The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) by John Dury
page 13 of 37 (35%)
page 13 of 37 (35%)
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Dury refers to is an academic faculty and not the general public. To
insure fullest use he goes on to advocate the necessity of a _printed_ catalogue with yearly manuscript supplements to be issued as a cumulative printed supplement every three years. He does not reach the point of proposing a call-number system but stresses the importance of shelf-location guides in the catalogue. He believes in aggressive acquisition policies and the necessity of good faculty-librarian relations, with the former advising the latter of the important books in their fields of specialization. He urges what might now be called "interlibrary loan" and other forms of sharing. To keep the librarian on the straight and narrow, apparently a recurrent problem in Dury's day, he recommends an annual meeting of a faculty board of governors where the librarian will give his annual report and put on an exhibition of the books he has acquired. To allay the temptation to make a little money on the side by "trading" (Dury's obsessive term) in the library's books for his personal profit, the librarian is to receive administrative support for his various expenses during the year and, as a scholar working with other scholars within his university instead of as a mere factotum, the librarian is to receive an adequate salary (perhaps the only one of Dury's reforms that must wait until the millennium). The question remains to what extent Dury's duties as the deputy librarian of the King's Library allowed him to implement the reforms he advocated on paper. The probable answer is, not very much. The librarian's duties and responsibilities described by Dury are those of an academic, university librarian, interacting with the faculty and participating fully in the intellectual life of a scholarly community. The role of the librarian of the King's Library would have been that of keeper of a static and isolated collection, and Dury is particularly |
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