ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

NATIONAL LIBRARY SERVICE

A new British National Library Service should be a direct responsibility of the government and administered as part of the Department of Education and Science, says the Library Association in evidence it has submitted to the Dainton Committee, set up by the government to study the problem of a national service.

The association says that the library departments of the British Museum should be divorced from the antiquities departments. These library departments, the national central library, the national lending library for science and technology—together with the British national bibliography, the copyright offices and a new national bibliographical and information service—should together form the new National Library Service.

It would have two principal divisions, one as a national reference library and the other as a national lending library. It should be directed by a professionally-experienced directorgeneral, with a status not less than that of a deputy secretary in the Civil Service.

To advise the Secretary of State, the statement goes on, there should be a library services council and within the Department of Education and Science there should be a libraries branch. The service should recruit staff with appropriate academic and professional training and should make some contribution to professional training at an advanced level.

The association argues for a site in central London for the National Reference Library and the bibliographical headquarters of the National Lending Library, adding that the site area of seven and one-half acres envisaged by the British Museum trustees would not be excessive.

Among the many other detailed recommendations are that the national libraries of Scotland and Wales and the university libraries at Oxford and Cambridge should be brought into relationship with the National Library Service, but that it should not include the Science Museum library; and that the reference library and the Public Record office should be housed close together and a national policy on archive collection formulated.