never comes into the book-trade at all, and is only to be had by the personal interest and good-will of the writers.

(4) No one man has the knowledge or the ability to supervise all branches of literature. The necessity of employing specialists is as great in this as in other departments. We have great respect for Mr. Spofford's abilities, but we certainly do not believe that he can manage the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office any better than it is managed now. He will necessarily place the work under some subordinate, and the consequences will certainly be extremely unsatisfactory to the physicians of the country, who are the persons chiefly interested.

To us it seems clear that the Law Library of the nation, the Medical Library, the Astronom

ical Library, the Library of Physics, Chemistry, and Mechanics, and the Library of Natural History should be under separate and skilled management, separately catalogued, and in the buildings which contain the museum, etc., to which they naturally belong. If, however, it be decided that all the libraries shall be placed in one building, then that building should, without question, be so arranged that each special library will be separate from the others, and preserve its own independence. This could be done in the building proposed by Mr. Poole, but it would be out of the question in a building on the plan accepted by the Library Committee.N. Y. Post. Oct. 27.

XJS XJX XK, XL

ΧΜ, ΧΝ

Classification?

Cataloging

Preservation

Use: rules, etc.

44

Reference, Consultation. Circulation.

Branches.

Management, reports, and history

of particular public libraries, arranged geografically.

Catalogs, arranged geografically.3

1 Under any country the names of cities about the private libraries of which books have been written will form a preliminary alfabet, e. g., under x15 (United States), Boston, New York, Providence, etc., will precede the alfabet Buckminster, Morrell, Pickering.

Works on the classification of the sciences may go in the class SCIENCE.

The separate catalogs of private collections incorporated in a public library to be put in XH, XI. A catalog of all the works in any library, public or private, which treat of one subject, may be put in XH, XI (or XM, XN), or in the § Bibliografy under that subject, or under the class subjectbibliografy (xx), according as one or the other method is adopted in regard to other lists of works on a single subject. For example, the catalog of the Ticknor collection may be X15 T or XL5B or XTHX B (XT being National bibliografy, and HX Spain). The finding lists of English prose fiction of various libraries will be xK (or XL) or XTE. Mr. J: Bartlett's list of his books on angling might be either X15' or XXSR B (SR being Angling).