The presidential address at the Library Association, held this year
at Exeter, was delivered on Tuesday by Dr. Kenyon, Principal Librarian at the British Museum. Dealing with the principles of librarianship, Dr. Kenyon maintained that the guidance of his readers' taste should be one of the chief attractions of a librarian's post. The free library and local libraries in general were not only instruments of knowledge but of culture, and they stood, together with our religious organisations, in the forefront of agencies for good on which the future of the nation depended. The charge that free libraries led to a " washy state of intellectual anaemia " by being chiefly purveyors of fiction was effectively met by library statistics, which showed that the pro- portion of fiction issued to readers as compared with the total issues was less than twenty-four per cent. For the rest, the fiction issued was, to an overwhelm- ingly large degree, sound and healthy, while the know- ledge sought in the free libraries was mainly scientific, technical, historical, political, or sociological. So far, then, as he could judge, the free libraries were doing what they could to add materially to the higher culture of the nation, and he noted with satisfaction the efforts made by the library authorities in many places to undertake the systematic pro- vision of lectures or exhibitions, or to associate their library with a museum or art gallery.
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