Title: Academic and legal deposit libraries
Description: This book is one of a series of nine books in the “Examination Guides Series” originally published by Clive Bingley Ltd. before 1969, featuring special library topics by different authors (for example, *Library Work with Young People, Theory of Cataloguing*, and *Special Libraries & Information Bureaux*). This edition was written by Donald Davinson, who was a Principal Lecturer in the Department of Librarianship in Leeds Polytechnic. This volume concerns itself with “Academic and Legal Deposit Libraries,” which Davinson groups together because of a legal deposit library’s duel function as a cultural repository and academic research center. The text has eight chapters: “History and Functions,” “Government, Finance and Organization,” “Planning, Equipment and Fitting,” “Staff,” “Stock,” “Special Departments and Collections,” “Relationship to Teaching and Research,” and “Co-operation.” As you can infer from these chapter titles, while this book does give some general information, much of the book is fundamentally a prescriptive text for future librarians: it offers suggestions, guidelines, and procedures rather than mere historical background. This is partly due to its audience: this book is for students of library science to prepare for their library degree exams on these particular topics; you can find these traditionally short (this one is 97 pages long) “Examination Guides” in many disciplines, usually focusing on a sub-topic and often divided into eight or ten chapters (depending on the university) because many of these books have one chapter for each week of a term’s lecture series that a particular lecturer composed and processed into a book. As you’d expect, the greatest strength of this text is its forthrightness and brevity; it aims to educate or reinforce previously-learned information for students, so it is direct and concise and limits its jargon to common library science terms. Its greatest weakness is that it is from 1969, so many of its practical suggestions and its factual information (data about specific libraries, for example) are outdated. However, it is helpful partly because of that, because it’s like a time capsule that highlights the immediate concerns facing libraries in the late 1960s. Most of the easily-accessible information we have about library history is about people, places, events, and dates in an often-reductive narrative, whereas this book shows either the authentic or perceived realities of this aspect of library science from a moment in time after the history of the founding and legal issues of legal deposit libraries but before computers and digitization changed libraries forever.
Subjects: library science, libraries, legal deposit libraries, legal deposit, copyright libraries, copyright library, national library, national libraries
Places: Oxford, Cambridge, London, Harvard University