Arrange, aid, and encourage seminars or workshops for a fuller use of trustee talent and experience. Promote any legislation that improves and extends library service. The trustee is a policy maker, cultural counsellor, controller of finance, employer of personnel and the library's contact with the public. All trustees of libraries great or small should always remember that ultimately the only tests of a library's worth are the size and balance of its collection and the number of satisfied users. If the trustees are not striving to maintain or improve these, then anything else they may do is largely irrelevant.
Libraries are about books and readers.
In the chapters that follow there are frequent references to plans, policy and procedure documents, job descriptions etc. The amount of detail needed in these will vary depending on the library but trustees should resist the temptation, attractive to all committees, to produce rules that cover every foreseeable situation. Such attempts will be time consuming, not very productive and can never cover all possibilities. Too many rules will restrain the innovative and helpful staff and at the same time will provide comfort and a refuge for the idle and disobliging. It is better to have as few rules as possible and allow a flexible and intelligent working tradition to develop over a period of time.